These are the highlights for me from my college career. For the most part, these are just grouped by topic and aren’t in any sort of order. With graduation coming up in a little less than a month, I thought it would be fun to take a look back at some of the most memorable things I’ve done and photographed. Hopefully I’ll be able to continue my documentary-style photography with my future career. Until then, here are my favorite moments from university!
--
Formula SAE Michigan. Four days of complete and utter chaos. 120 universities from around the world descend on the unsuspecting town of Brooklyn, Michigan in early May to compete head-to-head in engineering, business, and on-track performance-based events hosted by industry leaders. In short, it’s one of the largest collegiate engineering competitions in the world.
I joined Owls Racing, FAU’s Formula SAE team, in the fall of 2014 to help build the 2015 car. In the beginning, we were all told that space was limited and only the most dedicated members would be allowed to go. What I heard was forget sleep and hang out in the machine shop learning anything and everything I could about racecar engineering. By the time the Michigan list was made, I had become the car’s Brake Lead as well as one of the drivers for competition. Excited doesn’t accurately describe the feeling I had, more like terrified and exhausted.
The week or so leading up to Michigan had quickly fallen apart. OR-15 had been operational since April with very few problems during the testing phase. Then, without warning, the engine couldn’t get past 8000 RPM. The car would shake itself to pieces along with the poor driver strapped inside which didn’t bode well for any event except skid pad. We needed to be able to run the engine up to 13,500 RPM and it idled at an already-high 3500-4000 RPM due to the restrictor. What this meant is we spent nearly 72 hours straight troubleshooting and diagnosing OR-15 at Lot 5. I had been placed on trailer packing duty with Josh, affectionately known as Taco, prior to this. The trailer was nearly packed so, taking only the essentials with us, the first crew went out to Lot 5.
Initially, we thought this would be a quick fix but ended up taking nearly three days. It turned into each of the drivers taking shifts in the car, having their brains rearranged by the violent shaking of the engine, and then sleep for a bit while the others jumped in. Lyons, the electrical lead, and Strudel, the powertrain lead, didn’t get that luxury and spent the entire time awake trying to get the car running. In short, we tried over 40 or 50 attempts at fixing the car. Nearly everything mechanical and electrical was looked over, telemetry was downloaded and analyzed, and ECU tunings were modified. The final patch ended up being something in the ECU tune that forced the engine through the troubled RPM band; the actual culprit of the problem wouldn’t be found until after Michigan, deep inside the motor.
They said be prepared for everything from spring in Florida to freezing cold weather. They weren’t kidding. After driving over 20 hours to get to our hotel in Adrian, we were glad to see the weather was cool but comfortable. This won’t be too bad. We went through tech inspection the first day with the sun shining and light jackets on our backs. It was a gorgeous day that made everything run smoothly. Day Two was cooler with a few more clouds, but nothing unreasonable. Luca and Reef would place second in the business presentation while the car underwent the rest of its inspections and presentations. I got to present my work to a guy from the now-retired DeltaWing Prototype team which was both nerve-wracking and cool at the same time. And then, Day Three arrived…
If Michigan, could be summed up in one image, here it is. We were on our way to one of the dynamic events in the morning and it was pouring rain. Everything was soaked, everyone was cold, and the cars did not want to start. In your normal daily driver, the ECU has been programmed to check atmospheric temperature and altitude prior to the start so it knows how much fuel (and maybe throttle) to put in the engine to light the fires. It does it so well that you don’t even think about it. FSAE cars are custom one-off builds where these compensations have to be done manually… It wasn’t fun and we had a lot of batteries die on us. In this shot, I was walking backwards with the handy dandy D50 locked and loaded and completely exposed to the elements as Strudel guided the car along the paddocks. The rules stated the car had to be pushed when not on track, hence all the bodies behind him. Today was going to be a long day…
But then the rain cleared by the time we hit autocross. Everyone’s spirits lifted as we started putting down solid times in the afternoon events. We would find out later we came 29th in acceleration, 30th in skid pad, and 16th in autocross with one of the heaviest cars and without an aero package. In this shot, we were just happy we made it through the entire day without any major malfunctions. The traction control button kinda worked for the acceleration event but it was so wet that finding the point to release it was just a wild guess. Still, OR-15 plowed through the events and we quickly made a name for ourselves. Later that night, the endurance run order was released: one of the last cars to go in the afternoon. All of the sleepless nights and hair-pulling was now paying off…
Saturday is the endurance event. It runs all day with staggered starts for the cars. It’s purely time-based, just like the other events, but for this season up to seven cars would be on the track simultaneously. The run order is determined by the previous day’s autocross times: the faster the car, the later you ran on Sunday. Since we managed to secure a staggering 16th position, we were running with the much lighter and much more advanced teams. Today’s goal: get the checkered flag without any heroics or mechanical problems. Anything falling off the car would be an instant DQ and cost 300 of the 1200 total points FSAE Michigan was worth. And if the car didn’t start at the specified time to enter the track, you had ten minutes to figure it out or face removal from endurance. The stakes were a little high.
