Designing Formula SAE Cars with Rensselaer Motorsport

Rensselaer Motorsport is an engineering club at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York made up of a group of dedicated students who attend weekly meetings to help engineer, conceive, design, and fabricate formula-style cars for Formula SAE.

In this episode of the Next Generation Design podcast, our host Greg Arnot, is joined by Elliot Wilk and Levi Hlavac, two dual-major aerospace and mechanical engineering students at RPI that are part of Rensselaer Motorsport.

In this episode, you will learn how members of Rensselaer Motorsport manage a balance between their coursework and the demands of the club, why CAD is such an incredibly important tool for them, and how NX aids in their complex design process.  

What you’ll learn in this episode of the Next Generation Design podcast

• The challenges faced when getting cars from concept to finished product (06:31)
• Why Rensselaer Motorsport chose NX as their CAD software of choice (12:04)
• Why design-integrated simulation so important in the racing and automotive industry (19:49)
• The importance of using connected software products like NX and Simcenter simulation (21:33)
• Advice for those who are just starting out learning CAD (25:47)
• How AI and the quest for sustainability might influence the  future of automotive design (29:41)

You can always listen to the Next Generation Design podcast right here, or wherever you do podcasts.

Read the summary or watch the video version of this episode: Designing Formula SAE cars at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) | Rensselaer Motorsport

Listen to or read the next episode of the Next Generation Design podcast: Digital Engineering Modular Aircraft at AERALIS

Listen to or read the previous episode of the Next Generation Design podcast: Driving Innovation with SaaS: NX X for Product Design

Connect with Elliot Wilk:

• LinkedIn

Connect with Levi Hlavac:

• LinkedIn

Connect with Greg Arnot: 

• LinkedIn

---

Podcast transcript for Designing Formula SAE Cars with Rensselaer Motorsport

Levi Hlavac: CAD is extremely important in all of our design. “If we don’t have any CAD, it doesn’t exist” is something we say often. A lot of the time, people have the designs in their heads, and they’ll have an idea of where the design is going. But you have to communicate that. The best way to communicate that is just to put it in a 3D model, put it in the assembly, and now I know exactly where it is on the car. It’s an extremely useful tool to be able to design a component and put it on the car before we even build the car entirely, to know that it works, to know that it sits there right and that it’s in the right spot. 

Greg Arnot: You’re listening to another episode of the Next Generation Design podcast. I’m your host, Greg Arnot. On today’s episode, I’m joined by two dual-major aerospace and mechanical engineering students who are part of Rensselaer Motorsport, a club at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Rensselaer Motorsport is a group made up of students who engineer, conceive, design, and fabricate formula-style cars. Before we begin, let’s meet today’s guests, second-year student Elliot Wilk and fourth-year student Levi Hlavac, both at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, or RPI. Elliot, Levi, welcome to the podcast.

Elliot Wilk: Thank you. Happy to be here.

Levi Hlavac: Thank you very much.

Greg Arnot: It’s great to have you both. Now, I’d like to jump right in: Out of all the academic paths you could’ve taken, what made you choose aeronautical and mechanical engineering?

Elliot Wilk: As a kid, I was always interested in cars and planes. I really wanted to fully understand the engineering and the science behind it all. When I heard about the aeronautical and mechanical engineering degree at Rensselaer, I just thought it’d be great to get into that and try to learn more about what I’m really interested in.

Levi Hlavac: I think I was similar. I’m just a curious person in general. I wanted to know the interior workings of all those big machines and transportation vehicles. The same deal — I ended up at Rensselaer with an aeronautical and mechanical degree.

Greg Arnot: In addition to double majoring in aeronautical and mechanical engineering, you’re both also members of the Rensselaer Motorsport club. Levi, can you tell our listeners a bit about the club? How many people are a part of the team? 

Levi Hlavac: We have about 25 to 30 pretty dedicated members who show up to every weekly meeting and come to the shop to help build the car. If you want to join, it’s pretty simple. Just email one of the team leaders—me or our team lead—and we can bring you to the general body meeting. You’ll get into our Slack and access all the communications and Google Drive. From there, we want to get you on a project right away to see what you can bring to the table. If you’re putting in work and doing designs, there are a lot of roles you can take. You could even be part of the business team, managing funds, creating budgets, whatever it might be. If you excel and if you’re putting in the work, and the team sees and respects that, you’ll apply as a full member, and we’ll accept your application in about a month’s time, during the first or second semester. There are a couple of requirements to be a full member, but mostly, it’s just about making a significant contribution, maybe doing a design review where you defend a design you made. That’s a big one. So, if you are doing these things, it’s pretty easy to join the club.

