LAFAYETTE TODAY
Fast Lane
 | | Mathew Ingraham ’06 and Erin Githens ’06 work on the Formula-style racecar that
mechanical engineering majors raced at California Speedway.
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You could say Mathew Ingraham ’06 had been prepping for it since he was five, when he first changed the oil on his mom’s ride. (Dad helped.)
He’s one of 13 mechanical engineering seniors who developed and built a three-quarter scale Formula-style car and raced to a second-place finish among rookie entries in the Society of Automotive Engineers’ Formula SAE West competition at California Speedway
in Fontana, Calif.
The car challenge was a two-semester capstone experience in the students’ major and the sort of long-term project they’ll be asked to handle as working engineers, says Jeffrey Helm, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, who advised the group along with Associate Professor Scott Hummel. “As they go through school, they get a lot of opportunities, but everything seems to be in relatively small chunks. This gives them a chance to really tackle a problem that has a fairly high degree of complexity,” Helm says.
Joining the seniors, some of whom were on last year’s inaugural Formula-car team, which built a racer but didn’t enter it in competition, were
a half-dozen juniors and sophomores. Lafayette placed 25th overall among 48 teams that included colleges and universities in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Mexico, Sweden,
and Venezuela in addition to the United States.
“I enjoyed making decisions for ourselves and using the knowledge we’d gained over four years to actually construct something we could drive,” says Erin Githens ’06, who worked on the suspension and steering crew. Her biggest challenge? “Finding time between my other classes and activities to work on the car.”
Ingraham says, “Our car was basically designed to be as reliable as we could get it,” noting that problems with cars that don’t finish the event can often be traced to overly complicated designs. “We tried to keep everything as simple and reliable as possible. Just finishing is what
we wanted.”
And finish they did, earning a certificate of merit for scoring in all events—including tests of acceleration and braking, cornering, fuel economy, and endurance, among others.
“This has been a fantastic experience,” Helm says. “How many times do you get to build a racing car from scratch and put it to the test in a competition with teams from across the world?”
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