From Engineering to Indy — Erin Crocker ’03 Is Driven to Succeed

Erin Crocker ’03 is already the winningest female sprintcar driver in the Empire Super Sprints (ESS) league history. On May 17, she’ll graduate from Rensselaer and into big-league auto racing.

Gary Gold

Crocker, from Wilbraham, Mass., was the only female driver in the Empire Super Sprints (ESS) league. She finished the season with an overall sixth-place ranking in an all-male field of 69 drivers. Now she has decided to make a go at racing full-time in the more competitive Silver Crown Series.

“My goal is to be an Indy car driver,” Crocker says. “I don’t want to race just once a week. I don’t want this to just be a hobby, I want to make this a career.”

Inspired by her late father and two competitive brothers (she also has two sisters), she started her career driving go-karts and quarter-midget cars at age 7, and has since progressed to sophisticated automobiles. When she began her first semester at Rensselaer, she wanted to continue her amateur sprint car racing career, so school administrators and professors ponied up a $25,000 sponsorship for her race team and her car, and coordinated tests and assignments she missed while on the racing circuit.

“I wasn’t just a number or a tuition check to Rensselaer,” says Crocker, who will have a related degree in industrial and management engineering to fall back on should her plans stall. “They really encouraged me and helped boost my career. A lot of schools don’t take that same sort of interest in their students.”