Building a race car from scratch is an
incredible real-world design experience
for student members of the Society of
Automotive Engineers (SAE).
Race teams sharing parts at a competition? A rare occurrence, but this is not your average car race. It is the 1994 Formula SAE car competition that pits the automotive knowledge and creativity of college SAE chapter teams from across the country against each other. Yet, despite each team's desire to win, Professor Larry Carlson from Mechanical Engineering says "There is a real spirit of sportsmanship at the competition, and competing teams help each other out a lot."
Carlson acts as faculty advisor for the College's new SAE student chapter and the Formula team. He readily admits though that, in accordance with the competition's rule, he provided very little assistance to the 20 student SAE members who worked on the car. "My goal as an advisor was not to do it for them," says Carlson, "They did everything themselves."
One of the students doing "everything" was Kyle Thomas. Now a senior in mechanical engineering, Thomas was a team member for the '94 race, but this year he is the project leader.
This is a formidable task considering the students build the SAE car, which is similar to a Formula One car but scaled down and intentionally designed not to go as fast, from scratch.
Thomas loves the challenge though and says, "I think this is the most valuable mechanical engineering experience we have at CU. It is a good way to learn the engineering process and a lot better than what many of the classes can teach you."
Carlson agrees and says, "It is incredible real-world design experience for the students and the ultimate mechanical engineering design project. This is the type of project I can see becoming an interdisciplinary senior project in the future Integrated Teaching Laboratory."
While there were only a smattering of non-mechanical engineering students who assisted with the 1994 car, Carlson expects this to change. He sees more aerospace students working on the body and more electrical and computer science students working on the wiring and system analysis in the future.
Thomas adds that regardless of which department the student comes from, "We need people who will be really excited about this type of project and who are willing to get their hands dirty."
Thomas hopes that this will include more female engineers. "Right now it is still very male dominated," says Thomas, "which is unfortunate because I'm sure there are many female engineers that would be very adept at a project like this."
The 1994 competition took place May 19-22. As the competition information stated and the team sportsmanship attested to, "Winning is more related to engineering professionalism than to who crosses the finish line first." Appropriately, the victor in the competition was not the first team to see the checkered flag, but the team who accumulated the most points in eight categories. These included presentation, engineering design, cost analysis, acceleration, a skid-pad event, an autocross event, a fuel economy event, and an endurance track event.
Unfortunately, the College's car experienced engine problems and was only able to complete three of the events. However, its score was still good enough to place in the top two-thirds of the 78 entrants: not bad for a club that is only two years old and entering its first car competition!
Thomas says that the team has four or five returning members for this year's competition and that they are expecting more favorable results. "This year we are concentrating on durability and reliability and keeping our systems simple."