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From the Issue: The Fast and The Studious

24.11.11

Unless you happened to catch the Formula One-style race car sitting on College Walk during the activities fair back in September, Knickerbocker Motorsports probably means nothing to you. So, if the name Formula SAE sounds like an alternative to breast milk, here is some explanation.

Organized by the Society of Automotive Engineers and founded in 1978, Formula FSAE is an intercollegiate design competition in which students develop Formula-style race cars that are meant to serve as prototypes for a hypothetical autocross racer. The competitions are set up on the premise that a fictional manufacturing company has hired a team to design this prototype, which runs a full gamut of tests–from overall design to fuel economy–to gauge its viability as a production item.

Columbia University’s chapter of Formula SAE arose in 1997. “Then it was only five to six guys building the entire car themselves,” said Columbia FSAE’s current president, Christopher Correa-Henschke, SEAS ’12. “Their goal was to design and build a chassis.” The two inaugural engines came from a junkyard, and the team spent the majority of its time those first few months stockpiling materials for the years ahead. According to the organization’s website, alumnus Steven Wang built the team’s first chassis himself in the summer of 1998, “spending months in the back of the Wind Tunnel lab with his welder and the tubing.” After graduating, he went on to design for Ford.

Source: Bwog