Cal Poly Racing showcased their newly built Formula SAE and Baja SAE vehicles at the Business Silo April 13, unveiling the two cars they have spent months designing and assembling for the upcoming competition season.
Cal Poly Racing club consists of over 100 members split between its Formula and Baja teams, which design and build vehicles for national collegiate competitions each year. The Formula car is a competitive open-wheel electric vehicle, while the Baja car is built for off-road driving, according to the Cal Poly Racing website.
The two cars are nearly completed, said Thomas Pierce, president of Cal Poly Racing and a mechanical engineering junior. Both the Formula and Baja teams will be testing and fine tuning their vehicles until their respective competitions.
Baja SAE will compete May 1-4 in Arizona and June 12-15 in Maryland, while Formula SAE will compete June 17-21 in Michigan.
The unveiling is an annual tradition for the club, Pierce said. Each chassis — the core frame of the car — has a one-year lifecycle, meaning a new vehicle must be built each year.
“For the large portion of the year, our car doesn’t look like a car,” Pierce said. “Either it’s being manufactured or it’s being designed so you don’t really know what it’s going to look like.”
Formula SAE
This year’s Formula SAE car builds upon much of last year’s design, but with some major upgrades, said John O’Donnell, Formula team lead and an aerospace engineering junior.
“Our aerodynamics package is completely new, it’s a lot better, a lot bigger,” O’Donnell said. “It’s producing double the amount of downforce and so visually from the outside it just looks so different because it has bigger wings.”
The car also features a new, smaller motor to increase energy efficiency, O’Donnell said. The car’s projected top speed is 77-78 mph and can accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 3.2 seconds.
Baja SAE
Vehicle weight reduction was one of the primary goals for this year’s Baja SAE team, said Matt Shaffer, Baja team lead and a mechanical engineering senior. This year’s car weighs 365 pounds — 20 pounds lighter than last year’s model.
“We’re always trying to lose weight just because we have the exact same engine as everybody else [for Baja],” Shaffer said. “So it’s really dependent on how much your car weighs.”
Another key focus for the club in general was increasing vehicle reliability, Shaffer said. This includes having a bigger focus on testing this year.
“We had an incredible car last year, but it wasn’t able to last some of those longer events, which was detrimental to a lot of the points that we missed out on,” Shaffer said. “Hopefully with a more reliable car, we’re able to get more points of competition and also last longer for those events.”
