Baja SAE is a college-level competition where students design and build a single-seat off-road racecar. The Baja car competes in multiple events, straight-line acceleration braking, and suspension. Also, a maneuverability course is a time trial course with time penalties for exiting the course or hitting cones. Also, there is a hill climb event to show off your car’s torque and driver technique. Finally, there is an endurance race that lasts four hours, and we try to set as many laps as possible. Another aspect of competition is the business presentation, we compete by presenting our club as a company and trying to sell the judges on our engineering designs and the reasoning behind our designs with analytical data backing our choices.
This past spring, our team competed with 107 other schools at the competition held in Williamsport, PA, placing 25th in the Hill Climb and 40th in the endurance race. This past month we went to a mini-Baja competition called OktoBajafest hosted by Clarkson University. During the endurance race, we got 6th place and set a new record of 49 laps completed in
four hours. 17 colleges were competing with three cars allowed per team and we placed 9th overall.