It’s an unseasonably warm September Saturday—perhaps the last real tshirt-and-shorts kind of Saturday we’ll get this year. The sun is unobscured by the few wisps of cloud wafting lazily above Springett parking lot, which is mostly empty but for a small group of engineering students gathered at one end. There is just enough of a breeze to keep the heat comfortably at bay. It’s a beautiful day for a drive. The car sits waiting as some of the students set up a makeshift track with battered orange pylons. Out here, compared to the pickup trucks and sports cars, the car doesn’t seem very big. At a glance, it could be mistaken for a large go-kart—though if you sat in a go-kart to race against this machine, it would be moving at 100 kilometres an hour before you figured out which pedal was the gas. This is no go-kart. It’s a Formula racecar. It goes from zero to 100 kilometres an hour in just 3.4 seconds, and it was designed and built by the students of Western’s Formula racing team to compete against other cars designed, built and driven by students from universities around the world. Today, Miguel Achtymichuk will drive the car for the first time. The second-year mechanical engineering student is the team’s brakes manager, and was a member of the team for his entire first year at Western. When the engine fires, it doesn’t roar so much as it rumbles and sputters. With two team members standing at the ready at either end of the track with fire extinguishers, Achtymichuk drives over to the track and begins his first lap. He starts off slowly, to get a feel for the car’s unique handling. He takes
each lap a bit faster than the one before, and though he hits the odd pylon, you can soon tell by the sound of the engine that he’s growing comfortable with the car. By the sixth lap, the car is howling down the straightaway and careening around hairpin turns—now the engine is roaring. This car is loud, and this car is fast. By the 12th lap, Springett feels less like a parking lot and more like a speedway, and by the 15th lap, the car is going around the track so fast that the other students barely have time to replace the knocked-over pylons before it’s back around again. The car will have at least six drivers today, many of them first-timers. When the weather is favourable, the team does this about once a week. Every committed member of the team gets a chance to drive the car, and eventually may even get to race it in competition. “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever driven before,” says Adam Bezzina, technical lead and chief driver for the Western team. “It accelerates so fast, brakes so fast, you can corner a lot faster—the corners that we take at 60 kilometres an hour. An average car couldn’t even make that corner because the turn radius is larger.” “Obviously, we don’t have anywhere near the technology that a Formula One car does, nor do we approach the speeds that they hit. But the driving is difficult nonetheless, and it takes a lot of practice.” Each year, the team builds a new car to compete in Formula SAE events, organized by the Society of Automotive Engineers International. The SAE sets the rules and standards for the cars, and organizes competitions that >> see formula pg.3
Andrei Calinescu & Mike Laine Gazette