Building a Better Race Car
What’s the best part of being a member of UConn’s Formula Society of Automotive Engineers (FSAE)? For many it’s a day in mid-July.
Most of the year, the student club toils away doing everything you could imagine goes into designing and building a Formula-style race car — except driving it.
Just one member gets behind the wheel for the club’s two competitions, in Michigan and Canada, at the end of each spring semester.
But, after all the races are done (this past spring UConn’s car ranked number 22 out of 109 teams in Michigan and number 8 out of 25 teams in Canada), the engineering students get together for a team drive day, in which all members get to take their baby for a spin. “It’s a lot of excitement because we get to see the car from nothing but some metal tubes all the way to a race car that competes. Then comes the next wave of excitement where you realize you’re going to get to drive the car and kind of feel the power behind something you’ve built,” says the club’s lead powertrain engineer Kenneth Brown ’19 (ENG).
—Emma casagrande ’18 (CLAS)
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