Dedication drives UW formula team to competition

It's 9 o'clock on a Wednesday night, and most of the campus has shut down until the following day, but in the basement of the mechanical engineering building a dedicated group of individuals is hard at work designing and constructing its year-long project [HTML_REMOVED] a formula-style race car.

The University of Washington Formula Society of Automotive Engineers (UW FSAE) members, numbering more than 30, can tell you it's more than just building an open-wheeled, open-cockpit race car.

Sophomore Ryan Trickett, a newcomer to UW FSAE, is heading up the design and construction of the dashboard and puts hours a week into the project.

The multi-layered facets of the operation include designing, building, marketing and competing in a worldwide annual collegiate design competition with the car, which provides opportunities far beyond any simple "shop class."

There are technical and administrative leads, with several sub-groups underneath those. Each group and individual plays its own part so that when the team takes the car to the FSAE West 2008 competition in June, it has a finished, polished product.

"Group dynamics play a huge part in the success of the team," Trickett said. "We always have to know what others are doing, or else we might end up with some big problems down the road."

In Trickett's case, working on the dashboard directly affects the region of the chassis around it, the steering wheel placement and possible view obstruction.

Sometimes, when major problems do occur, the team has to take immediate action to get the car back on track. A recent example comes from only a few weeks ago, when the UW team sent preliminary designs of its 2008 chassis to the FSAE rules committee. The rules committee reply showed a couple of problems with the design of the car that would have disqualified the team if taken to competition in that form.

Ryan Kelly, technical director and two-year veteran of UW FSAE, said that coming up with quick solutions to design and construction problems is an important part of how things run at UW FSAE.

"As soon as we became aware, we corralled all of the technical group leaders into a kind of emergency session and sat down and looked at what all the issues were," Kelly said of the rules committee decision.

In that emergency session, they got together to assess the problems and risks with the current design and pose possible solutions. In many ways, the process must be fast because time is limited when it comes to design and construction.

"We just get it done," Kelly said. "We try to be very proactive about facing our issues."

Design issues may be solved easily, but the rules state that the car must not only be design and performance focused, but also reliable, easy to maintain and affordable [HTML_REMOVED] fewer than $25,000.

This means that many members must also focus on the administrative and outreach portions of the project.

One of the team captains, senior Jonathan Schwedhelm, a four year veteran, is in charge of a lot of these administrative duties.

"We run it like a small business," Schwedhelm said. "We have the technical portion and the administrative portion, so we need to always keep track of our finances [and] what everyone is doing and make sure we get our name out there properly."

The team earns money toward its budget by working with sponsors and helping direct parking at Husky sporting events. It all has to be done to help build the car and keep the program running.

For Schwedhelm, working with the team provides the rare opportunity to gain experience in both engineering and business.

"The whole point of [FSAE] is it enables you to take everything you've learned in the classroom and tie it together as completely as possible," Schwedhelm said. "This is the purpose: build something amazing and be in an environment that is as close to the real world that you'll find in college."

This means that the team is often looking for hard-working individuals from any college background. While a strong awareness of automotives is suggested, business majors, art majors and just about anyone else with interest and dedication can join.

It is exactly that kind of working environment that was a big draw for many of the newcomers to UW FSAE, including Trickett, a business major.

"It really is a great thing to be a part of; the best part is probably the camaraderie," Trickett said. "It's pretty amazing to feel like you're apart of something bigger."

While Mondays and Wednesdays are filled with class, project updates, designing and building, Sundays are what many on the team look forward to.

Since most of what goes on in the shop has to translate to real-world success in competition, the driver training and maintenance team (DTM) spends almost every Sunday, rain or shine, at a giant donated parking lot at Boeing's Everett Assembly Plant.

The goal is two-fold: test the car in a number of different arenas, including acceleration, skidpad and endurance, and autocross and train drivers in these areas so that when competition rolls around, they have the skills necessary to perform as competitively as possible with their car.

As Kelly guided me around the autocross track a few Sundays ago, he said that continued driving and testing of the car is one of the most crucial ingredients to competition success.

Kelly said working out the kinks on Sundays is a big part of making things run smoothly for the FSAE competition.

The team wanted to demonstrate the process of assembling their car, so it let me take the 2007 car for a spin.

Car 18, the 2007 vehicle that earned fifth in design and fourth in autocross in the FSAE West competition in June, will be tweaked and modified with some expected 2008 performance changes to give the DTM a good idea of what to expect when Car 19, the 2008 vehicle, is unveiled and ready to test in early April.

Formally unveiling their car is something new for the UW FSAE race team, but it's one that has many on the team excited and pumped up for the future of the team.

Public relations head Brian Hood says that the unveiling is about presenting their finalized project to not only their sponsors and mechanical engineering faculty but to the University as a whole.

"This is the first unveiling we've ever tried," Hood said. "Hopefully we will be able to showcase the car really well."

Sitting only a few inches from the asphalt below me, I fumbled with the six-spoke seatbelt and asked Trickett what it feels like to go around the autocross track for the first time. He said it is hard to describe in words, noting that I would begin to feel it the moment I begin to accelerate.

After a few problems getting the car started, due to my lack of knowledge, I was off. I quickly began to understand why the team spends countless hours on this single project.

The engine roars loudly, and the car seemingly accelerates faster than a cheetah. Each lap, filled with corners, slaloms and straight-aways, feels faster than the previous, and each time around I had the desire to push the car harder.

That the ultimate outsider, a journalist, could take the creation for an exhilarating spin proves just how much satisfaction and pride can be found in such a small, yet potent, formula-style race car.

As I made my way in after my final lap, I wondered if all this dedication to the project would translate into competition victory.

The team seemed to think so.

"There's always some random element in the results," Kelly said. "But barring that random element, I don't see why we can't win this year at West."

[Reach reporter Allen Wagner at features@thedaily.washington.edu.]