When summer starts, many college students like to go home and spend time with friends and family; it’s a chance to unwind after a long school year.
Members of ASU’s Society of Automotive Engineers team don’t have the same aspiration this year. Instead, they hope to continue preparing their hand-built, Formula-style race car for an automotive design competition in Lincoln, Nebraska, in June.
The SAE is an international organization that focuses on automotive and aerospace engineering. The company, founded in 1905, created a yearly motorsport contest in 1978 called Formula SAE, which was designed for engineering teams from universities around the country to face off at race car designing.
ASU’s SAE team, Sun Devil Motorsports, has competed in the annual contest for more than 20 years, but the team has struggled with a small budget in recent years, which has impeded its goal of finishing the car’s construction or even traveling to the contest.
Troy Buhr, the team’s manager and a mechanical engineering student at ASU, believes this year’s car can be competitive, but the team will need sufficient funding to showcase its full potential.
“The problem with this team in the past has been getting the finances necessary to get ourselves to this competition in Nebraska,” Buhr said. “In the past couple of years, we’ve started to get a little better, but we’re not there yet.”
The team’s goal is to raise $10,000 before the spring semester ends, which would be enough to finish building the car and bring it to Lincoln for the contest. The event takes place place June 15-18.
“This is what the club is designed to do — to race in competition this summer,” Buhr said. “I have seen so much happen in the past year and a half that I’ve been with the team, and I think it would be very special (for team members) to get the satisfaction of going to the competition and competing.”
To promote its fundraising goal, a dozen members of the team displayed the car at Phoenix International Raceway the same weekend as the Verizon IndyCar Series race, which occurred April 1-2. The team’s motivation for bringing the car to PIR was to let racing fans see the car on display, learn about Sun Devil Motorsports and donate money to help the cause.
“We knew someone that knew someone that works at PIR so through this chain of command, we were able to secure a display space,” Buhr said.
Sun Devil Motorsports started building the car in January. Eighty-seven people, most of whom are engineering students, are on the team, and more than 40 members regularly contributed throughout the semester, according to chief engineer Wes Kudela.
Kudela, a senior at ASU, overlooks the team’s effort to build the car, and makes sure that everyone who’s willing to help gets their job done properly.
“I’m responding to emails, talking to people, helping people get the parts they need and going to meetings at the shop on Saturdays,” Kudela said. “Then there are design meetings on Tuesdays, and by the end of the week I’ve spent 40 hours of my time for this team.”
Kudela said the total cost of designing the race car is $38,000, but believes his team can mass produce it cheaper with fewer production costs in the future. He called this year’s car a “monumental and professional” achievement by all that contributed to the project.
If the team raises enough money to travel to Lincoln for the contest, Kudela and Buhr said they think finishing in the top 10 is a feasible goal.
“The whole semester, we’ve been making progress every time we meet at the shop, and I think the pressure really set when we made a deadline of April 2, the day of the IndyCar event,” Kudela said. “At PIR, we knew it would be great publicity for the club, and we’d meet people.”
The team traveled to the Formula SAE contest in Nebraska in 2015, but the car — different from this year’s car — was affected by a broken wheel axle, and it couldn’t compete to its full potential.
“I think going from 62nd out of 79 teams last year to a top-10 car this year is very achievable,” Kudela said. “It’s a decent goal, and it’s not getting us in over our heads — we’ve all pulled together when it really counts.”
If the team goes to the Formula SAE competition in Lincoln, it will compete against other teams in various driving tests. Evaluations are made by judges who analyze each car based on overall speed, acceleration, manufacturing techniques, fuel efficiency and safety.
Reach the reporter at jhaverli@asu.edu or follow @The5thJohnHav on Twitter.
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