Here’s how Middletown woman on winning Indy 500 team is shattering glass ceilings
It was a Memorial Day weekend to remember in the Rotondo home in Middletown, the joyous celebration building Sunday afternoon before erupting as the checkered flag waved on the big screen.
It coincided with Nicole Rotondo tossing her headset in the air from a timing stand at Indianapolis Motor Speedway as driver Marcus Ericsson’s car, powered by the Honda engine overseen by Rotondo, a 28-year-old trackside race engineer, crossed the bricks at the start-finish line to win the Indianapolis 500.
“I’m not sure I was even breathing at that point,” said Rotondo.
Rotondo's a pioneer, among the first female trackside engineers ever to serve in that role with an Indy 500-winning team, the latest accomplishment in a journey the began in Monmouth County.
“My husband (Rich) has always been in the mechanical field,” said Nicole’s mom, Stacy. “She was always right there. “Dad, how does that work and how does this work?” She has always been our curiosity kid.”
That curiosity was the foundation for what has been a rapid rise in the sport.
“I always had an interest in cars and engines,” she said. “My dad is a mechanic by trade, so we grew up working on all kinds of engines. Boats, cars, tractors he picked up on the side of the road. A little bit of everything. But I’ve always been interested in cars and racing and stuff like that.”
Now Rotondo, a mechanical engineer by trade, is on a motorsports career path she’s envisioned for the past decade.
“It’s been like a dream come true,” she said.
Stars align
It’s called “the Greatest Spectacle in Racing” for a reason, and the pressure built throughout the afternoon as Rotondo monitored the performance of the motor in Ganassi Racing’s No. 8 car, which had a nearly three-second lead as the laps were winding down.
Then NASCAR legend Jimmie Johnson, in his first season racing Indy cars, wrecked with six laps to go, resulting in a red flag that brought the action to a standstill.
“It becomes very, very stressful,” Rotondo said. “We had a pretty solid gap and when that red flag hits it’s a totally different ballgame and everybody is very stressed out. When the engines run that hot and then they sit in pit lane that long you can have trouble with your engine overheating, your electronics overheating. You just hope the car fires back up again everything is running right. And now you’re going to have someone right on your bumper and you hope we get this guy on the restart.”
Ericsson eventually held off driver Pato O’Ward in what turned out to be a two-lap showdown to win the 106th renewal.
It wasn’t preordained that Rotondo would be in this position. She actually studied marine biology in high school at the Marine Academy of Science and Technology in Highlands.
“I realized that was not really my calling,” she said. “I was like, “you know what I really like? Working on cars with my dad. I think I want to be a mechanic.” And he was having absolutely none of that. He said you are going to get a degree, and mechanical engineering was the next step.”
So Rotondo chose Rochester Institute of Technology, which offered an automotive option that included classes dealing with high performance vehicles, as well as an SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) race team she became involved with.
While Rotondo joined Nissan’s body design group in Detroit after graduation, she was always looking for a path into motorsports. So she entered a program called the Infiniti Engineering Academy, a competition where engineers from different countries compete for a spot working with Infiniti in Europe and with the Renault Formula One racing team.
“I made it to the finals but got beat out, and the girl that beat me out was so deserving,” Rotondo said. “We’re still friends and she actually came out to celebrate with us after the 500.
“But I was sitting at the airport absolutely defeated on my way home from that program, and the advertisement for this job popped up in an alert I had set up. It was everything that I was looking for. They were looking for people with SAE experience and power train experience and people who wanted to be trackside. The stars aligned I guess.”
She joined Honda Performance Development as an assistant trackside race engineer in 2019.
“An incredible position to be in”
By Rotondo’s own admission, the whole Indy 500 scene “is a lot to process,” from the massive crowd to the bands and flyover by the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds. This year the hoopla concluded with Ericsson drinking milk in Victory Lane, a longstanding tradition for the winner.
Now, her plans for any downtime at her home in Detroit include working on an old Honda motorcycle she’s rebuilding. Because even though most of her work nowadays is done on a laptop, she still likes to get her hands dirty.
“The engine I work on now is definitely a class above anything I ever worked on growing up,” she said. “But it really all comes down to the same basics. Engines are just air and fuel mixtures and the timing of getting that mixture. So whether you are doing it mechanically with a wrench or changing those ratios with a laptop, it’s the same basic idea.
”My job has a huge amount of responsibility, but I have a great amount of support from Honda. I am the one on the timing stand who gets to make the call when it comes down to the engine, which can be a little daunting. But it’s also an incredible position to be in.”
After finishing sixth in the standings last season, the No. 8 car tops the points leaders after six races. And to be part of a year-end championship team would be another step in what has already been a groundbreaking career for Rotondo.
This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Indianapolis 500: Nicole Rotondo of NJ on winning Ericsson team
