Pitt Engineering alumna Kate Gundlach is still racing toward her dreams

When racing giant Arrow McLaren wanted to promote its longtime performance engineer Kate Gundlach to her dream job last year, she immediately said … no.

“I just didn’t feel ready,” Gundlach (ENGR ’06) explained. She wanted more time to observe her colleagues and get a better idea of what would be expected in the new role. She worried about how the change would upend her comfortable life. She wondered who was going to take care of her four dogs.

“That inner saboteur — she always gets you,” Gundlach said.

Fortunately, the company higher-ups thought enough of Gundlach’s abilities that they recycled their offer for the 2025 racing season. And this time around, Gundlach said yes. The promotion to race engineer makes her one of just two women in the NTT IndyCar Series to hold the top engineering job.

“It means a lot that the company had that much interest in investing in me,” Gundlach said.

But the promotion did come with a downside — she had to leave the No. 5 car and its talented, unpredictable driver, Pato O’Ward. Gundlach worked as O’Ward’s performance engineer for five years, a job that required her be as adept at psychology as mechanics. Essentially, she was a Pato whisperer.

[Revisit Pittwire’s coverage of the 2023 Brickyard Weekend.]

“I could read every little eyebrow raise,” she said.

Gundlach’s new position puts her in charge of the No. 6 car. Its driver, Nolan Siegal, just 20 years old, can race a car but can’t yet rent one. On the course, he’s calm, introspective and whip smart — he deferred his admission to Stanford to remain behind the wheel — but that doesn’t mean he lacks fire. In fact, sometimes he can burn a little too hot. Last year, after crashing out of a race, he defended his aggression with a shrug: “I wasn’t going to go home because I lifted [off the gas] in qualifying.”

Gundlach loves his energy and believes his ceiling is high. Her role is to help him get there by optimizing, well, everything. As the top engineer on the team, she oversees the performance of the driver, the car and a team of racing experts, including the performance engineer, the systems engineer and the crew chief.

“My field of vision has massively expanded,” Gundlach said. “The pace is intense, the pressure is extremely intense, and there are a lot of moving pieces.”

But she’s up to the tall task because in life, as out on the course, “it’s easier to pull it back than it is to push it forward.”

Learn more about the track star in Pitt Magazine’s coverage from 2023, when Gundlach helped O’Ward place third at the Gallagher Grand Prix.

Photography by Tom Altany