Racing Through Adversity

NovaRacing’s journey from setbacks to comebacks in the world of Formula SAE

As a first-year student, Will Stoval ’24 ME had a moment he’ll never forget. During his first competition with NovaRacing, Villanova’s Formula SAE team, Stoval had been placed in charge of building the car’s muffler. Any sound emitting from the muffler had to register under 110 decibels; any louder, and the team wouldn’t be able to enter the car into the race. At the time, Stoval knew little to nothing about mufflers, or engineering for that matter. He asked questions incessantly of the upperclassmen on the team, one of whom encouraged Stoval to learn from experience by taking responsibility for building the muffler all by himself. He had two weeks to build a muffler that would be compliant for competition. Stoval spent those weeks learning from trial and error. The first four mufflers he built exploded, sheared or failed in some other spectacular fashion. His fifth iteration would need to work perfectly.

“The entire competition for NovaRacing was riding on whether I had actually built the muffler correctly,” Stoval recalls. “That was very stressful and a ton of pressure to be under as a freshman.”

Stoval and his teammates rolled the car out onto the tarmac. The stewards came out with their decibel reader, and the team waited anxiously as they started the engine and held the meter to the muffler. A few minutes passed before the person measuring the sound looked up at Stoval and indicated with a thumbs-up that the car’s muffler had passed the test.

“That was one of the greatest feelings that I’ve had on this team,” says Stoval, who now serves as the team’s captain. He has since become the go-to for designing engines and engine-adjacent parts.

“It’s all because an older team member encouraged a younger version of me to learn from experience. Now, when team members ask questions, I answer them to the best of my ability, but I also encourage them to get their hands dirty and learn from trial and error.”

Over the past three years, Stoval and his NovaRacing teammates have seen it all: from devastating losses to triumphant victories, including the team’s hard-fought second-place win at Michigan International Speedway in 2022, the team’s best-ever finish in its 15-year history. But success for the NovaRacing team is about much more than winning trophies. It’s about the process, the lessons learned from failures and the camaraderie that has bound the team together for nearly two decades.

Humble Beginnings

Before coming to Villanova in 2006, Tom Gacka ’10 ME, ’12 MSME had become enamored with the idea of getting involved in a Formula SAE program. He was inspired by his older brother’s participation on the FSAE team at the University of Michigan, which he had the opportunity to shadow at a competition.

When Gacka came to Villanova, Jonathan Zacharkiw ’07 ME and a group of seniors had already begun taking steps toward developing a racing team. The unofficial team members were working on components for what would be the team’s first car as part of their senior design projects, a standard component of Villanova’s Engineering curriculum. When Zacharkiw and his fellow senior teammates graduated, Gacka took over as captain, recruited new members and worked diligently to continue building the team’s foundation. His next priority was to secure funding.

The team took their plans to Gerard F. “Jerry” Jones, PhD, then the chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department, who—while he loved the idea—was unable to supply the amount of money the team needed to get started.

“It was about $50,000, as I recall, which was about half of the annual Mechanical Engineering Department operating budget at the time,” says Jones, now a professor and adviser to the NovaRacing team. “I was aghast.”

But Gacka and his teammates didn’t give up there. They turned their efforts toward external fundraising, sending letters to local businesses that might be interested in sponsoring the team’s car in exchange for advertising. Slowly but surely, their outreach rendered results, and the team raised enough funding to get started.

“These were the team’s scrappy days, with little funding, not many members and very little experience,” says Gacka, “but we worked really hard and had some important early success to gain momentum.”

Over the next two years, eight or nine more Engineering students joined the team with the goal of building a car model strong enough to compete at the annual Formula SAE competition.

In Formula SAE—a program sponsored by SAE International (formerly the Society of Automotive Engineers)—students are challenged to conceive, design, construct, refine and ultimately race a small Formula One-style vehicle. Teams showcase their vehicle’s performance through a series of timed events, both on and off the track. It’s an opportunity for teams from universities around the world to exhibit their ingenuity and engineering prowess. Every decision, every component and every second counts.

NovaRacing took its first shot at the Formula SAE competition in 2008 but wound up forfeiting because their car wasn’t completed in time. In 2009, NovaRacing placed 62nd out of 120 registered teams. A year later, the team earned first place in the fuel economy event and made it into the top 30 overall, placing 28th out of 117 registered teams. They’ve been on a steady climb to the top ever since.

Gacka, who also completed his graduate studies at Villanova, stayed on as a team adviser, helping usher the team to its first major wins.

But the path to victory hasn’t always been easy.

Lessons Learned

Life on the NovaRacing team means learning from mistakes and constantly striving to improve.

In fact, Stoval says, “failure is the best teacher.” It’s an adage he’s come to embrace since joining the team, which has seen its fair share of challenges.

