Good communication shifts Mizzou Racing Formula SAE Team into the fast lane

Story and photo by Sarah Woodhurst, posted Dec. 23, 2009

Most think of summer as the racing season. But the Mizzou Racing team knows that, in reality, racing season is a yearlong effort. The Mizzou Racing Formula Society of Automotive Engineers team, known as FSAE, is a student-run project of mostly engineer majors who work year-round to design, build and enter race cars in annual competitions.

“I really think that this year’s car is going to be one of the best that I’ve seen here,” said Chief Production Engineer, Ryan Sobotka. “We all agree that communication is the key here. We communicated a lot this summer and I think it definitely shows.”

Members of the team have designed all of the parts on the completed FSAE car. The team built a number of the parts, but also sent on designs for manufacturers to build.

Officers of the Mizzou Racing team, Ryan Sobotka, Maria Holt, Trevor Stoll, and Steve Reeves, pose with the 2010 race car.

This spring, the FSAE Competition will take place in Fontana, Calif., where Mizzou Racing will show off their skills on and off the track. The team is judged in eight different events: presentation, engineering design, cost analysis, acceleration, skid-pad, autocross, fuel economy and endurance.

The endurance event is a road course where the driver of the 480-pound car enters and drives through corners at a speed near 55 mph. The skid pad is a figure eight course in which the car is judged on its cornering capabilities. In the acceleration event, the car goes from zero to 60 mph in 3.5 seconds. The acceleration strip is about 75 meters long, and the car’s top speed is around 110 mph.

Chief Business Officer, Maria Holt said that her favorite memory is the first FSAE competition she attended in Virginia.

“I got to spend a whole week with the team. Competition is really fun, because you get to see the results of all your work,” Holt said. “It can also be nerve wracking too. You have to watch your car race, and you really want to win, and not crash, so its exciting and scary all at the same time.”

Although there are speed events in the competition, the team says that the entire competition is meant to showcase engineering design knowledge. In the presentation event, a few members of the team present their car design and qualities to a panel of judges. Judges will question the team to ask them why they chose to use parts on the car and what type of advantage they felt the part added to the car.  Preparation for this week-long competition involves planning and teamwork year-round.

“Competition brings you closer together as a team, since you spend all week working together to get the car to finish well,” Holt said. “I've made some really great friends on the team that I am going to miss when I graduate.”

For more information and updates, visit: http://students.missouri.edu/~sae/ and become a fan of Mizzou Racing Formula SAE Team on Facebook.

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