Last week, the Formula SAE team finished assembly of the 2005 car. Since the workload was lightened slightly due to GM week festivities, team members were able to put in a couple of hours in the shop during weekday nights. Friday and Saturday, most of us more or less lived in the shop—sleeping included—working long, late shifts. Two team members even pulled all-nighters and didn’t sleep until the car was completely assembled early Sunday morning.
By then, most of us could have slept for a week straight, and probably should have. We managed, however, to all meet in the shop Sunday afternoon to tweak last minute details and load the car on the trailer to take it to Tech Park’s parking lot. After six and a half months of fabrication, we were finally ready to run the car, the earliest a car has been ready to run since any of the current team members have been here.
Inness Eisele, the group leader, was the lucky member that got to drive the car for the first time. Originally, I thought that seeing the car progress from a hollow, freshly painted shell to a completely assembled race car sitting on the table was awesome, but listening to the engine roar for the first time and watching the car zip around the parking lot was one hundred times better.
All of us have been working hard on this project since the beginning of October. Instead of sleeping in or going to parties during weekends, we grinded tubes, molded carbon fiber, and ran wiring. We “spent thousands of hours eating pizza and Deli & Brew, repeating movie quotes, calling people names, breaking stuff, and oh yeah, we also happened to build a racecar,” commented Shop Manager Dan Gurick ’05. Some nights we left early and got to enjoy a team movie, others we left late ready to kill each other. Watching the car run proved all the hard work and frustration worthwhile.
“It still amazes me how something so complex and complicated comes together in such a short period of time, even with us being full-time students at such a demanding school. It’s mind-blowing when you really sit down and look at it,” said team member Steve Jaffe ’05. I couldn’t say it any better. I wasn’t able to give nearly the amount of time Steve, Dan, and the other team leaders were, so I can only imagine the feeling they got while watching the car fly around the cones. All I can say is: look out Michigan, we’re going to take the competition by storm.
