Challenging the notion of ‘good ol’ boy’

He had a scowl that could melt the paint off a race car. And that’s only one reason they called the late Dale Earnhardt “the Intimidator.”

So when engineer Alba Colon stepped up to introduce herself to the reigning NASCAR champion midway through her first day on the job, all in the room held their breath. After all, there was no such thing as a female engineer, not in stock car racing. Especially one who spoke little English.

And Colon was both. Putting her in front of the decidedly old-school Earnhardt was like putting red meat in front of a lion.

“I don’t give you more than a year here,” Earnhardt snapped.

That’s when the red meat decided to fight back. Colon hadn’t gone through college, survived a competitive recruitment program and relocated from balmy Puerto Rico to frigid Detroit just to surrender at the first challenge.

“It was like, ‘Who is this guy, telling me that I can’t do this?’ ” said Colon, who set out to prove Earnhardt wrong.

“Not only him,” she corrects. “Everybody.”

A dozen years later Colon appears to have made her point. Not only has she outlasted Earnhardt’s prediction by 11 years but, by rising to the position of program manager for General Motors’ 21 NASCAR Nextel Cup teams, she has become one of the most powerful women in motor sports. Even if she can’t change her own oil.

“I did it once,” she boasts.

What she can do, however, is make fast cars go faster. Which may be one reason the last two Nextel Cup champions, Jimmie Johnson and Tony Stewart, both drive for her.

“She’s a big help,” says Chad Knaus, crew chief for Johnson’s team. “She’s definitely got the pulse of what’s going on -- not only with what we do in the garage area, but what’s going on with General Motors as well. She’s involved with everything.”

Yet this season figures to present Colon, 38, with her biggest test since that first meeting with Earnhardt. Not only has NASCAR served notice that it will be strictly enforcing its rule book this year, but Colon has to deal with two different models as well. For the 16 races in which NASCAR is mandating its safety-conscious Car of Tomorrow, the racing Chevy will be an Impala SS. In the 20 other races, it will be a Monte Carlo SS.

For Colon, that means twice as much work.

“That has been a huge challenge,” she says. “Working on all those little details and getting that ready.”

You could say the same thing about Colon’s tenure as a NASCAR engineer -- which, it should be noted, isn’t a popular career choice among girls growing up in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico.

In fact, it wasn’t even Colon’s first pick.

“I wanted to be an astronaut,” she says.

Never mind that only two women had been to space at that time -- and neither of them was a Latina. Pushing the envelope was apparently something Colon enjoyed.

“My mom said I was weird,” she explains, more with pride than shame. “I just was different. My parents raised a rebel.”

Even rebels have their limits, though. And since Colon’s parents -- her father is a doctor, her mother a teacher -- insisted that their daughter stay at home while attending college, she enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez. Convinced that she could still get to space from there, Colon applied to the school of engineering, where she first ran into people who thought like Earnhardt.

“I learned the feeling in college,” says Colon, adding that she was one of only seven women in the school’s mechanical engineering department. “You have to be mature to say, ‘I know what I am doing,’ and just keep doing it. It’s not easy. But it’s part of the deal.”

Colon quickly proved herself in the classroom, so it wasn’t long before a university professor, holding out the carrot of better grades as incentive, persuaded her to work with a group struggling to design a solar-powered car.

A year later, she was asked to join another university team building a scale-model Indy racer for a competition in the U.S. And that’s when she discovered space wasn’t the final frontier -- at least not for her.

“I discovered that I liked cars,” she says. “I didn’t know that.”

But breaking down gender stereotypes in Puerto Rico had done little to prepare Colon for what she would face after GM hired her after she graduated in 1994.

Winning over stock car racing’s good-ol’-boy drivers and crew chiefs, it turned out, was just part of the deal. Simply getting to work was the bigger challenge, since security guards routinely turned her away at NASCAR tracks, not believing a woman could actually work on cars. At others, Colon said, the first question she got was, “ ‘Who are you here with?’ Meaning, who is your boyfriend or who is your husband?”

Her assimilation was made even more difficult by a language barrier that still persists. Born in Spain but raised in Puerto Rico, Colon speaks a Spanish that is part Castilian, part Caribbean. And neither part is understood in NASCAR garages, where many speak with Southern accents that often make English all but unintelligible.

The first time Colon met driver Ward Burton, for example, slow-drawling Burton threw his hands up in disgust, saying he couldn’t understand a thing she was saying.

“What do you think?” Colon shot back. “Everybody can understand you?”

Although engineers aren’t well known to NASCAR fans, they are far from anonymous in the garages, where their computer-assisted work on engines, aerodynamics and other technical issues are critical to keeping cars competitive. And as GM’s program manager, Colon also serves as the liaison between Chevy’s teams and the NASCAR hierarchy.

“She doesn’t have the easiest job in the world, I can tell you that,” says Knaus. “She has to deal with NASCAR and she’s got to deal with competitors. She’s in the middle of that and it’s a tough place to be.”

Yet, she has won respect on both sides. Knaus calls her “extremely valuable” and NASCAR rules chief Robin Pemberton calls her “one of the most well respected people in the garages.”

For Colon, however, the greatest compliment is that, even though she’s one of the few people wearing lipstick along pit road, no one looks at her as a woman anymore.

“She’s just Alba at this point,” says Marcus Jadotte, NASCAR’s managing director of public affairs. “She’s a part of the community now.”

Even the Intimidator came to that conclusion. Shortly before his death in a last-lap crash during the 2001 Daytona 500, Earnhardt sought out Colon.

“I knew you could do it,” he told her. And this time he was smiling.

“It was awesome,” Colon remembers. “It makes you feel like you finally made it. You’re doing good.

“I feel like one of the guys. In a good way. People know -- they respect what you can do for them. They understand why you are here. And you are treated the same.”

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kevin.baxter@latimes.com