Sun Devil Motorsports 16 team overcomes setbacks, hits the workshop hard over spring break as national competition rolls closer
Editor’s note: This is the latest installation in a yearlong series about ASU's Formula SAEFormula SAE is a student design competition organized by the International Society of Automotive Engineers (now known as SAE International). team. Find links to previous stories at the end of this article.
If the story of the Arizona State University student engineers building a race car for a June competition were a movie, this would be the part where the broken and bloodied hero lifts his head and knows he’s got a fighting chance.
In the past few weeks they made mistakes, took hits and lost money and morale.
Now they’re back in the race.
It’s the first Saturday of spring break. Yet in a machine shop in the back of the Psychology North building on the Tempe campus, the only sign of a holiday is electronic dance music pulsing in between the whine of metal grinders.
These are the students of the Formula Society of Automotive Engineers, working on a design competition to build a Formula-style race car. The concept behind the competition is that a fictional manufacturing company has contracted a design team to develop a small Formula-style race car. The prototype is to be evaluated at the competition in Nebraska for its potential as a production item. Each team designs, builds and tests a prototype based on a series of rules.
‘In a pretty good pinch’
The ASU team has been struggling for the past three weeks. They made a mistake cutting the suspension tabs that hold the A arms, which support the wheels.
“It pulled us back in so many ways,” team manager Troy Buhr said.