SheSue Experience

The Race Car Engine

My son is in the mechanical engineering program at Oregon State University.  His current dream is to be involved in the design of race cars.  It seemed fitting for him to get involved in the Formula One Student Team at OSU.

Formula Student is a design competition for university students held annually at multiple locations around the world.  This year my son and the team will compete in Los Angeles,  Germany and Austria.   He heads for LA in a couple of weeks, then on to Germany and Austria in August.  He has been on the team for a couple of years, but this year his responsibilities have really ramped up.

Each year, hundreds of college teams design and build formula style race cars.  These cars are designed as prototypes to be evaluated for production by a hypothetical manufacturing firm.  The cars are evaluated on a number of qualities including their design, performance, and cost.  The competitions provide an opportunity for students to apply their knowledge, develop creativity and work as a team on a complex engineering project.

The teams are broken down into different aspects of the car:  electrical, engine, design, machine work, etc.  Senior students use one aspect of the car as their senior project.  They not only are responsible for this part of the car to be completed, but they must submit a written report based on their work.  The team leader is also a senior student, using his leadership skills as his senior project.  The leader must make sure everything gets done, his team mates work together as well as  come up with sponsors and funding for the project.

These teams  spend hours and hours of time building this car. They get no class credit. But they do get the glory of a completed car and watching it race. Saturday was the grand unveiling of the car for 2009. There were a lot of last minute details that needed to be taken care of, but the kids pulled it off. My son hadn’t slept much in the previous week. Now he has to get ready for finals while doing all the fine tuning on the car.

The Race Car Shifter

Mechanically the car is mostly ready. My son says a lot of tuning and testing still needs to be done, then the car will be ready for decoration. All sponsors get a sticker put on the car plus the team envisions a beaver on the nose of the car. They hope the beaver will take them to the top ten in their competitions.