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October 31, 2005 —
To appreciate the challenges facing the Cardinal Formula Racing Team (CFR), you almost have to think of football.
Imagine that instead of ten games, the football team played only once per season. The team has one year to prepare and spends most of practice going over their playbook. They cannot send advance scouts to gauge the competition, and the only thing they know for sure is that the other guys are gonna bring it.
So they have to bring it too. But it is done with players that were not highly recruited, and instead decided to join the team just because they like to play. Sure, some of them are pretty polished already, but most need a lot of teaching. But that teaching can be hard to get since players can come and go as they please. They might have class today but tomorrow is free so they could put in a 10-hour day. And the coach is not always there to motivate. In the end, it is up to the players to decide how hard they are going to work to win.
But it is not a league championship they are trying to capture. This team of volunteers has one year to prepare for a world championship and four days at the end of May to try and win it.
If it sounds hard, that's probably because it is. That's Cardinal Formula Racing - a game of millimeters played on an asphalt gridiron.
It is 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning and CFR team members file into a lounge most students do not know exists. Messy hair and droopy eyes say most of them just got out of bed ten minutes before and they fight the urge to jump back in by sipping coffee or Mountain Dew. Today's list is normal. The car has an oil leak, a coolant leak and needs to be cleaned up and put together so it can be on display during the Admissions Open House. That's just last year's car - the number 52. Formula SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) regulations call for the team to build a new car every year. This year's car - the number 8 - is in the corner of the shop, a piece of metal on sawhorses.
The list also mentions that things need to be properly locked up and put away. During the week, the differential casing - a part not much bigger than a football - was dropped and chipped, creating one expensive fumble. It is worth about $600 and will set the team back about a month. But that is just one of the reasons they're in the shop more than six months before the May 17 World Championships at the Ford Proving Grounds in Romeo.
Student powered
"If you give students enough freedom to be extraordinary, it's exactly what they become," says Brooks Byam, Cardinal Formula Racing's faculty advisor. Byam has been the team's advisor all but one year of its existence, taking over the position in 1998. An associate professor of mechanical engineering, Byam is part advisor, part coach, and part motivational speaker. But despite his position as the team advisor, Byam chooses to delegate power to the students. This year's team manager, Hussam El-Jobran, 26, oversees almost everything that happens with the team. The Toronto native also plays a big part in training fellow members."The hardest job any student has on this campus is leading this race team," Byam says. "It's a lot of money, it's a lot of work, it's a lot of pressure."
And since Byam cannot monitor the team's progress every hour of the day, he has to rely on the students to get the job done.
"They have to be really self-motivated, self-controlled," says Byam. "I put a lot of trust and a lot of faith in my students. And they deliver."
When the students deliver, it is against the likes of some of the world's best teams. The world championships pit 140 teams against each other in a competition featuring seven events. Teams such as the University of Western Australia, Duke, Florida and yearly favorite Cornell compete against one another to try and earn the most points. But despite the stiff competition, Byam feels the SVSU program is in a good position to win.
"I consider SVSU CFR a perennial top ten team," he says. "Amongst the best in the world."
Speed machine
Growing up, Ryan Smith used to race remote controlled cars. Today, the 20-year-old St. Charles native is in his third year with the team and is in charge of the car's suspension. Like most of his teammates, Smith did not start off with a position of leadership. As a freshman, he spent most of his time helping where he could before getting a chance to work on suspension his second year. With a passion for speed that left him tinkering with his remote controlled cars to make them faster, Smith says he took to the intricacies and "voodoo magic" that come with working on the car's suspension.
"Last car, they told me to build a suspension and turned me loose," he says. "I didn't know what I was doing completely so I would ask senior members for a lot of help. I picked it up and I learned a lot."
Now that he has a year of suspension work under his belt, there are new things he would like to try. Unfortunately for Smith, an old adage in racing says, "the last of the old will always beat the first of the new," shelving some of his ideas.
At the morning meeting, Smith suggested a change with the suspension, which Byam quickly shot down; not because the idea was bad, but because there is a dangerous balance between trying something new and trying to win a world championship.
"That's the whole thing with the Formula SAE car," says Smith. "We only have a year to build it and there's always gonna be a way to make something better. But it's a question of, 'Is it going to be worth the time?'"
Since Smith cannot stray from the game plan, he has to make minor adjustments to try to improve the car's performance. This year, Smith plans to make the rear uprights out of aluminum instead of steel, saving 1.5 pounds per side. And since the team is always trying to make the car faster and lighter, Smith figures it is a good change.
"I had to build uprights anyways," he says, "I might as well build them three pounds lighter."
Decreasing the weight will also help Smith if he is driving. Smith has logged about as many hours behind the wheel as any other team member, opening up the possibility that he may drive the car this year. However, the team participates in open qualifying each year, with the fastest drivers getting the chance to drive during competition.
One member Smith is sure to compete against for driving time is Ricky Green. The 20-year-old mechanical engineering major from Saginaw also has logged his fair share of hours in the car and says there's nothing quite like the rush of driving.
"Driving acceleration is like being strapped into a rocket ship," he says. "But unless you actually get in the car, you will not know what it's like."
Something for everyone
In a room full of mechanical engineers, it is hard to miss Gretchen Schuelke. The 22-year-old accounting major sits at a table poring over numbers. The Midland native is in charge of purchasing and the cost report and marketing portion of the spring world championship. She was asked to do the team's cost report last winter as part of an independent study before Byam asked her to stay on as the team's chief financial officer. Schuelke has not looked back since.
"I really enjoyed working with them in the winter," Schuelke says, "so I decided to stay on."
Having majors outside the engineering department is common, and even encouraged, Byam says.
"You don't have to be a mechanical or electrical engineer to work on the team," he explains. "All majors can make a contribution."
Byam says opportunities exist for chemistry majors to work with fuel-burning, marketing majors to work on the competition presentation - even graphic design majors can work on the car's sticker design. In the end, Byam and CFR will take any major; Byam's philosophy is, "the more the merrier."
"I think the key to winning the world championship," Byam says, "is more and more people making contributions on the team."
And the team seems to be on their way to that goal, with an active list of around 45 members, which Byam says is the most the team has ever had.
So with this group of people, Byam thinks they can accomplish all their goals.
"I like to say our intent is to win. Why we do what we do is to win," he says. "And in the process of preparing to win, we learn."