By Erin Peterson
For Javier Rodriguez Martinez ’24, nothing compares to the moments before the start of a jet dragster race. As a recent intern for Larsen Motorsports (LMS) and part of the crew for its Florida Tech jet dragster team, he stands near the set of starting lights known as “the Christmas tree” as dragsters prepare to compete. As the cars complete their final checks, 30-foot flames blaze from the engines.
When the lights turn green, Rodriguez is hit with a powerful shockwave of air and sound.
“You can feel it in your body when they launch,” he says of the cars, which reach top speeds approaching 300 mph.
Ten years into the partnership between Florida Tech and Larsen Motorsports, these high-octane moments serve as part of the highlight reel of the connection between the university and the company. But the real impact of the partnership, which launched in 2014 with the support of then-president Anthony Catanese and currently offers opportunities in its 30,000-square-foot space within Florida Tech’s Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Innovative Design (CAMID) facility, goes far deeper.
Through his internship, Rodriguez, who graduated this spring, honed his computer-aided design (CAD) skills and learned the subtleties of maintaining, building and testing engines. He strengthened his social presentation skills, talking to countless jet dragster fans at races and other events. And he lined up a job as a project manager for the energy company SolarPlus near his Puerto Rico home.
There’s no question that the work prepares students well: Larsen Motorsports’ jet dragsters are built with sophisticated technology and engineering.
“Our cars are built with the same standards and practices you would find in the aerospace industry, but we just put our wings upside down,” says Larsen Motorsports CEO Chris Larsen.
Still, the company’s most important and valuable products aren’t its dragsters, but its people, says President Elaine Larsen.
“People ask us: ‘How many times have you won?’ ‘What’s the fastest speed you’ve gone?’ But the numbers we’re most proud of are the numbers of students who have gone through our program and the successes they’ve seen.”
Elaine Larsen, LMS President
“People ask us: ‘How many times have you won?’ ‘What’s the fastest speed you’ve gone?’ But the numbers we’re most proud of are the numbers of students who have gone through our program and the successes they’ve seen.”
Since the program’s inception, hundreds of students have gone through its 15-week internship program, and the job placement rate of these students has been 100%.
“They’re not getting just any job,” says Elaine. “These are future engineers, future leaders—they’re the ones who get things done.”
These numbers are among the many successes of the program and why it was easy for President John Nicklow to support the recent five-year extension of the partnership.
“Our work with Larsen Motorsports is one of the many ways that Florida Tech helps today’s students prepare for careers, solve tomorrow’s challenges and pursue their boundless potential,” he says.
To understand how far this partnership has come in the past decade, we looked back at some of the institution’s and company’s earliest ambitions to see how they stacked up to today’s reality.
1. Inspiring Internships
HOW IT STARTED
Student opportunities were at the heart of the initial partnership goals, and LMS filled a 10-person initial internship class.
HOW IT’S GOING
Today, LMS attracts more than 150 applicants for its twice-annual 15-week internship opportunities, and they typically hire 17 students per semester.
“We’re trying to do even more,” says Elaine of the surge in interest.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that the internships have proven popular. In addition to some of the marquee perks—working closely with some of the fastest dragsters on the planet, plus the opportunity to travel across the country to events—students gain practical experience that positions them for great jobs after graduation.
“A student can come to us with literally no hands-on experience whatsoever, and by the time they leave us, they know aerospace standards and practices. They know what it feels like to cut aluminum versus stainless steel and what it’s like to weld those different metals,” says Elaine. “When they’re designing something in their software, they’ll have a much better understanding of what they’re designing.”
They also get mentorship from employees at companies including Northrop Grumman Corp., L3Harris Technologies Inc. and Siemens Digital Industries—which have ended up hiring many former LMS interns. And while Elaine notes that they most commonly work with aerospace, mechanical, electrical or chemical engineering students, they’ve had interns with a wide range of majors, from ocean engineering to aviation management.
One intern currently making the most of the experience is aerospace engineering major Nihaara Sawhney. Sawhney, who has loved cars since she was a child—“I was a Hot Wheels girl, not a Barbie girl,” she says.—saw an internship with LMS as a perfect way to combine her interests. During her internship in fall 2023, she helped manufacture flame holders for the jet dragster afterburners as part of the fabrication team. This spring, she became the team’s leader.
While she loves the flexibility that the internship offers right now—“It’s a great way to learn while you’re still going full throttle with the semester,” she says.—she’s also appreciative of the opportunities it presents to prepare for life after graduation, such as its robust mentorship program.
“Every Friday, mentors from Northrop Grumman come in to guide us, look over our work and give us tips,” she says. “One of them even gave me advice on my résumé. Learning from professionals in the industry is a huge benefit.”
2. New Student Recruitment
HOW IT STARTED
Larsen Motorsports keeps a packed event schedule, with dozens of races across the country that attract tens of thousands of fans. From the start, they saw that busy calendar as an opportunity: Florida Tech could use the events to highlight its strengths to a wide range of audiences.
HOW IT’S GOING
Over the years, LMS and Florida Tech have developed a streamlined system to build excitement about Florida Tech for young dragster enthusiasts. LMS reaches out to high schools near their events, invites students to come to sessions about the science of a jet dragster and then provides all-access passes to the dragster events.
For prospective students who visit campus, seeing the shop is often a powerful catalyst for future enrollment.
