(Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle)
Though she’s only 16 years old, Rosalee Ramer of Watsonville, California is already a successful monster truck driver. She’s very smart, having scored in the 99% percentile of the math portion of the SAT. Rosalee uses her considerable brains to design, build, maintain and drive these custom-built car-crushers.
She’s been at it since the age of 3, when she first held a flashlight to help her father build an engine at night. Now Rosalee is designing the first electronic fuel injection system for a monster truck.
But she’s more than an engineer. Rosalee also drives Detour, her family’s truck, in competitions. She often jumps it 30 feet into the air. It’s a joyful experience:
"Just being in a truck that loud, feeling it under you, stepping on the throttle," Rosalee said, "it almost doesn't feel real. You feel like you're in a different world. You're taking something that weighs 10,000 pounds and with a tiny touch of the throttle, you can just roast the tires."
-via The Mary Sue