Greg Arnot: What are you each responsible for as a team member? 

Levi Hlavac: I’m the Technical Director for Rensselaer Motorsports. Essentially, I’m the chief engineer. I oversee a bunch of engineering leads for each system, and I’m responsible for the engineering to get done and designing and integrating their systems and making sure that they are thinking about “Hey, how does my system interact with the chassis, or how does my aero system interact with the cooling system.” My role is to make sure all these elements come together in the end and mesh together flawlessly, although that never happens.

Elliot Wilk: I’m currently the Aeronautical Project Manager, which means I’m in charge of aerodynamics and bodywork. This semester, I’m focusing on rules-required tasks, so I’m trying to make sure our car is waterproof against any rain from the outside, and I’m also trying to close the cockpit of the driver to prevent any debris from entering while racing. So, mainly, I’m working on adding panels and closing off certain areas to protect against weather or debris.

Greg Arnot: Fascinating. I was a student myself once upon a time, and you’ve got me wondering: How can you possibly find the balance between Rensselaer Motorsport and your engineering coursework?

Levi Hlavac: In terms of balancing Rensselaer Motorsport and school, some people don’t. But I think what it really comes down to is how you’re spending your weekends because a lot of the time we spend designing or manufacturing the car is going to be on a weekend. So, if you get a lot of your schoolwork done during the week and manage your time well, you’ll be able to put in the time on the weekend. But yeah, it’s tough. I think everybody has a tough time balancing the two because some people are really ambitious and want to do more schooling and add more classes on top of their normal school load. It’s really a testament to how well you can manage your time. I see people join the team, and they’re like, “Whoa, this is a big commitment. I don’t know how I’m going to do both of these things.” I’ve been through that and been there, doing assignments late at night because I did motorsport all day. It’s a tough balance, and I don’t think anybody’s very good at it, but it definitely improves your time management skills. Both Elliot and I have sort of been there. Elliot’s got a lot of schoolwork. I’m sort of on the back end of it in my senior year, but he’s still in the thick of it.

Elliot Wilk: Yeah, I would agree. But everyone has a different approach to it. My approach is to schedule most things you can after schoolwork and then just fill in Motorsport in the gaps. But people do other things, and that work for them. So, I would say you just try your best and figure it as you go. If you want to put a lot of time into Motorsport, you’re going to have to be able to balance your time well.

Greg Arnot: Elliot, in your experience so far, what would you say is the biggest challenge when it comes to getting the car from concept and design onto the track?

Elliot Wilk: I would say the biggest thing, at least right now, as we’re trying to get all the components on the car and get them ready, is system integration. There are tons of components on the car, tabs that are welded, things that are bolted on, and tons of different fasteners, so you have to make sure the car works together. We have to be vigilant about looking at our CAD and seeing if these things actually fit or if bolts going through the holes can hit other things. Because with CAD, you can’t always realize these things beforehand; you have to talk with people and figure it out. It’s difficult to CAD a bunch of wires, but you need to know that those wires are going to be there, and they’re going to exist, and you need to make space for those wires. So, a lot of integration is, I think, the biggest challenge and just communication comes hand-in-hand with that. 

Levi Hlavac: Just piggybacking off of that; I totally agree—communication is one of the most difficult things that we try to improve on every year. It’s always a challenge. When you have 20 or 30 college students all coming together with their schooling, in their free time, not getting paid or not getting credit for the work they do on the car, emotions can get pretty high and intense pretty fast. Managing the project is a challenge. Everyone has their own individual projects to manage and their subsystems. Then, they also have to think about how it all fits into the entire car. You forget to talk to one person, and “Oh, whoops, now my bolt runs into your cooling pump. What are we going to do?” So, yes, communicating and making sure the team is on the same page is a big task. When we schedule out the year and have our engineering schedule chart, we all contribute to it, and we all have to keep it updated. Sometimes, people don’t keep it updated, then it’s like, “Oh, you’re behind.” And then it’s, “Oh, I’m not behind, actually.” So it’s constant back and forth week to week because the design cycle is so fast. Every week, things are decided and finalized week to week during the design cycle. If you’re not communicating and on top of it almost every week, as a design leader or as part of leadership, you can get left behind and out of the loop pretty fast. That’s very easy for us RPI engineers to break down communication in one week, and that could spell a system integration issue down the line later. So, I think that’s definitely hitting the nail on the head, Elliot.

