My name is matt Cromer. I’m a senior in mechanical engineering and the team captain of the Auburn Formula SAE racing team. We're a group of college students that design build and race an open wheel formula style race car. It’s a group that is extra curricular that also takes knowledge from our engineering classes. The team is open to any Auburn student; you don’t have to be in engineering. As long as you are willing to learn about automotive or project management or anything like that we will take you on the team. Timeline for building: The competition that we build these cars for is called formula SAE. It’s a competition sponsored by the Society of Automotive Engineers, it’s a professional engineering organization. They put on the event held in Detroit Michigan in May every year. We start building the car in the fall. In the early fall we start to put down our design ideas, and various items that we want to have on the new car. We spend all of the fall designing components testing them, using computer simulation to validate our designs. At the very beginning of spring, hopefully earlier than that, we start building the car. About 90% of the parts on the car are built in our shop. We have two shops for building parts. Students are responsible for building each component and manufacturing each component without any outside help from engineering professionals. Once the car is built we are also responsible for testing it. We do that on campus and the students who are on the team drive. We do have a faculty advisor, Dr. Peter Jones. He is a professor in mechanical engineering. He is mainly responsible for guiding the team trough the whole process of building the car but he is not allowed to help the team build the car in any way. He is just here for moral support. Our team has very strong results in the past. Our highest finish in any competition was 3rd in Detroit in 2004. And 3rd in California in 2007. We have had many top tens and most recently in 2009, actually this is the 2009 car we just finished, that car finished 15th out of 120 teams in Michigan. And then in a competition in June in California we finished 8th out of 81 teams. The FSAE event is made up of different types of events to test the car; there are static events and dynamic events. The static events consist of cost presentation and design. The judges judge your car in whoever cost the lease wins that particular event and each particular event is given points. Static events are given a certain amount and dynamic events such at skid pad, acceleration, autocross and endurance are given points. Whoever has the most points at the completion of those events wins the whole competition. We actually graduated four alumni last year for the formula team and they all have jobs. Two in the automotive industry. We have had team members who have graduated and gone on to racing. We’ve had other members who have gone on and do completely other different things in mechanical engineering. As far as the people when went into racing we have some people who are on very competitive teams in different racing series in the U.S. and all over the world.
Mostly engineering students, mostly mechanical engineering students, but we will take any Auburn student on the team. The majority of our sponsorship money comes from the department of engineering but it’s up to the team members to go out and find sponsors who can donate parts and labor or money to help the team.
The car is completely hand built by students. It is very unlike any road car that’s in the road right now. It does have four tires but other than that it’s completely different. The way that we
organize the team is that there are 10-12 students responsible for designing the car and then about 10 or 12 students who are responsible for building the car. We split the car into different sections. Someone will design the suspension, someone will design the engine components, someone will design the break system, different stuff like that. Sometimes it’s hard to work with buy that’s what has to be done for the car to be built. Any team member who is involved in building the car, designing the car can go to competition. We normally bring 25 people to competition. About half those are the design leaders and about half those are the guys responsible for manufacturing. If you are a consistent member of the team and put in the effort to help build the cars then you get to drive it. The way we decide drivers for competition is we have tryouts kind of everybody gets to drive the car and well look at how comfortable people are and what the times are and then from there we will pick who are the eight drivers we want to have in competition. It’s a manual, but it has automatic shifting. We can push a button and it just shifts the car. The car does about 1.2 lateral g’s sustained and does 0-60 in about 3 seconds. This car is our 2006 car, it weighs about 500 pounds and makes about 65 horsepower sorry about 75 horsepower and the car on the other side is our 2009 car weighs about 420 pounds and makes about 60 horsepower.