Team racing for top prize with their Sexy Beast
U of A engineering students pin hopes on black and red racer
It’s a black and red race car powered by a 478-cc engine and a desire to settle a score. And its vibrations will rattle right through you.
“The vibrations the car has means you can’t sit in it for too long. Your eyeballs shake in your head. That’s the first thing I thought,” said Shawn Stevenson about the first time he took a spin in the car that he and a team of University of Alberta students will feature at the Formula SAE West student design competition in Nebraska next week.
The students will face off against about 100 teams from around the globe that have each dedicated thousands of hours to designing and building a race car that will be judged on categories such as endurance, design, and presentation. Many of the 16 team members were present last year when their entry was found to have serious design deficiencies and was not allowed to race.
“It was a disaster,” said Stevenson, about last year’s competition. “They said our car was unsafe and we couldn’t really disagree.”
So the team went back to work, fixing and improving upon the 2012 design. Stevenson, this year’s team leader, estimates 6,000 manhours went into the fabrication process alone. The car is worth about $80,000 in manufacturing time and materials, most of which were donated by sponsors.
The students participate in the project on their own time, learning lessons that go beyond the calculations from their undergraduate engineering courses.
For car buffs, it’s also a chance to take their love of cars to another level.
“Fixing a car is not the same thing as designing and building a car,” said Justin Bekker, a third-year material engineering student who is part of the team.
Bekker thinks one of the car’s highlights is the carbon-fibre
“You can’t sit in it for too long. Your eyeballs shake in your head.”
The end result is a 142-kilogram race car with a carbonfibre chassis that can clock a top speed of 100 kilometres/ hour on the track. Its name is alternately, “Sexy Beast” and “Sweet 16” — after the team’s competition number in Nebraska and in another competition to be held in Germany later this summer.
The driver is seated about four centimetres off the ground, just a little in front of the single cylinder engine. chassis. Countless hours of research and work went into determining how the material could be used. The top-of-theline material will likely be used by about ten to 15 per cent of teams in the competition.
The U of A team is gunning for a spot in the top 10 or top five in Nebraska, and will continue to refine the car before the competition in Germany in July.