Greg Arnot: I’d like to switch gears a bit and move toward the specifics of the design side of things. Levi, how have you found CAD technology helpful when it comes to designing vehicles and addressing some of those main challenges you mentioned previously?

Levi Hlavac: CAD is extremely important in all of our design. “If we don’t have any CAD, it doesn’t exist” is something we say often. Because a lot of the time, people have the designs in their heads, and they’ll have an idea of where the design is going. But you have to communicate that. The best way to communicate that is just to put it in a 3D model, put it in the assembly, and now I know exactly where it is on the car. We’ve been trying to do better. Especially this year, we have changed the way we do CAD a little in terms of how we integrate all the different subsystem assemblies together, and it’s increased our load times. It’s a lot easier to open the entire full car assembly, which takes a couple of minutes no matter what, but it’s definitely faster than it was last year. A lot of people need to open that full car assembly often because if they’re designing a part of the car, they need to make sure it doesn’t interfere with anything. The car is packaged very tightly; there’s not a lot of room to put things on the chassis and within the protection envelope of that chassis. So, every system is fighting for its space. How do you make sure that nothing runs into everything else? That happens often. You wouldn’t believe how many times someone comes to me with a design, and I say, “Hey, have you opened the full car assembly to make sure that this doesn’t run into something? Because I promise you, it does.” It’s like, “Oh, shoot, no, I didn’t do that.” So, it’s an extremely useful tool to be able to design a component and put it on the car before we even build the car entirely; to know that it works, to know that it sits there right and that it’s in the right spot. 

Greg Arnot: I imagine that there are an incredible amount of moving parts in a project like this.

Levi Hlavac: There are tons and tons of different small components that have to all fit together, and all be able to fasten to the chassis, be in the correct spot for the component to work well—maybe it’s a radiator, maybe it’s a reservoir, there are certain spots everything needs to go. If you don’t have any CAD, no one knows where it is, and every other team can’t work around it because we all need to work around each other’s components. So, it’s absolutely instrumental to have good CAD, updated CAD, and CAD that works together in the assembly because, without that, we can’t communicate how our designs are and how they change because they change constantly. So, it’s a very important tool, and it helps us communicate what we actually want to do on the real-life chassis.

Greg Arnot: Can you tell our listeners which CAD software you chose and why?

Levi Hlavac: We use NX, same with the school. The school is an extremely important aspect of what software we use; our school is the default for NX. I have a class that I’m currently taking that uses FEA Nastran. Knowing that the school teaches that software, it only makes sense for our team to use that software. That helps us with new members often because they come in with experience already in NX. It’s really important that they’re able to just jump in right away and use the software that we use. It has its advantages and disadvantages, but it helps a lot to have the same CAD as the simulation you use. That’s why the NX suite is so perfect because not a lot of other software suites have such good simulation. If you were to use another CAD software, you would have to import the 3D model and put it in this simulation, and then that comes with some disadvantages. You can’t change your 3D model very easily after the fact. There are a lot of things that change. So, I think it’s easiest to do a simulation while using the NX 3D CAD. So, that’s what we stick towards.

Greg Arnot: Are you utilizing composites in your design of the car? And why?

Elliot Wilk: We use composites mostly because they’re the perfect mixture of weight, strength, and performance. Of course, we want our car to be as light as possible to achieve maximum acceleration and braking. So, we aim for a very light car but also need it to be stiff and strong at certain points. For many of the panels I worked on this year, we used carbon fiber. That’s a carbon weave and a bunch of epoxy laid onto a certain surface. We make these composites, and sometimes they’re simple shapes, like just a panel. Sometimes, they’re extremely complex—we’ll show you at some point maybe a picture of this year’s car—the nose, which is this complex shape that goes like this and is all carbon fiber wrapped around it. So, sometimes you have simple shapes and sometimes complex shapes. But having something lightweight and strong that’s going to hold up is extremely important.

Greg Arnot: Thanks, Elliot. I’m curious to know if there are any metrics that you can speak about that you’ve seen improve from using NX, such as decreasing design time, that type of thing?