I was positioned at the on-track photographers’ area. Located behind water barriers where the course turned around to head the other direction, we had a great unobstructed view of the cars. The four of us who were down there knew the cars running near us so we had plenty of time to practice on other teams. The car before us came out; we started getting ready with fresh memory cards and batteries. Then the car after us came out… But we weren’t out… S***, what’s wrong down at the other end. The group chat explodes saying the engine won’t start and that they need a jump. This could keep us from finishing when it’s time for driver change.
Two minutes go by between the team who was scheduled after us running and OR-15 making it to the track. It’s a 120 second penalty, but we made it out. Trent and Chris would be driving for this one. All we had to do was make it home.
During Chris’ stint, SVSU spun in front of us and started smoking heavily. White smoke is everywhere, fire crews are running up, and here comes OR-15, directed by the marshals to go off-course. This was probably the luckiest shot I have ever taken. The D50 has a really small buffer for burst shots and a slow frame rate, so timing the few shots I could take was tricky. Combined with low megapixels, the incident being far away, and a 300mm lens without stabilization, this was a pure luck shot. The drama was intense, and for my first time at Michigan, the adrenaline was wild. We were so happy to see him come around the smoke and keep going. A few laps later, OR-15 would see the checkered flag, a first in the team’s history to complete all of the dynamic and static events at FSAE Michigan.
My freshman year of college was a whirlwind that ended at a superspeedway in rural Michigan with my now-closest friends. Everyone in this picture poured their soul into the car to get it to the number 24 spot. Most of us still talk to each other every day. To me, this year would be how I defined how FSAE should be: insane hours, madman-like work ethic, huge focus on safety, goofing off a bit to take the edge off, and then doing nothing but racecar from the time finals end to the time we loaded the trailer up to come back home from Michigan. Chris, the captain that year, took a huge number of new members (most being freshmen) and showed us what it meant to be an FSAE team. Of all of us, he worked the hardest, hands down. So much so that we started to get concerned about his sanity. But watching him work made the rest of us new guys want to work just as hard.
I snapped this as we left the paddock on Saturday. The four days of chaos was over. We were hot, sweaty, exhausted doesn’t even begin to describe how tired we were, and we had just shown up to competition and dropped the mic in front of all the Florida teams. UF placed second overall, we were 24th, UCF 25th, and the next closest Florida school was UNF at a distant 60th. I was hooked on Formula SAE. That night at dinner we were already laying out how the next car was going to be built. Like water from a fire hose, ideas were streaming out of everyone. I had finally found a home. It was with a bunch of crazy, sleep-deprived motorheads who also thought we were the best engineers on the planet, but it was home. I would go on to compete with FAU two more years as a brakes engineer, photographer, and driver before transferring to UNF in August 2017. And the issue with OR-15 prior to competition? We accidentally put the wrong cams with the wrong block. Harmonics are a thing, and engines don’t like them apparently.
Albums Featured:
Comments