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The Fast and Fastidious: Bruin Racing at UCLA

Bruin Racing

Courtesy of Bruin Racing

Bruin Racing‘s four competition vehicles from the 2021-2022 season

Sep 29, 2022

UCLA Samueli Newsroom

At the Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn, Michigan, a blue-and-gold formula race car zoomed through 22 laps to secure a fifth-place finish.

Down south in Cookeville, Tennessee, a rugged, Baja all-terrain vehicle made its way through a 1.2-mile course full of hills, jumps, water crossings and drops.

And in Indianapolis, two cars — a gas-powered vehicle that gets about 400 miles per gallon and an electric car that averages 60-70 miles per kilowatt hour — pushed the boundaries of efficiency at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

All of these accomplishments have one thing in common: they’re made possible thanks to the hard work of the student engineers at Bruin Racing, UCLA’s premier club for all things cars.

“The most important part of our mission is teaching people,” said Dominik Bahm, a fourth-year mechanical engineering student and this year’s director of Bruin Racing. “Bruin Racing welcomes any and all UCLA students, regardless of prior experience or major.”

Bruin Racing, which is an organization under the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) at UCLA, is made up of three teams: Formula, Baja and Supermileage. Over the course of just one school year, each team designs, builds and races a new vehicle, a feat that requires a lot of dedication from leadership and new members alike.

“It’s like running a startup where everyone, including your CEO, is a part-time unpaid intern,” said Conor Sefkow, a fourth-year mechanical engineering student and this year’s Baja managing director.

While the three Bruin Racing teams have different areas of expertise, each group is dedicated to providing opportunities for students from across campus to learn about how cars are built. With a thorough training process in place, the club gives its members a crash course in computer-aided design, electronics, composites and more.

For those who are less technically inclined, there are also many nontechnical roles available in the club, including media chair, public relations chair and finance director.

“The most important part of our mission is teaching people,” said Dominik Bahm, a fourth-year mechanical engineering student and this year’s director of Bruin Racing. “Bruin Racing welcomes any and all UCLA students, regardless of prior experience or major.”

Formula

Formula is Bruin Racing’s race car division. The team designs and builds open-wheel race cars for national competitions at professional racetracks. This spring, Formula not only completed a competition for the first time but also managed to snag fifth place out of 48 competing teams from universities across the country.

“The other Bruin Racing teams are great, but the main draw to Formula is definitely the speed and acceleration,” said fourth-year mechanical engineering student Noah Truong, who is Formula’s managing director for the 2022-2023 school year. “Our car accelerates to 60 mph — as fast as a Porsche 911 does and corners even faster than one. On our first run of the day, we set the record lap time. This was against so many cool and fast cars: Porsches, Corvettes, heavily modified Miatas, and even some purpose-built race cars.”

“Our car accelerates to 60 mph — as fast as a Porsche 911 does and corners even faster than one,” Noah Truong said.

The team typically builds a new car every year, starting with the design process at the end of spring and into summer, manufacturing in the fall and building it in the winter to be ready for competition in the spring.

“Racing is a unique challenge because you are asking 50 or so full-time college students to put in the work of a full-time job without paying them, and they also don’t know how to do it,” said Samantha Hilton, who graduated in June with a degree in mechanical engineering and was the managing director of Formula for the 2021-2022 school year. “It takes a lot of personal motivation to put time and effort not only into making the car (that’s the fun part), but learning the whole process on how to make the car.”

Challenges arise regularly when building the vehicle, largely due to the limited resources at the team’s disposal, but the Formula team knows how to find creative solutions to problems that crop up. Sometimes they have to 3D print mock-up parts to keep the build process on track or simply roll up their sleeves and put in double the hours to get the car ready in time.

Bruin Racing Baja
The Formula team members with their Mk. VII race vehicle

Baja

Bruin Racing’s Baja team builds an off-roading race car that can clear tough obstacles like jumps, water crossings and rough terrain without compromising speed. Rather than joining a traditional race, the Baja team competes in a three-day series of events that includes a sales presentation, technical inspections, dynamics tests and a grueling four-hour endurance race, where cars race wheel-to-wheel over all-terrain obstacles for as many laps as they can.

“A Baja car has to be fast to do well in the acceleration event, but also strong enough to pull sleds and climb hills, rugged enough to crawl over rocks, but also maneuverable enough to make extremely sharp turns,” Conor Sefkow said.

“I liked the challenge of balancing all the different scenarios that a car can face,” Sefkow said. “A Baja car has to be fast to do well in the acceleration event, but also strong enough to pull sleds and climb hills, rugged enough to crawl over rocks, but also maneuverable enough to make extremely sharp turns.”

Last year’s UCLA Baja team passed all of the technical inspections and placed in the top 20 out of 89 teams in the sales presentation and design evaluation components of the spring competition in Tennessee. Despite bad weather that prevented the team from competing in the dynamic events, Baja’s Model 21 car dubbed “Icy-Hot” competed in the endurance race for a few laps until a transmission failure sidelined the vehicle.

“This was a major failure that meant the car could no longer run, but in the span of two hours, we were able to remove the transmission and replace the broken clutch to get back onto the endurance course for one more lap,” said fourth-year mechanical engineering student Emma Gloyer, who is this year’s Baja technical director.

Being away from campus for the summer didn’t stop the team from working on their vehicles. As soon as the students returned from their competition in the spring, the team delved into research and development to improve on last year’s design so they can start the manufacturing process as soon as they are back on campus in the fall. Much of the manufacturing and building process will take place early on in the school year so that the team can have a race-ready car assembled by spring to compete in the Baja SAE races in Portland, Oregon and Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Bruin Racing Baja
The Baja team members with their Model 21 vehicle dubbed “Icy Hot”

Supermileage

While a knee-high, bullet-shaped vehicle that’s just barely longer than a supine human may not fit the traditional bill of a race car, it’s the perfect vehicle for Bruin Racing’s Supermileage team. The group aims to design a vehicle that pushes the boundaries of energy efficiency, building a car that can travel as far as possible while using the least amount of fuel.

The Supermileage team is unique to Bruin Racing in that it actually produces two cars per year — a gas-powered vehicle and an electric car. Both sub-teams compete in the annual Shell Eco-marathon in spring at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, best known as the track for the Indy 500. Even though neither of the two teams was able to compete last year due to poor weather conditions in Indianapolis, they were among the first university teams to pass technical inspections.

“Supermileage has given me significant technical experience, shown me what areas I am interested in, and provided me with leadership skills that will serve me well in any field,” Blake Lazarine said.

“In the nature of building a car, we are always facing new challenges,” said Claudia Adelman, a fourth-year mechanical engineering student and this year’s gas vehicle president. “This past year we struggled with tuning the car to find the combination of efficiency and drivability, but after many months of testing, we were able to create a competition-worthy vehicle.”

As energy efficiency continues to be a dominant factor in many tech breakthroughs, the skills the Supermileage team members gain can easily transfer to a variety of technical fields.

“My entire technical interview for my previous internship [as a hardware engineering intern for Parallel Systems] was combing through circuits I made as part of Supermileage,” said fourth-year electrical engineering student and this year’s electric vehicle president, Blake Lazarine. “Supermileage has given me significant technical experience, shown me what areas I am interested in, and provided me with leadership skills that will serve me well in any field.”

Bruin racing supermileage
The Supermileage team members with their electric and gas-powered vehicles (from left to right)


Sara Hubbard and Natalie Weber contributed to this story.

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