Last May, NovaRacing heard what Stoval describes as “the worst three words you could ever hear in motorsport”: Did Not Finish (DNF). The team’s car, dubbed VU14, had done well in every category of the annual Formula SAE competition at Michigan International Speedway, with strong scores in the categories of design, cost and presentation, acceleration, autocross and skid pad. Then came the very last event of the day: endurance. To pass the test, their car would have to run for roughly 13 miles. Toward the end of the run, the battery failed, and the car couldn’t make it across the finish line.

“The car wasn’t able to keep going, which was really, really devastating,” says Stoval. “The highs are high, and the lows are low.”

Jones says mishaps like the one NovaRacing experienced are simply inevitable in motorsport, even at elite levels. “There are so many things—components, accidents, human error and misjudgments, rule interpretations, etc.—in racing at this competitive level that will result in failure,” he says. “This even happens at the highest competitive levels,” such as in IndyCar and NASCAR in the US and in Formula 1 worldwide.

The important thing, Stoval says, is that team members learn from their mistakes as they move forward. “That DNF was a phenomenal lesson to learn,” he says. “It taught us to accept failures as learning experiences instead of retreating into a shell and thinking our chances are over.”

Taylor McDermott ’23 CpE, one of the captains of last year’s team, agrees with Stoval’s sentiment. “Though experiencing a DNF is heartbreaking,” she says, “I’m so proud of the growth and resilience the team has shown coming into the new year. They have the approach and dedication to go far.”

Full Speed Ahead

Since the disappointing DNF last year, the NovaRacing team has been hard at work. Their sights are set on building, as Stoval calls it, “the leanest, meanest, most aggressive winning machine that Villanova has ever seen.”

To do so, the team’s 30 members are bringing all their skills to bear, juggling between their time in the classroom and their responsibilities in the machine shop, and even putting in extra hours during academic breaks. Over last summer, several team members committed time to working on the car. The team even hosted an early testing day for the car (VU15) so they could start training their driver early and continue improving the car’s build.

In September, NovaRacing participated in the Pittsburgh Shootout, a small Formula SAE competition at the University of Pittsburgh. The team won second place in the autocross event and finished in the top 20 overall.

“We put in the hours as a team this summer and started this year off right by bringing a trophy home to Villanova,” Stoval says.

The team is now focused on making as many improvements as possible before returning to Michigan International Speedway in May. Having gone from a second-place win to a DNF, the team is determined to come back strong. Their dedication and unity remain unwavering. And their ethos of embracing setbacks as stepping stones toward growth is their fuel.

“I’m not necessarily thinking about how great it would be to win first place. I’d love to do that, but we’ve all just got our noses to the grindstone and we’re truly trying to build a winning machine,” Stoval says. “We’re spending this whole year pouring our hearts and souls into this car, and we’ll see how that turns out.”

Adds Gacka: “I am honored to have been a part of this program, and the new members continue to make the old alumni proud. I can’t wait to see what they do from here.”

Hands-on Learning

The NovaRacing experience isn’t solely about competing. Team members get to participate in hands-on fabrication and design in the workshop, while also learning the formulas and theories that make mechanical engineering possible in the classroom. It’s a combination that produces graduates who are not just theoretical engineers, but also practical problem solvers ready to tackle the challenges of the professional world. It’s also what team captain Will Stoval ’24 ME and Associate Director of Undergraduate Student Services and Program Operations Gayle Doyle say helps students to thrive in their careers once they graduate.

“No amount of theory is going to be able to help you build a part if you don’t actually know how the machine works,” says Stoval. “What’s great about NovaRacing is that, when we leave the classroom, we’ve got a machine shop where we fabricate all of our parts and do our own welding.”

“The students gain hands-on, real-world experience from designing and building the cars,” adds Doyle. “Many have secured internships and job offers from participating in the competition as well.”

Going Electric

NovaRacing is preparing to go electric. The team has begun recruiting a special group of students who will spend the next two to four years conducting research, fundraising and building the foundational components of the team’s first electric vehicle (EV) racecar. Students who apply will be asked to complete four projects of increasing difficulty to earn a place on the team. No prior experience is required, and recruitment is open to all majors.

Beginning next year, new recruits to NovaRacing will have the option to choose a focus on internal combustion (IC) or EV design. Team members with an EV focus will also help manufacture the IC car so they get the fabrication experience required to produce a functioning car. The team is also working on securing sponsorships from local and international companies to evolve NovaRacing into this new class of vehicle.

“I would like to see two cars built at once, one EV and one IC, because wherever there are races to be won, we want to be on the track fighting for a place on the podium,” says team captain Will Stoval ’24 ME. “We are several years from having a functioning EV car, but we are taking the first steps.”