Every year, the NC State Pack Formula Motorsports Society of Automotive Engineers team and the Baja SAE team work to build race cars to perform in a race against over 100 other schools nationally. This year’s event will take place in Michigan on May 8th. 

The Pack Motorsports FSAE has over 50 active and returning members, and over 200 prospective members without design positions, who learn the ropes during the first year. The returning members are usually juniors and seniors who have more experience. Members’ creativity, knowledge, team skills and engineering imagination are all challenged during the year they build the year’s car. 

Scott Davis, a fifth-year studying mechanical engineering, is the co-captain of the Motorsports SAE team. He enjoys the real-world experience of being on the team and the competitiveness of a sport. The upcoming competition will be his sixth in five years, and he said he’s excited to give it one last shot. 

“I think our goal is to win, but at least for me, as one of the seniors, [the goal is] to just leave the team in a good place,” Davis said. “That’s always been a challenge. It’s a student organization, so people are always leaving and you might have a good group of people that are here for four years, and then they leave and then it’s like, ‘Well, now what?’”

The Baja SAE team, while very similar to the Formula team, has an offroading and obstacle focus, while the Formula team races on the tarmac. Hayden Purcell is a second-year studying mechanical engineering and is a member of the Baja Motorsports Team, where he is the suspension lead. 

“We’re all very like-minded individuals, we all have the same passion,” Purcell said. “It’s cool to be around a group of equally passionate people who all like the same thing and who work together and struggle with it because it’s not always easy. Struggling with it together, working on it together and coming up with unique solutions can be satisfying.”

The competition is judged based on design instead of who wins the race, so the clubs have to present their build and network of subsystems to a panel of judges who will determine which teams are elite. Some of the subsystems they are judged upon include the chassis, engine system, structure and electronics. 

“All of [the design process] is taking stuff off of last year’s car and implementing new designs, whether that be little things like, this broke for this reason, we need to fix that, change that this year, or it’s performance-wise,” Purcell said. “We take a lot of alumni help and use a lot of resources, we’ll take scholarly articles and a lot of stuff to try to throw it all together and put our spin on it.”

The motorsports teams give members the closest thing to industry experience that they can get while being a student. Funds come from big companies who hope to see the programs grow, and it is important to the current members to leave the team in a better place than they found it. 

“We’re trying to have as many people involved from the college … just so they can actually see the tangible product that we’ve completed, and that we’re not just siphoning all their money into some black hole,” Davis said. 

On April 20 at 2 p.m. in the Hunt Library Auditorium, both racing teams will present their competition cars. The teams will give a presentation of their builds, followed by an overview of their design philosophy. The cars will be set up outside, where they will be unveiled and discussed further.

“I think that’s kind of a secondary goal, to just continue to knowledge transfer and continue the documentation so that the team can be successful even after a certain group leaves,” Davis said. “Because it’s very often when we go to competition, you’ll see a team that was good one year and then they drop off the face of the earth the next year.”

To learn more about Pack Motorsports and Baja racing, visit their website, as well as the NC State MAE events page.