Payne: The she-racer behind the racy Fiat Abarth

The 2015 Fiat 500 Abarth may be an Italian import, but its soul is All-American boy racer. Make that girl racer. Meet Warren native Allison Singer, a 31-year-old car jockey-turned-engineer in charge of the Fiat's feisty new automatic transmission.

"This is my baby," says the Lawrence Tech grad, who joined Fiat just four years ago. The tough, fast-talking Singer is a splash of Danica Patrick and a dose of Tatum O'Neal in "Bad News Bears."

With her racing background and mechanical engineering degree, Singer was hired for the Abarth program right out of school. The Abarth is a legendary badge in European racing circles – a Fiat legacy that goes back to Carlo Abarth who first gave production cars extreme track makeovers a half century ago.

Mr. Hyde to the Fiat 500's Dr. Jekyll, the affordable, hot hatch Abarth is a snarling bag of bobcats. Singer helped develop the 2012 manual Abarth before being thrust into the role of "integration engineer" for the automatic transmission version that hit dealer lots this year.

Singer might seem an unlikely role for such a position. She hates automatics.

"I'm very anti-automatic, so I started looking for another job," she laughs when her bosses first told her they wanted an auto Abarth. "After I decided to stay, the hardest thing was doing right by the name. I grew up racing cars and I have a natural draw to manuals. To me you can't just throw in an auto and call it an Abarth. It's got to be 100 percent Abarth - but for a customer who wants to keep both hands on wheel."

So Singer created something extraordinary: A $25k subcompact with the guts of a megabuck supercar: Rev-matching downshifts. Gear hold in corners. An exhaust note that would wake the dead.

"It's a lot harder than you think because you want features you're getting on an $80,000 AMG Mercedes but you don't normally see on a $25,000 A-segment car," she explains. "It was a challenge but a good challenge. We spent a lot of time at the race track."

Thanks to Singer's tenacity, the Auto-barth is boffo.

It's a determination she honed as a race car driver since she was just 14-years-old. The product of a racing family, she first suited up in Dodge Neons, then graduated to the ferocious Dodge Viper. She was the rare female competitor.

The mix is little different in the industry's engineering ranks, but Singer has thrived. Her racing background was crucial to being noticed for the Abarth program. A bored pre-med student who decided to pursue mechanical engineering instead, she has produced a hit in the slow-selling Fiat 500 lineup. Automatic Abarth sales are running nearly equal to manuals.

While the European model has its own automatic option, the American version was developed stateside with Singer's special sauce. "(My bosses) realized I knew what I was doing," she says. "They didn't fight me on any of the stuff that mattered."

"We put in two modes, NORMAL and SPORT," she continues about the little automatic she has come to love. "So NORMAL needed to be: 'I'm going to be pick up milk from the grocery.' Then in SPORT mode . . . you can feel shifts, you can hear shifts, you can get some pop in the exhaust. SPORT mode I want to let the animal out of the cage. I want SPORT to be 100 percent obnoxious."

Singer was keen to live up to the European Abarth legend even as American customers demanded changes.

"It's a different country, a different market," she says. "Our customers want cruise control, for example. In Europe they have paddle shifters because they don't care about cruise control."

Performance car buyers are demanding, and many manufacturer programs want track skills from their engineers. The U.S. Abarth program is no different. "I don't think they would have looked twice at me without the racing experience straight out of college," says Singer. "Because of my life experience it worked out for me."

Abarth needed an automatic – not just because Americans prefer their ease of auto use – but because, well. Let Singer explain . . .

"It used to be if you wanted fuel economy you would buy a manual. But now automatics are good enough you can't outdo them. You're missing a big portion of customer if you don't offer them both."

But racers are racers. And for Singer, a stick is still a must. Her daily driver? A manual, orange Dodge Challenger R/T Hemi, of course.

Henry Payne is auto critic for The Detroit News. Find him at hpayne@detroitnews.com or Twitter @HenryEPayne.