Levi Hlavac: I totally think so. If we didn’t have any of the NX suites, especially for the simulation suite, we would have a much longer design time or at least be a lot less sure of our designs before we bring them out to the real world. I also think that a lot of our designs definitely improve upon iteration using these softwares. So, even if it’s just 3D modeling, and you finish your part, and you go look at it, and then you go, “Oh, I need to do some more work on this,” and iterating, or if it’s simulation-based, that iteration can converge upon our design goals exceptionally. I think that whenever you start a design project, you need to have clearly defined goals. That’s something that every engineer, I think, struggles with, especially student engineers. So, we do our best to try and help younger members be able to set goals properly, and be able to have these goals alongside the design process to then drive their design and give them direction in their design. With simulation and CAD, you’re able to converge upon your weight goal or converge upon your strength goal much faster. Hitting those metrics is extremely important because we need to know how parts work. We need to know that they perform like we expect them to. That totally decreases design time but also increases the reliability of our designs because we’re able to prove they work and defend our designs to teammates and judges.

Greg Arnot: Makes sense. It’s great to hear that NX and simulation can help you hit those metrics. With Formula cars being made up of many different complex systems, how has NX helped you with handling complexity in designs?

Levi Hlavac: It’s a very good tool when it comes to complexity. Currently, our team isn’t super focused on complex designs; we like to keep our designs as simple as possible. That way, the optimal solution to a problem is the simplest solution. So, we try to simplify our designs as much as possible, but sometimes, there are complex problems that we have to solve. Every year, there are a lot of problems that do end up being complex if you look into them far enough. So, a good example is our accumulator, essentially our battery pack, and how that’s cooled. That’s not an easy thing to do. In no way you slice it as a simple problem. We’re trying to cool batteries; it’s extremely important that inside the battery casing, there are not a lot of particulates and no water from the air—there are a lot of problems when it comes to pushing air over your hot batteries. So, for a problem like that, it’s extremely important to be able to simulate what might happen before we can test it because testing something like that is going to cost us way too much money and time. So, being able to model the battery segment and put it in a thermal or a fluid sim to be able to know what performance we might expect out of whatever inlet we design is extremely important because we’ll go through multiple iterations on that inlet or maybe the outlet of that airflow out of our battery and say, “Hey, that’s not sufficient, or that’s not really what we want to hit,” we want to be a little higher factor of safety for our cooling than we are now. So, we’ll iterate, go back to the design, simulate, and then conclude whether or not that simulation gave us the results we want. Being able to simplify that complexity in a simulation is extremely important, and being able to model it accurately is very important. It saves us so much time and so much money and allows us to iterate fast and bring all these components together faster because it’s all about how fast we can get the car together, running and on track. That testing time is invaluable once you actually have the car. But you can’t build the thing very fast if you’re not able to confirm that “Hey, we’re going to be able to cool our batteries.” If you can’t confirm that, it’s not a good idea to probably build the car and run it. We really wouldn’t be able to build a car without those simulation tools.

Greg Arnot: Elliot, can you tell me more about how you use validation and simulation throughout the design process?

Elliot Wilk: Essentially, we use it all throughout the design process. It’s a key component of that process. When you’re designing parts for the car, you need to know it needs to withstand some force. You test that some parts can withstand some force. Essentially, we just jump right in, do the CAD, run the simulation, and run the hand calculations, and we have to make sure that that’s going to work. If it doesn’t, you have to go start again and change your design. Essentially, you just have to keep doing that over and over again till hit your goals; whatever weight goal you have, how much load this thing needs to carry. I would essentially say that it’s extremely important because simulations are just so accurate, especially things like FEA; you can just design a part, run a simulation, make sure it’s strong enough, and then put it on the car. Obviously, if it’s not strong enough, you have to do it again and then repeat the process. Throughout the entire process, we’re always running simulations, and we’re always doing validation.

Greg Arnot: And why is design-integrated simulation so important in the racing and automotive industry?

Elliot Wilk: It’s really important because you don’t want to actually make something until you know it’s right. The worst thing is I make something, I think, “Ah, this is the greatest thing in the world,” and then it just breaks. We’ve had this happen; I believe it was two days ago when we had a major component fail, and that ruined our testing day. So, just having something that you know is going to work, you know is going to have that factor of safety—so you’re sure whatever happens to the car, this thing is not going to break or bend—you need to know that before you make it and before you put time and effort into machining, time into buying stock. When that doesn’t happen, you waste your money, you waste your time, and it’s just not a good look.

