Taking Students off Road Racing

Reported July 2009

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Engineering students from all over the world gather for a down and dirty off-road vehicle competition.

It may look like a day of off-road fun, but to these students, it's a serious competition where they design, build and race all-terrain vehicles for three days.

"It's designed for a bunch of off-road events, and your goal is to make it a really durable car," Ryan Spend, an engineering student at Purdue University, told Ivanhoe.

"It's a whole lot of fun," explained Dustin Bride, an engineering student at the University of South Florida. "You go about 40 miles an hour through the woods."

Tumbling down steep hills and curvy turns, the maneuverability event tests a vehicle's steering system and the driver's ability to navigate around cones. Mistakes add two seconds or more to team times.

A giant pit filled with 10 inches of mud -- called the mud bog -- tests vehicle traction through heavy mud, a popular event that gets filthy.

"Driving through the mud is my least favorite because you get absolutely disgusting," Bride described.

The sled pull event tests how much weight a vehicle can pull. The car pulls a weight box on a sled that sits on an incline. As the sled is pulled, the weight box moves, transferring the weight -- up to 2,300 pounds -- increasing the amount of resistance on the vehicle, until the vehicle can no longer pull the weight. The last day of competition is an all-day endurance race. Over 100 teams compete all at once, for four hours straight.

"Wheel to wheel with a hundred other teams, racing for four hours is very intense," Bride said. "It's an adrenaline rush like none other,"

"The coolest part is coming to the competition and seeing the car work," Glenn Bower, Ph.D., event coordinator, told Ivanhoe. "They work a year, and this is the end of a year. Basically, a lot of hard work for a whole year paid off."

Top winners this year included teams from Oregon State, Brazil and the University of South Florida. A complete list of winners in all events can be found at www.sae.org.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.-USA, contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Nancy Lewis
Corporate Communications Manager
Warrendale, PA 15096-0001
(412) 977-2894
nlewis@sae.org

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
IEEE
Pender McCarter
IEEE http://www.ieee.org
IEEE-USA http://www.ieeeusa.org
p.mccarter@ieee.org

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