Take Rodriguez, who earned his degree in mechanical engineering. As a prospective student years earlier, he had narrowed his search to a few different schools, including Florida Tech. During his visit to Florida Tech, he mentioned his love of circuit racing and quarter-mile racing, and he was encouraged to visit the LMS race shop in CAMID.
“I remember that I actually got a tour—I think by Chris [Larsen]—and that was one of the major selling points of the school,” he says.
He enrolled, and just a few years later, he was working in the shop as an intern, building the skills that would carry him into the next phase of his life.
“I’ve learned a lot,” he says. “I’ll be taking all of that with me as I graduate and go into real life.”
3. Faculty Partnerships
HOW IT STARTED
A 2014 news release was enthusiastic about the distinctive ways faculty and practitioners might supercharge their work.
“Our partnership will allow us both to collaborate in areas of research and education in ways unique to education and the motor sports industry,” Elaine said at the time.
HOW IT’S GOING
These powerful partnerships have come to fruition. One recent collaboration paired Elaine with master’s students in a data analytics course taught by assistant professor of information systems Jignya Patel.
For the project, students helped determine the return on investment that Sherwin Williams got through a partnership with Larsen Motorsports. As part of the project, students audited the Sherwin Williams sales process that occurred during the Larsen Motorsports events, analyzed the orders that were generated at the event, proposed a streamlined process and generated decision-making dashboards for the sales personnel and Larsen Motorsports management. The students presented their solutions and recommendations at the end of the semester to Elaine, and they received practical feedback.
It wasn’t just Larsen Motorsports that benefited from the analysis: Students learned key skills from the real-world project.
“Students often work with perfectly clean data in class projects, but that never happens in the real world; they learn to deal with that fluidity,” Patel says. “They also learn to communicate in ways that [align with] the broader context of business. Students are often engrossed in analytical thinking that tends to be more technical, and this project got them to zoom out and think about the work from a business perspective.”
4. Deepening Connections
HOW IT STARTED
While Elaine and Chris couldn’t have predicted exactly what the LMS-Florida Tech partnership might hold, they knew they didn’t want it to be superficial.
“This was not a ‘Give us a case of oil; we’ll put your sticker on our fender’ sponsorship,” says Chris. “What we wanted was a true affiliation with a great university that had a reputation of success in the areas that we wanted to focus on.”
HOW IT’S GOING
It’s hard to imagine a better case study of the value of the Florida Tech-LMS partnership than the one offered by the trajectory of Zach Costello ’16. As Costello recalls it, he was on his way from class in spring 2015 when he saw a flyer for an unveiling of the Florida Tech jet dragster. On a whim, he decided to check it out, and he was immediately captivated.
“I wanted to be part of that team; I didn’t care if I was sweeping floors,” he says.
He landed an internship a few months later during the fall of his senior year, during which he helped develop and organize the shop that LMS would eventually call home. In a second internship with the company that spring, Costello started doing metal fabrication.
At one point during his internship, he was at the shop welding afterburners when two managers from Embraer stopped by on a shop tour and started chatting with the young Costello.
“By the time they were done with the tour, I had two business cards and an invitation to send my résumé to them,” he recalls.
He did just that. A few weeks later, he had a job offer from Embraer in hand.
“I wouldn’t have gotten my first job without Larsen Motorsports,” he says.
Even after he took a job at Embraer, his nine-day, 80-hour work schedule meant he could spend every other Friday at the LMS shop, where he continued to hone his skills. He worked on the crew and as lead fabricator. He was promoted to crew chief, and by 2021, he was licensed as a backup driver.
Today, he works across the street from the Larsen Motorsports shop as a performance analyst at L3Harris Technologies. In addition to his official responsibilities, he often talks with interns about their own trajectories, a responsibility he takes seriously.
“It’s come full circle, and one of my roles now is to continue that cycle of mentorship at the shop,” he says.
5. Business Partnerships
HOW IT STARTED
When the partnership launched, Elaine says, business engagement and development were as important to them as their work with prospective and current students.
“It was one of our three major pillars,” she says.
HOW IT’S GOING
Today, students who have completed LMS internships are highly sought after by companies including Northrop Grumman, United Launch Alliance and Lockheed Martin, among many others.
“Florida Tech interns at Larsen Motorsports learn to use the same digital design and analysis tools used throughout industry,” says Kirsten Dreggors, vice chair of the Florida Tech board of trustees and vice president of engineering at Northrop Grumman. “They gain hands-on experience integrating their designs directly into the cars. The knowledge and skills they gain at Larsen Motorsports is incredibly valuable for starting careers in engineering. It creates a solid foundation for well-rounded professionals and really sets them apart from other candidates.”
In addition, LMS has built a program to teach other businesses how to run successful internship programs at their own companies.
“We talk with them about onboarding, training processes, milestones and how to teach students how to level up,” Elaine says. “We show them what’s worked, what hasn’t and how we create an environment that keeps students coming back.”
It’s a process that’s designed to help all businesses tap into the deep pool of talent at Florida Tech—and create a pathway for students to land their dream jobs after graduation.”
What’s Next
Elaine says they expect the partnership to continue to get stronger: They’re eager to do even more with students, internships and business partnerships.
“One of my son’s teachers liked to say ‘Good, better, best: Never let it rest until your good is better and your better is best.’ That’s what we believe, too,” says Elaine. “We were good the first five years, better the second five years, and in the next five years, we’re striving to be the very best. We have new projects that are on the cusp of launching, and our biggest goal is to get all these students into the stratosphere—where they belong.”
This piece was featured in the spring 2024 edition of Florida Tech Magazine.
