Getty
Isabella Robusto races at Sonoma.
When NASCAR fans think of female drivers in the last 20 years, it’s a small sample size. Danica Patrick, Hailie Deegan, and Toni Breidinger are several that come to mind. Isabella Robusto is a name most have never heard of — at least not yet.
The 19-year-old made headlines last week when she became the sixth female driver in the 72 years of ARCA racing to capture a pole. More impressively, it was her first track over a mile in length. Unfortunately, her inexperience proved costly and she crashed on Lap 2 and finished last.
Despite that result, Robusto has been impressive in her three previous ARCA national races in 2024, including a sixth in her debut at Phoenix, fourth at Elko, and runner-up at Springfield.
Isabella Robusto Pursuing Aerospace Engineering Degree
What makes Robusto’s on-track achievements even more impressive is she’s doing all this while pursuing a degree in aerospace engineering at Arizona State University. She detailed in an interview with the “Beating and Banging” YouTube channel that her course load includes three math classes and humorously revealed how the problems have more letters than numbers. She also described how her studies have proven beneficial to her racing.
“I feel like the biggest thing is kind of the terminology,” Robusto said. “I feel like the challenge is the driver communicating with the engineer and the engineer understanding what the driver’s actually explaining and trying to say.
“I feel like me being able to have kind of both of those lingos and be able to communicate it in a way that the engineer can understand but coming from the driver’s side, I feel like is a huge help, especially when we’re working on the simulators trying to kind of prepare setups for the next race weekend.
“I feel like it just kind of helps clarify things that sometimes are not so clear coming from a race car driver to an engineer that has never raced or doesn’t understand kind of the lingo that a driver uses. So it just helps the communication part a lot.”
Robusto Focuses on Safety After Injury Sidelined Her
Making her ARCA debut in 2024 is actually a year later than originally planned. She was supposed to make her first start in 2023 but a concussion kept it from happening. Unsurprisingly, after sustaining such an injury, she takes her safety seriously and is actively involved in ensuring it happens.
“It really just helped me kind of dive deeper into the safety aspect of kind of my helmet, my gear, seat, whatever it might be, especially with running with so many different teams,” she said. “It’s important to kind of make sure that you check on everything as well as the team.
“So, it kind of changed a little bit on the safety side of how I go into races especially with different teams and to make sure that everything’s as safe as possible.”
What Does the Future Look Like for Robusto?
At just 19, Robusto has her whole career in front of her. Unsurprisingly, for someone disciplined enough to major in aerospace engineering while racing cars, she thinks big picture and has a plan of where she wants to go in the future.
“One year is to run full time in ARCA, compete for the championship, get a couple wins under my belt, but especially fight for that championship,” she said.
“In five years, I would say probably the Xfinity Series, maybe doing some Trucks. Mostly Xfinity. Maybe a couple Cup races here and there, but I want to make sure that I learn everything that I can before I move up even if it takes me an extra two years to get to the Cup series.
“10-year goal, obviously, is to be in the Cup Series racing. A lot of it will depend on what I do kind of leading up to that. But I want to make sure that I take my time in each series. If it’s two years in ARCA instead of one, just so that I can learn that much more before I go to Trucks I feel like is more important to me than kind of racing up to the top just to kind of get into the Cup Series.”
Isabella Robusto.
Remember the name.
Kyle Dalton covers NASCAR for Heavy.com. He has more than 30 years of experience covering high school, college and professional sports, including stories for the Austin American-Statesman, San Antonio-Express News, Detroit News and Sportscasting.com. More about Kyle Dalton
