Women in Engineering Make a Mark in Motorsports
From homemade science kits to pit box crew — see how Purdue mechanical engineering student, Jennifer Short, has turned a life-long dream of motorsports into a reality.
“Getting into motorsports requires a little bit of luck, and a whole lot of passion,” Jennifer says . “When Jenna Soukup spoke to our Grand Prix team, I purposefully stayed behind to ask her questions and made sure that she remembered me. When I worked for Andretti, I put in 100-hour weeks. Now I have the experience to back it up. I can tell these INDYCAR teams that I’ve been around a car; I’ve done sensor calibrations; I’ve operated their software. It’s having these connections that will make the next step possible.”
Transcript
00:00:00 My dad took me, starting when I was 10, to the Indianapolis 500 for the first time. And I went every year. This year was actually my 10th race. So that's kind of where the love started. And once I decided to become a mechanical engineer, I joined a Grand Prix team, which is kind of where the career path came from. It didn't even occur to me before that this could be a career path for somebody. Like I knew it happened, and I knew there must have been people behind it, because like, how else do things run? But it never occurred to me that I could do that. After my freshman year I did work at Andretti Autosport in their LMP3 Weathertech Challenge. So I would work 60-hour race weekends, and then go back and do the whole thing over again. And I loved every second of it! I ran and operated our timing stand, I was a glorified IT tech. During pit stops, I went over the wall to operate the fire extinguisher. At the Watkins Glen race,
00:00:49 I actually put a car out from being on fire, which is the coolest moment of my life to date! I was doing my thermodynamics homework in the back of the garage, and all of the mechanics were like, what are you doing? And I was like, I am a student, this is due at midnight, so we don't have a session for another 20 minutes, like I can finish one more thermo problem! I heard back from Ganassi, and they're like, we're doing this Women in Motorsports program, we want to interview you. This team is incredible. These people are so brilliant, and I get to learn from them, and it was an absolutely amazing experience. It started with the Indianapolis 500, which is one heck of a way to start an internship! When I wasn't following an engineer around, I would go hang out by the car, and I made a point to make friends with the mechanics on my car, because I was like, you know so much about this. So I started out just kind of looking at data,
00:01:43 trying to like learn what the data was telling me, to track some pretty important metrics like fuel flow rates and stuff during pit stops, making sure that we have all the metrics that we need during the race, and that they're accurate, so that when it comes down to a tenth of a second, we have that tenth. I was on the timing stand when we got pole for the 500, which was absolutely amazing. We were all just like running down pit lane to get to the yard of bricks and take the pictures, and I have a P1 hat, which is really cool. Angela was amazing to work with. She was just so, like, kind and teaching me what she did and going through. She's an Excel wizard! The Excel tools that she creates, I idolize, honestly. I don't know how she does it. We talked about what it means to be women in motorsports, because it is a different experience. None of them ever questioned why I was there, which does happen in motorsports, I've found, with women. I love working with the team. They were
00:02:40 absolutely incredible. Racing is it for me! The competition, the feeling when the car starts up, there's nothing like it. It's a little bit of luck, but a whole lot of passion, and a whole lot of work. You gotta throw your all into it. I was working 100-hour weeks to accomplish my dreams. That's what you need to do, and if you want it, you can achieve it, and it is possible, but you just gotta keep working.