NMU
Team Third in Mini-Baja Event
Twelve students from the
NMU chapter of the Society of Automotive Engineers comprised a team
that took third place out of seven teams in a mini-Baja vehicle
competition at Michigan Tech. It was the first time Northern participated
in the event.
SAE chapters from schools
nationwide had a five-month time limit in which to design and build
their own mini-Baja vehicles from scratch. On the day of the competition,
they raced against each other for three hours on a rough-terrain
loop track; the vehicle with the most completed laps was declared
the winner. NMU students and volunteers
invested 2,500 hours in the process. Although NMU’s entry wasn’t
the fastest that day, Jeffrey Hoffman (Engineering
Technology) said it was well engineered and didn’t face the breakdowns
that plagued many of the other vehicles. It also finished
ahead of U.P. rival Michigan Tech.
“The team pulled off an amazing feat considering our budget
and time constraints,” Hoffman said. “Our competitors
had $20,000 to work with while building their vehicles, whereas
we only spent a total of $1,500. We also had only 20 weeks in which
to design and fabricate it, which is difficult when these are full-time
students with jobs.”
The next race is scheduled
for June in Dayton, Ohio, with 140 vehicles from universities around
the world competing.
“Our
third-place finish was very encouraging, but the Dayton
race will require a lot more preparation,” said Adam Menor, SAE
president. “We’ll be judged on manueverability, acceleration and
overall design, so we’ll have to redesign our vehicle to be more
competitive against the 140 universities from around the world that
we’ll be going up against.”
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