With an electric vehicle (EV), the University of Michigan Ann Arbor won the second Annual OU Grand Prix on Sept. 13. The Oakland University team placed in fourth among 15 racing cars, which attracted around 500 attendees to enjoy the Formula SAE competition.

With a lap time of 40.136 seconds, Andrew Kwon, UofM’s driver and aerodynamics director, took the podium at OU. Followed by the University of Waterloo’s time of 41.675 seconds. Saginaw Valley State University placed third with 42.296 while Grizzlies Racing took fourth place with 42.707 seconds.  

“Everyone likes to give a lot of credit to drivers, which is very nice for me,” Kwon said. “But, you know, at the end of the day, it’s a team effort. I don’t make the car; everybody contributes and helps fix the car.”

As their second win of the month, the UofM’s EV team won the Lawrence Tech Grand Prix on Sept. 6 and got third place at the Pittsburgh Shootout. Kwon attributed recent accomplishments to the revamping of their new car.

“This car is very similar to the last car because we realized that we have a fast car on paper, but we haven’t ever been able to actually put that down,” Kwon said. “We focus on reliability this year. So, you know, cooling the car, making sure the car gets together in one piece on time, and focusing on testing time.”

Although not on the podium, Grizzlies Racing (GR), the OU team, added another step in its long-term improvement in performance. Throughout the years, GR has been escalating its position at the Michigan International Speedway (MIS).

“A few years ago, we were all right, we were placing maybe middle of the pack, 60th,” Deacon Fancher, GR business and marketing director, said. “But as of recently, the last two years, we’ve been placing 14th, and then this year was 13th — so we’re getting there.” 

Not all cars were racing at the same time. The competition was based on individual time laps, where cars would complete laps between 1 and 5 p.m. to achieve the fastest time. In one of those laps, GR had a hiccup with a deviated tire.

“For a tire, there are two components. There’s your metal rim, and then there’ll be your just rubber tire on top of that,” Erin Atkinson, GR team member, said. “If your tire pressures aren’t correct, or if you’re taking a really sharp turn, the forces being enacted on that can cause it to deviate.”

As the fourth time that the tire deviated, the team quickly fixed it and put on a good run, Atkinson explained. With more experience under their belt, the The OU Grand Prix is one of the last shootouts of the season before the team goes to the 2026 MIS competition.

“That is a competition composed of teams from all over the world — we’ve had teams from Poland, Spain this year, we hosted a team from Venezuela — It’s a lot of fun with 120 teams,” Atkinson said. “What we do to prepare for that is that we just design the whole car, we design the frame, the wiring system for the electrical power train. It’s all just a lot of engineering work … because at the end of the day, this is an engineering competition.”  

Mahle, Magna and Ktec sponsored the event while Motor City Dawgs catered the food. Hope College, Lawrence Tech University and Wayne State University were among the competing teams, but it was Michigan State University’s team that overcame one of the biggest challenges before entering the track.

“As we’re inspecting the car, we noticed that our rear right upright actually cracked, and for us, especially, that was a super big deal, because we don’t have spare uprights,” Quinn Schultz, MSU’s structure lead, said. “It’s what holds your brakes, your calipers, the rotors, the wheel hubs, you know what spins the wheels.”

Described as one of the most complex components of their vehicle, Schultz explained, the team had to go back to their gear shop to completely replace the piece to pass the tech inspection. 

“This was something that we should have never completed in eight hours — it would take a week and a half — and there was no way on paper that we should have come back here today,” Schultz said. “We went back to the shop, put our heads down, and we came back out here at 8 a.m., truly incredible.  The people on this team have such a work ethic like the drive is just actually unreal. It’s probably one of my favorite memories of Formula SAE, so far.”

Like them, each Formula SAE team overcame its own challenges and got a chance to bond with the local racing community in preparation for its big competition in May 2026.

“[OU Grand Prix] is a lot more laid back than our big competitions,” Atkinson said. “You get to know these other teams, and you just kind of feel the camaraderie of all these engineers working together.”