Naturally, a lot of meticulous science—and trial and error—is steering this enterprise. But it comes from a personal place: Hoping to combine two of his passions, motorsports and engineering, Grandstaff joined the program's SAE Club over four years ago, eventually finding a group of likeminded students. "We were working all those years, making slow progress," he says. "So we finally decided, if we actually want to get a car built, we have to make it a senior design project. That’s when we got a lot of our friends to join."
Sanders worked with a previous Motorsports team back in 2016, attempting to build a go-kart in the STEAM Studio. Sanders is thrilled to support another eager group:
"They have a ton of enthusiasm and drive," she says. "And one of the things that’s particularly compelling is that it is student-driven."
In a critical part of the process, the students raised thousands of dollars in funding, helping pay for tires, brake components, racing gear, chassis tubing, and battery cells, among other costs. The money was essential, but the biggest hurdle might have been time management.
"I think the technical stuff came very easily. The Mechatronics [Engineering] Program does a great job of preparing our students for a project like this, but the challenges that come from this competition are so broad and interdisciplinary and well-rounded, it reflects the actual industry environment,” says Sanders. “It’s a big undertaking, and they’ve definitely risen to the challenge."
That challenge involved intense deep dives, acquiring all that knowledge you can’t access with a quick MacBook search. "Pretty much everybody had little to zero experience in the motorsport world, so we were starting from nothing," says Grandstaff. "We did a lot of research to see what other teams were doing, what options were expensive, what designs were easy to build. In terms of building it, we had to realize how long it takes to make a certain part of the car. At the beginning, Sara said, 'Take the time you think it’ll take, and then multiply that by four or five.'"