The Toyota Grand Prix in Long Beach is a big event for professional racers, their fans and motorheads alike, but it is also an exciting opportunity for Cal State Long Beach’s Society of Automotive Engineers.
CSULB’s SEA club participated in a display event in the convention center for the Southern California section of Society of Automotive chapters, alongside schools like UCI and UCLA, showing their Baja car.
“We take the cars we work on and display them in the exhibition hall, and we let people ask us questions about what we do, basically like a car show,” said CSULB SAE president and junior mechanical engineering major Justin Jimenez.
The title of Baja car comes from the famous race, the Baja 1000 in Baja California, which are often dune buggy-style vehicles, “single seater, same engine, off-roading,” as Jimenez refers to them.
The team began working on this car last year to take to SAE Intercollegiate Competitions, and for the display at the Grand Prix, they just needed to make repairs on parts that broke during those contests.
“But generally speaking it takes about a full year to develop the car from the initial stages of planning, designing through to making the basic structure and adding all the smaller components, testing, rebuilding and the going to competition,” Jimenez said.
The exhibition event started Friday, but they have been doing this for years.
“We’ve been doing this kind of event for a long time, we do it almost every year, so I do feel at home being there,” Jimenez said. “It’s very familiar to me, it’s really cool to talk to people [about our work].”
Those who stop to talk to them vary from in expertise from clueless to brilliant, but to everyone, Jimenez is sure to mention that it’s an engineering student project.
“I think that’s a really important detail, to know that it’s students collaborating to put this together,” he said.
He also explains how its purpose is to compete against other schools, and goes into how the car gets created.
“Our process [is] starting with a simple design on a computer, taking that into a machine shop, building the basic structure and putting all the little components together,” Jimenez said.
This type of experience is valuable for a student like freshman mechanical engineering major Quinn Bogenreif, who’s taken the initiative to get involved in this project according to Jimenez.
“I think I’d like to go into automotive engineering, this has kind have been a gateway into the field,” Bogenreif said. “I specifically like off roading vehicles instead of on-street.”
Jimenez said SAE is strictly an extracurricular club, with a small team of about 10 primary members including students like Bogenreif, all of who range in experience.
“Then we have new students that filter through and come and go who we teach stuff too,” Jimenez said.
Though there was no judging for them at the Grand Prix this weekend, those competitions are just around the corner. They will participate for the second year in a row at the Baja SAE California — which just started last year — in Gorman, CA April 27-30. Then they will head to Baja SAE Illinois in Peoria, IL June 7-10.
“At the competitions we’re actually using the car and they’re evaluating our design,” Jimenez said. “We did pretty well in [Gorman] last year, we got third place in hillclimb.”
Jimenez said there are static events that strictly judge the design, and how much it cost to build the car, as well as dynamic events.
“Those are more like standard races,” Jimenez said. “So they have events like endurance race which is just four hours of driving around a loop track, and there’s hill climb events where we have to go over obstacles, suspension tests, so a variety of different tests and races.”
Competitions are fun, but the real value comes from working alongside fellow students in the shop.
“I can’t imagine going into the industry without having done this,” Jimenez said. “I’ve seen a lot of the course work that’s ahead for me in the junior and senior years and it’s a lot of theory and not a whole lot of hands-on experience, but in this club you learn all the technical aspects of manufacturing.”