Greg Arnot: Of course, that makes perfect sense. You don’t want to put in all that effort only to see a vital component fail on testing day. We’ve talked a lot about the importance of simulation in your design process. Can you tell us about the specific simulation tools you are using within NX?

Elliot Wilk: The main simulation tool, I believe, is the Nastran Finite Element Analysis Solver. I think it’s called Pre/Post if I’m getting that right. It’s FEA that comes just with NX, and it’s a really good FEA; it’s accurate, it’s repeatable, and it just works really well in terms of getting accurate numbers. I believe a few others use the thermal software as well. For the brakes this year, one of our teammates used the thermal software. For cooling as well, you want to run that thermal simulation just to make sure you’re getting airflow through certain areas and are able to cool things down.

Greg Arnot: How important is it for you to be using software products that are “connected,” such as the connection between NX and Simcenter simulation software?

Elliot Wilk: It’s extremely important because exporting a certain file and putting it into other software to do some analysis is just inconvenient when I can just go take the part, analyze it, “Oh, it doesn’t work as well as I thought it would,” you just go back, you just push buttons again, and within like 10 minutes, you have the simulation again. So, being able to go back and forth through your CAD program and through your simulation program is extremely important for saving time and getting the design right. If I had to export every single time, it would just be a bunch of time wasted, and I wouldn’t be able to work as efficiently as I could.

Levi Hlavac: Last year, we even had a lot of CFD going on; some of those members graduated. But they would even prefer to do the 3D modeling within the [Simcenter] STAR-CCM+ application. That’s super nice to have when you’re doing fluid sims because “Oh, I forgot to change this one thing in the model, but I don’t need to open up NX completely again; I can just change the model within STAR-CCM+.” Having that advantage saves you time a lot. It might save you a couple of minutes in one instance, but that builds up over time. It’s super helpful and allows for quick design iterations.

Greg Arnot: That’s wonderful to hear. Is there any other Siemens software you’re taking advantage of in the design process?

Elliot Wilk: Mostly Star-CCM+ for any fluid applications. So, most of that is external aerodynamics. Sometimes—not this year—we’ll put a front and rear wing on our car for more performance in the corners. We’ll run a simulation over that to make sure it’s providing downforce and making the car faster while meeting our drag goals. We don’t want a lot of drag on our car. We run that simulation just to make sure we’re hitting our goals. And if we’re not meeting those goals, we have to go back and iterate on our design. Also, for cooling sims, like water cooling and air cooling, we run those through STAR-CCM+. I think that’s the main one, but I’ve used [Simcenter] Femap before. I found that just using the FEA inside NX is better because it just utilizes it’s just easier to go back and forth with the designs.

Levi Hlavac: We use the FEA software a lot. For a lot of our drivetrain mounting, motor mounting and differential mounting, we have to do FEA because those are critical components. We’ll do FEA on our chassis; it’s currently still in the process of being simulated. But there are a lot of other smaller components that are extremely critical that we have to simulate. We like to simply geometry for those parts. This year, for ARM 27, we simplified our motor mounting and our drivetrain mounting. That makes it really easy to simulate because we don’t have a lot of complex geometry, places where the meshing might get a little complex or might give us weird artifacts or weird results. That makes it so that we can simulate and be confident our simulation is accurate.

Greg Arnot: Switching gears back to NX, when you first started using the CAD software, what tools did you find most helpful in that learning process?

Elliot Wilk: Learning from people is just the best option because you can go online and look at YouTube tutorials, but you’re not going to learn the full way to do assemblies, the full way to do constraints and good CAD. We have a CAD class on campus, so we just go to that class. I think members of the team really helped me out when I had CAD troubles. So, I would go to one of them, typically. He’d look at my CAD and he was like, “This is not optimal.” So, he helped us really fix it, bring it together, and make sure that it’s ready to go on the car. He spent a good amount of time just teaching us how to do good CAD, and that really stuck with me when I had to do other things, large-scale CAD projects. I think I used a lot of Xcelerator Academy and then a lot of the FEA stuff. They have a lot of stuff that walks you through the simulations side.

Greg Arnot: So, as someone who’s now spent a good deal of time with NX, what advice would you give a student just starting out learning CAD?

