On a Thursday afternoon in late January, Rosalee Ramer hustled across the Georgia Institute of Technology campus, where she is a freshman studying mechanical engineering. She had to finish packing and get to the airport. She needed to bring her reading assignment for English class, her multivariable-calculus homework, and the first two chapters from her mechanical-physics textbook. Plus her laptop. “And my charge cord. I cannot forget my charge cord,” she said.
She also had to drop off some sketches to a friend with graphic-design skills who had offered to digitize some art for her. “They were ideas for my new monster-truck shirt,” she explained later. Last summer, after she turned eighteen, Ramer signed on with Monster Jam, the largest national circuit for monster-truck racing. The attendance at Monster Jam events regularly surpasses fifty thousand. Her friend wasn’t in her room, so Ramer slipped the sketches and a note under her door. At the airport, she called her father, who had just arrived in Phoenix, for that weekend’s monster-truck show, where they would both be competing. “I did my math homework on the plane to Arizona, just to get it over with,” she told me. “I’ve gotten pretty good at doing homework on planes.”
Rosalee Ramer became a professional monster-truck driver in the fall of 2011, shortly after her fourteenth birthday. Nearly five years later, she is still the youngest professional female monster-truck driver in the country. She spent the majority of her high-school career competing in regional monster-truck events with her father, Kelvin Ramer, who has been building and driving monster trucks for more than a decade. She quickly became a fan favorite, with an aggressive but controlled approach to freestyle—an event that involves boosting off large jumps and riding wheelies across the course. And then there was her truck: a 1932 Ford pickup atop a custom chassis stuffed with a five-hundred-and-seventy-two-cubic-inch, eight-cylinder, custom-molded, super-charged engine that runs on methanol, throttling its energy through a power-glide transmission and into hot-pink wheels wrapped in sixty-six-inch tires. The exterior is coated in dark blue, with hot-pink and slime-green graphics boasting the truck’s name: Wild Flower. The rig is roughly twelve feet from dirt to roof. Her license plate, tacked onto the rear of the truck’s frame, reads, “Princess.”
During those years, Ramer did well in school, too. She had her eyes set on M.I.T. or Georgia Tech, two of the best schools in the country for mechanical engineering. “I’ve always wanted to try living somewhere different than California,” she said. Her family lives in Watsonville, just south of Santa Cruz. “I wanted to understand the South and experience its culture.” After making her decision, she posted a flyer announcing her choice—designed by a fan in Sweden—on Facebook, where she has nearly five thousand followers. Now she just had to balance being a freshman at one of the most difficult technical schools in the country with a robust touring schedule that had her on the road basically every weekend.
Kelvin didn’t go to a four-year school; he got a technical degree to learn how to work on cars and heavy equipment, and now owns his own towing company for large-scale vehicles. He’s been involved in monster-truck racing and freestyle shows for more than twenty years, and started building his first monster truck when Rosalee was an infant. “As soon as she could hold a flashlight, she was out there helping with the trucks,” he said. “To me, I saw a love for it and I just nurtured that.” With Rosalee’s help, he finished his first truck when she was seven. Soon, Rosalee had a go-kart and a miniature trophy truck and would try to pop wheelies on their Bobcat tractor. When she was eight, Kelvin started letting her sit on his lap and drive his monster truck. By eleven, she was unloading the truck for him at events. At thirteen, she got behind the wheel and crushed her first car. Around that time, too, they started building Rosalee her own monster truck—a real-deal, professional-grade, competition-ready unit. At fourteen, she signed to the WGAS Motorsport circuit, a regional series for professionals, and started competing. She was awarded rookie of the year in 2012, and has since competed year-round.
Last September, she ran in her first show under the Monster Jam umbrella. She is now going up against competitors twice her age, including famed drivers such as Dennis Anderson and his truck, Grave Digger. “She is already at the top level at Monster Jam,” Kelvin said. Each event is split up into three different performances: a timed race, a freestyle run, and a donut competition, with a total field of sixteen competitors per event. Since September, she has placed in the top five in freestyle a handful of times, and she won the donut competition at a January 23rd event in San Diego. “Everything I’ve done has always come back to racing,” Rosalee said. “I tried volleyball, gymnastics, swimming—never really stuck to anything. I thought, I don’t have time for this if I want to go to monster-truck shows. I took the racing side.”
At first, her classmates and teachers at Georgia Tech had no clue that Rosalee drove monster trucks for a living. “It was so awesome finding out,” Meghna Das, a friend of Ramer’s who lives in her dorm, said. “We all did the whole Instagram thing”—trading handles, following each other—“and Rosalee had over three thousand followers, so we Googled her.” Helen Zhang, another dorm-mate, remembered when word got out about Ramer’s other life. “I remember coming back to hall, everyone was freaking out, shoving phones in my face,” she said. “Look at this ‘Ellen’ video of Rosalee!” That video is from 2014, when Ramer appeared on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” “It was mind-blowing, for sure,” Zhang said. The three girls have since become close, and Das and Zhang drive Ramer to the airport every weekend.
Dr. Ruth Yow, Ramer’s first-semester English teacher, learned of her student’s hidden talent two weeks before the semester ended, when students were talking about their schedules for spring. Yow asked Ramer which course she was taking, and Ramer said she had to choose a class that didn’t meet on Fridays, because of her travel schedule. Dr. Yow asked what she travels for. “And she said, ‘Well, I am a monster-truck driver, and I go to competitions every weekend,’ ” Yow remembered, laughing. “She was one of my favorite students. I felt like I knew her, but it wasn’t until that moment that I found out she had this other identity.” Yow added, “She doesn’t look like a monster-truck driver. She has the maturity and that innate ability to move between identities.” Ramer told me, “Eventually everyone finds out, but I don’t have to flaunt it.”
The day after Ramer flew from Atlanta to Phoenix, she went over her truck with her father and attended the drivers’ meeting. “I just worked on my physics homework during the meeting,” she said. The next day’s show started with the racing element, for which Ramer, because of a malfunctioning steering mechanism, didn’t get past qualifiers. She fixed the problem and, for the freestyle portion, was the fourth truck up, out of sixteen. She boosted a few big airs, nailed a technically savvy “slap wheelie,” and landed fluid combination moves. Her score of thirty-five put her in first place, and earned her the “Hot Seat,” behind the judging panel and announcer station. The next eleven drivers came and went, and none scored higher than Ramer. The last driver to go was Dennis Anderson, in Grave Digger. He scored a thirty-six, squeaking past Ramer for the win. Ramer descended from the Hot Seat and into the pit to find her father. She ran up to him and gave him a big hug. Getting second place, behind a legendary driver like Anderson, was a dream.
The next day, Ramer’s father took the motorhome back to California, monster trucks in tow. She took a cab to the airport to head back to Georgia. Although she loves her life as a monster-truck driver, Ramer hopes to use her affinity for mechanics to get into consumer automobiles, while keeping monster trucks as a pastime. She spent the plane ride back to school studying for her physics test, slated for the following morning. A few days later, the test results were released. She got an A.
