Constructing a Race Car From the Ground Up
With uncertainty surrounding in-person competitions due to the global pandemic, members of the Purdue Baja Racing team spent hundreds of hours designing and building a single-seat race car to compete in the Baja SAE competition. With combined efforts, their four-wheel-drive race car propelled them to a top ten finish in the competition.
“This is a huge milestone for us,” said Anthony Anton, the team’s chief engineer . “I’m so happy to be part of the team that made a 4-wheel-drive car happen, even in the midst of a pandemic. This will definitely influence how we build cars in the years to come.”
Transcript
00:00:11 At Purdue Baja SAE, we build a single seat off road race car where we compete with a bunch of other teams. We use the standard Briggs and Stratton engine that's provided by SAE. Given all our gear reductions, we do get a lot of torque on the ground and that's what we're doing right now is trying to see our torque versus top speed here and then also with our gear reduction box that we custom made, we have a couple different gear ratios we can tune. So that'll help us see what gives us our fastest acceleration time. We really had no idea if we were even going to be allowed to build a
00:00:42 car. Until like a week before school, we didn't know if we were going to have access to our shop. With COVID, we really didn't have any prototypes made. We didn't have time or access to machine shops. So it was Discord, voice channel messaging, and sharing screens and looking at each other's CAD. It used to be that all cars were two wheel drive but with COVID this year, we have bonus points available for people who can compete with four-wheel drive. So we decided that with our team's background and the members that we had currently that we could do it this year so we went for it.
00:01:11 The number of drivetrain parts I think increased from like seventy to 250. This semester alone I've spent over 200 hours in here machining parts. And that doesn't include the time to actually make the tool paths or get the parts ready to be machined. So, that's 200 hours of just standing at the machine. It was a big relief when I first started making the first part. it became real. It's like, okay, we're actually going to, we're going to build a car this year. The first few times we took off and launched in four wheel drive and saw all four wheels spin and kick up a little bit of dirt, it was
00:01:41 very satisfying. Wow. We just built the first four wheel drive car in 17 years and we did it during a pandemic. It was very crazy. I feel like this whole process went really well. Like this is a huge milestone, actually seeing four-wheel drive made my year. And then being able to be a part of this team that got that done. Working with Baja has definitely allowed me to put a lot of the knowledge that I've learned in classes into something that I can actually see and apply to an actual physical product. It's also allowed me to research outside of the things I learned in class. So, I got
00:02:13 to really deep dive into vehicle dynamics and design a suspension system, which I wouldn't have done in class. That actually translated really well into my job search. I got around nine interviews last year for internships and had multiple offers in the automotive industry. So that really helped me, and I'd really contribute that mainly to Baja. Overall, I'm ecstatic with how it's turned out and really proud that the team got together and made this car.