Anyone Here Involved with Formula SAE?

Hello, Is anyone here involved with FSAE?

I have an alumni and some members of the local FSAE team coming to my workplace on Friday for some show and tell for students about this year's car as well as other things. 

It should be a hoot. They have designed an autoX course to fit on our band field which is asphalt, 120y x 60y block. It is somewhat difficult to find open flat spaces that are paved and not on some sort of slope 'round these parts.

If I am allowed (as  it is currently pre season and all) I will post some shots.

Former USF Racing alum.

Paris, one of the new staff members, has been doing a series on FSAE.  I'm sure they'll check out the thread in a bit.

In reply to slantsix :

Hey there! Yep, I'm an FSAE alumni, active with the SAE Florida chapter as the director of communications and I've been working on a whole project car series with GRM's local university's team, ERAU Motorsports, if you want to check it out here.

It's awesome you are getting involved with teams, FSAE is an amazing program for university students. What school do you have coming over? 

I have no formal engineering training, and I am not involved with the FSAE.

I am however hosting a presentation and test session for the University of Pitt Swanson School of Engineering / FSAE at my school. 

I teach at a public school outside of Pittsburgh, PA, and the team will come by and have a presentation for some of the high school students here. It should go pretty well if the weather holds out. (it is March in SW PA).

I will post some shots if I can, as it is pre season for FSAE, and I am not sure what can be shown and what is top seceret?

I've been the advisor for Hope College's FSAE team for 15+ years. Both of my sons were on the team. 

Our team has a "mentor model" where the team generally has 3-7 industry professionals mentoring/advising them, offering design reviews, and sometimes inviting them to design or build components at their worksites. These mentors have included pro race drivers, a tuning expert from Roush who tuned their Le Mans Vipers and other high-profile cars, local furniture industry engineers, automotive industry engineers, team alumni, marketing folks, fundraising folks, team culture experts, and several others.  The team has been very successful as a result.

I highly recommend any GRMer to get involved in FSAE, especially as a mentor. Not only are you paying it forward, but you'll likely get access to some cool technology and maybe learn some stuff too.

In reply to slantsix :

General rule of thumb, anything with design and data are a big sharing no no. If you take a look at their Instagram you can also get a better of idea. But when in doubt, don't be afraid to ask the team photographer or leadership if they are at the event.

Yes - student competitor for a few years, design judge for a few years, advisor for three.

In reply to Carl Heideman :

Well said! Mentors are such a vital resource for FSAE students. If you want to share your expertise and experience even more, see if your state has an SAE chapter. Chapters are constantly looking for alumni and professionals to become mentors for schools all over. That's what I do with the SAE Florida Chapter.

I'll add that before Covid, our mentors were generally visited/helped on site. Since Covid, a lot of our mentors Zoom in (actually Google Meet) and so the reach is now broader and more convenient for the mentors. 

One of my college regrets was not joining the SAE team at RIT. That and ditching that 4-hour class on Thursday nights. Who would have thought I'd need a magazine publishing class, right?

When applying to schools, I didn’t even know that FSAE was an option. Could have changed everything.

I did FSAE in the early 90s. It got me into the auto industry and led to a pretty interesting 30+ year career.

I was very interested in FSAE when I started at Georgia Tech in 2009. Then at freshman club day, I saw a beater turbo E30 next to a table that said "$2000 Challenge" written on it. I knew I had to join Wreck Racing and I've been GRM'ing ever since. We shared a shop with FSAE and they seemed to be having less fun than us. I have gotten 2 out of 3 jobs since graduating through those club connections. I recommend all engineering students join some kind of competitive team that builds something.

FSAE didn't exist when I was in college, but I later drove Kimini to the FSAE West event at Autoclub Speedway in Fontana California to chase cones. Does that count?

My roommate in college was on the FSAE and Baja team at WVU in the 90s.  Though I was in Vet., the Animal Science building was right beside Engineering so I used to go over to their machine shop and work on mods for my MG Midget and scrounge the FSAE cast-offs parts.  I discovered that I enjoyed working on machines more than animals, but I was too far down that path to change course.  I wish I had some days.  I ended up buying one of the old FSAE cars, which was not typically done because they usually scrapped the old ones.  A few years ago, I sold it to someone here on GRM.  The fab work, meshing of VW, Austin, and Sachs snowmobile wankel , and mechanical problem solving the students had done was impressive.  It's a great program.

In reply to Apis Mellifera :

Cool, I did not know WVU had a FSAE and I do not know anything about the Baja team.

WVU is not far from me, about an hour. I like the Cooper's Rock Area for seeing nature with a crowd.

In reply to slantsix :

They also have/had a Hybrid team.  The last year I was in Morgantown they were taking a Chevy Lumina and making it a hybrid... somehow.  As I recall, Hybrid and Baja were new, at least to WVU, at the time.   I don't recall much about the Baja car or program other than my roommate made a two-speed gear box for it, I think it used a Kawasaki street bike engine and friend of ours was the team leader.  Cool side note, he was on the research team that discovered VW was circumventing emissions controls aka Diesel Gate.

In reply to slantsix :

If you want to see what other schools around you have teams, you can go to SAE.org, the sanctioning body, and check out their university programs to find a list of every registered team.

In reply to kb58 :

Every event needs people to chase those pesky cones. Volunteers are how SAE events get done so, I say it counts haha.

Well, the Panther Racing Team came by and used our facilities for the better part of the day yesterday.

They were able to get some data in the dry and wet.

The Panther Racing Team had setup an autoX Course on the Band Field:

I was allowed to get some and post some shots:

Still Working on sorting my shutter speed settings:

I would say it was a successful event for all involved.