Close to three in the morning, a group of students is sitting anxiously in a garage. Most of them have been up all night hard at work while others have just woken up in anticipation of this moment.  Almost a year’s work has been put into this point – the car that they have been designing and building for most of the school year is finally ready. There’s just one small problem: the car won’t start.

“That first time you’re ready to start it, it actually doesn’t start until a few days later,” Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) President Sidney Zaki said.

Zaki, who joined the Formula SAE team last year is one of 65 students tasked with developing a car that would meet the sport design market. They have to design, test, and build the car that they will use to compete against other schools. They have design presentations, marketing presentations, safety cost and testing of physical features such as acceleration, braking, and endurance. The entire competition is the culmination of a year’s efforts. Next year, the students start fresh with a new car.

“The students do everything here from marketing the design to designing and building,” advisor Brian Sangeorzan said.

The program, which is ranked 9^th in the nation, recently got a boost through a grant from the DENSO Foundation. According to the DENSO Foundation website, the DENSO Foundation is committed to promoting education in the engineering and technology disciplines.

“It’s important for us as students to be able to get similar equipment [to the industry] to use to get be familiar with it, know how it works, know what you need to validate with it,” Zaki said.  “DENSO is doing us a huge help in giving us the resources to get us these materials and allow us and be able to learn more as we go through this process because there’s only so much we can do without the proper resources.”

Lead Powertrain Engineer Patrick Hoenle described how the team plans to use the grant.

“We were given of task by Professor Sangeorzan to make a list of items that would be helpful to increase our testing for the power train [that moves the car] and certain things that we thought would be good for instrumentation.” Hoenle said. “The equipment that we get has the capability of measuring certain aspects [that will tell us] how well the engine performs.”

These measurements are essential for the team because a big part of competition is when the team takes the car to the judges, they need to be able to show the data and theoretical concepts learned in their engineering class that the design works.

“We have done pretty well and we know that our design is good, but we need to have numbers to back it up,” Zaki said.

The team initially asked for $50,000 to purchase a flow bench, a viscometer, and a flow rate meter (all to measure engine capabilities), but was granted $30,000. Already, the team is beginning to consider future grant proposals.

“When we reapply next year, we can choose something different to get money for,” Zaki said. “This year it was power train development.”

Since the car has many subsystems on the car that can use validation, Zaki and Henle both stated that the group will reapply for the DENSO grant next year.

“They’ll give it to you the first year and they want to see you putting it to good use and that you’re actually taking the opportunity that they’re giving you,” Zaki said. “So if you prove to them that we’re good students and working hard and thankful for the opportunity they’ve given us, they’ll be more willing to continue offering you support.”

The support is critical, considering all the work that the team puts into the car.

“I would say about 95% of this car is designed by us,” Henle said. “About 75 percent of it is machined by us in house.”

With so much of the car being student- produced, a lot can go wrong, such as the car not being able to start.

“If it’s not working, you can’t keep pushing that button because something could go wrong, Zaki said. “Something may have already gone wrong. It takes someone who is knowledgeable enough in how things work and what probably is wrong.”

In that particular case, the problem turned out to be a simple wiring error, but there are other horror stories from the past.

“It’s Murphy’s Law: anything that can go wrong will go wrong,” Zaki said. “With that law in mind, you have to go in with an attitude that when it goes wrong, how am I going to fix it?”

“You have to learn to focus your negative energy of the situation on positive things and figure out how to do it quickly… you get that knowledge from experience,” Hoenle said.