Newsfeed
Printer-Friendly ModeAnother Heartbreaker
Despite breakdown, SVSU's race team best in state
June 25, 2007 —
Eleven laps down, 11 more to go.
Ryan Smith of the Cardinal Formula Racing (CFR) team pulled off the endurance track and the team prepared for a driver change. This year's car was fast - Smith passed two cars and should have passed a third, no small achievement considering most Formula SAE cars can hit 60, even 70 miles per hour before you can count to five.
"Oh, it was the best it's ever felt. Very fast," Smith said at the late-May race.
His teammate Mike Wyciechowski was prepared to hit the track and cap off a week of racing that would likely place CFR among the top 10 finishers of 2007, erasing memories of a painful 2006 which saw the team's car fall short before the halfway point of the endurance trial due to a clutch failure. All he had to do was finish.
He didn't get the chance.
"At the driver charge, we get two minutes to start it again, and it didn't start for whatever reason," CFR faculty advisor Brooks Byam explained, frustrated. "We went through this didn't we, up at school? Several times." It was the last thing the team expected. They had even tested the "hot start" several times before the race; the car simply decided not to start at the most inopportune time.
"This time, we made it farther, that was the one thing we weren't worried about," Smith said. All other systems were a "go," including the clutch.
"We watched that system pretty religiously this year," said CFR team member Adam Helmer.
"I put a few new parts inside the clutch to help out, to add some more pressure."
Controls manager Heather Fondriest shared responsibility for the clutch and other systems, including the brakes. She agreed with Helmer's assessment.
"We've definitely seen an improvement in the system this year," she said.
The car was lighter and faster than ever. Changing the composition of things as small as ball bearings in a motor can shave off a tenth of a second on the track, which as racing enthusiasts understand, often makes all the difference. Helmer talked about some of the changes CFR made to the motor between seasons.
"Some of the biggest changes we made this year to the motor were through the use of ceramics. We used ceramic ball bearings, which are based on glass, instead of metal," he said. "They're a lot lighter and they withstand the heat a lot better."
But new parts and new design are never enough to prevent all the possible contingencies of racing. There are just too many things that can go wrong with a machine consisting of so many moving parts.
"Racin' will do that to you. 99.99999 percent is not good enough," Byam lamented. "I don't know how many more of these I can take."
SVSU was on pace for a top ten finish. Besides the endurance trial, CFR placed better than eleventh in all racing categories. They placed 10th in acceleration, 11th in skid pad, and 11th in autocross. In the acceleration category, they even outperformed the eventual champions, the University of Wisconsin Madison.
When it was all over, SVSU outperformed nearly 70 schools, placing 37th overall. Notably, CFR out-raced every school in Michigan, including perennial contenders Michigan Tech University and the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, both top 10 finishers in 2006. So naturally, Byam had something one thing to be happy about.
"We beat every team from the state," he said. "Further, we beat Cornell for the first time. Cornell is the most winningest team in Formula SAE history."
The top three finishers overall were the University of Wisconsin Madison, the University of Western Australia, and the Graz University of Technology in Austria. All three colleges have been invited to SVSU's campus to race, and CFR has outperformed all of them, perhaps an indication of how well SVSU would have done if they had finished.
On the whole, there were very few repeat performances. The only top five finishers from the 2006 event that placed in the top 20 this year were the University of Kansas and Penn State. Helsinki Polytechnic and the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, which last year placed fifth and third respectively, both bowed out of the endurance trial. So SVSU wasn't the only school that experienced failure and heartbreak - but CFR certainly didn't expect to experience those emotions two years in a row.
"We are happy because the car was fast. The bummer is we have to wait a whole year to race again and we have to build a brand new car," Byam said.
"In other forms of racing you can race the same car several times. That's what makes Formula SAE so heartbreakingly difficult and frustrating."
Yet even after two years of heartbreak, SVSU hosts the best race team in the state. Byam and everyone at CFR understand the next logical step.
"SVSU CFR has an extraordinary team of students, faculty, administrators, and industry sponsors. One of these years we'll put it together and win the World Championship."