The MSU Formula One Racing Team stands around their vehicle that will be unveiled Sunday. Each year, the team starts designing a car in the fall, then manufactures it and races in the summer.
—After what could amount to thousands of hours of work, members of MSU’s Formula One Racing Team will unveil Sunday the green and black race car they’ve spent the last year building from the ground up.
It’s the culmination of a project that started as a design on a computer and took shape into race car No. 71, which is expected to reach speeds of about 110 miles per hour.
The team — comprised of about 20 MSU students from the College of Engineering, the Eli Broad College of Business and other majors — plans to pull a sheet off the car and present it to their families, friends and sponsors at a 3 p.m. unveiling Sunday at the Engineering Building.
Seeing the car come together in the last year has been rewarding, said chemical engineering junior Erik Stitt, who serves as chief engineer. Team members are excited to show off their work, he said.
“It sounds corny, but it’s kind of like seeing a kid grow up,” Stitt said. “You take a lot of pride in it and it’s cool to see it come together. It’s definitely satisfying.”
The car is near completion, said advertising senior Alex Harding, a member of the operations team. A new car is designed and built each year to be driven by team members in two competitions during the summer, he said.
“We compete against colleges from across the world — teams from Germany, Japan, South America,” Harding said. “Each team has a new car every year.”
MSU’s team has predominantly placed in the top 10 in competitions, Stitt said. This year’s car has “a lot of potential” if the right drivers are behind the wheel, he said.
The four fastest drivers on the team are selected to drive the car in the competitions, Stitt said. It can accelerate from zero to 60 miles per hour in three and a half seconds, Harding said.
Companies such as General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. sponsored the car, which had a budget of about $500,000, said engineering junior Josh Frontiera, who serves as project manager for the group.
The students put as many as 90 to 100 hours per week into the car, Stitt said. It’s a full-time job “and then some,” he said.
“We have kind of a running joke going that there’s Formula (One), there’s school and then a social life, and you only get to pick two,” he said.
Frontiera said he is looking forward to showing people the amount of work the team members put into the project.
“It’s kind of our big hoorah,” he said. “It’s going to be pretty unique to be able to pull that sheet off to show what we were doing this entire time.”
Designing and building the car has been a learning opportunity, Stitt said. It’s been challenging and it’s taken a lot of work, but it’s “extremely gratifying” in the end, he said.
“It’s really cool to graduate at 21 and tell people you helped design and build a car,” Stitt said. “That’s something most people can’t ever say.”
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