Last week we had a post about the unprecedented cooperation between Mihaylo College and the College of Engineering and Computer Sciences. The partnership was meant to bolster our entry into Formula SAE, a competition to see which university could build the best scaled down race car. Well, it worked brilliantly; up to a point.

In almost every category up to the Endurance Event our team, Titan V, outperformed last year’s team, Titan IV. Particularly, Trevor (who was one of the Mihaylo Business students who helped develop the business plan for the production and sale of these race cars and gave a presentation at the competition) was able to boost our Cost Score from 61 to 66.9 points and our presentation score from 18.2 to 52.5 points. That’s pretty good.

Overall, the whole team did great beating out our previous highs in Design, Acceleration and the Autocross score as well. And here’s a video showing how good our car was doing just days before the competition.

However, during the Endurance portion of the competition we hit a snag and did not receive an Endurance or Economy Score, which is a big blow since they are worth a combined 400 points and represent nearly two-thirds of the overall score. The snag? According to another piece, there was a part failure within the drive train that was caused by the unusually hard concrete course. After all of that hard work everyone on the team was very disappointed when they found out what had happened.

But accidents happen and if you take the best score from every category from this year and last year our team would have finished in 14th place for this year’s competition. That would have been a pretty good finish when you think about who else was in the competition. If we had finished in 14th place this year we would have beaten universities such as UC Berkley, Drexel and Purdue.

Positive strides were taken this year and I’m sure the momentum will be taken through to next year’s competition.