Elliot Wilk: I would say essentially just spend a lot of time doing it. If you can find someone to show you the ropes, to teach you—like a CAD class here—people say it’s really hard. But at the end of it, you really understand CAD at a deeper level. Just having someone be there is nice, but just spending a lot of time doing it is also very important. How motorsport is shaped is we do a lot of CAD in the fall. We do a lot of building in the spring. So I went back to CAD to make something really quickly, and I was like, “Wow, this is harder than it was last time.” But just doing it constantly, having new problems to solve in CAD, is just going to build your skill level. You’re going to go back to it and be like, “Wow, this is easier than I thought,” instead of “Wow, this is hard.”

Greg Arnot: With advancements seeming to come so rapidly in the industry lately, I’d like to look toward the future of racing and the automotive industry as a whole. Do either of you have any major predictions you’d like to share?

Elliot Wilk: I think the first main thing is more computing power in simulation. We have a lot of manpower on our hands right now, so we’re running simulations, maybe taking five to six hours. But I think the higher-end teams, like F1 teams, are taking a lot less time. I expect that to only change just for computers to progress and simulations to get faster, which is, of course, extremely useful for complex stuff like CFD and very complex FEA. I also believe a pretty cool future would be 3D modeling in a virtual reality sense. So, you just put on your virtual reality goggles, and you’re able to do all the CAD and see it in real life on a two-dimensional screen versus a three-dimensional moving object that you can manipulate. I thought that would be a pretty cool feature.

Greg Arnot: It’s interesting you mention a form of immersive experience with modeling because Siemens and the NX team have been collaborating with Sony on an Immersive Engineering product to be released later this year. This will include being able to truly be “in” your design with NX Immersive Designer and the Sony XR head-mounted display. Do you think Immersive Engineering has the potential to shape design for Rensselaer Motorsport?

Elliot Wilk: Definitely. I feel like a lot of time is wasted looking into CAD and trying to get the right view of something so that you’ve made sure it’s in the right place and not hitting anything else. But having that in a 3D sense would be extremely easy to manipulate and look, “Oh, it’s right here, obviously.” And then go to the car and be like, “Oh, it’s right here as well.” So, it’d be, I think, extremely useful for any sort of automotive racing application in the future.

Levi Hlavac: I actually hear a statement a lot where it’s like, “Oh, that looked bigger in CAD.” Because we’re so zoomed in on our part when we’re modeling it, we have it blown up to the size of our screen. So, if you had a 3D environment where you could interact with it, maybe make it a one-to-one ratio to actually have a sense of what size it might be, that would give students, or any engineer, a better perspective of what this actually looks like in real life. Because we’ll go to put the part on the car, and it’s like, “Oh, that’s big.” We 3D printed it just for a first iteration, and it’s like, “Oh, we need to go back to the drawing board because that doesn’t work quite right.” I think it would definitely help and give us a better understanding of what it would look like in real life.

Greg Arnot: Of course, we can’t talk about the future without touching on the influence of AI. Levi, how do you see AI and machine learning play into the automotive industry?

Levi Hlavac: I think AI is going to impact the automotive industry very heavily. I’m not sure necessarily how it would impact the industry on the top level, but being able to have maybe an AI assistant for things like simulation, or maybe to catch your little meshing mistakes, and things like this could definitely speed up the design process and expedite a lot of the user time when it comes into setting up simulations. I don’t think it would help so much, maybe in the 3D modeling space, although I can probably eat my words here because the AI could be smart enough to optimize a design for strength before you even did a simulation on it. You’d probably have to define some loading and some constraints here and there, but it could really change the geometry that you modeled. I think machine learning could really make a huge difference. If we had the tools for it, we might be tinkering around with it to see where we can optimize, where we can save weight, and hit our design goals.

Greg Arnot: Thank you. And one more hot topic question for you: What role do you think sustainability plays in the automotive industry and beyond?

Levi Hlavac: I think sustainability is the future for the automotive industry. It has to be. With our switch to an EV team, we’ve taken our initial step into that sustainability market. I think the entire industry is heading to EV anyway, especially the racing industry. Car manufacturers want to prove that they can build the best EV. And if they do that at the race car level, they’re telling the truth. So, I think sustainability is huge. I think there are new solutions every day, not just in the automotive industry but in the transportation industry as a whole. There are big strides every day, and I think the future is really going electric or even maybe fuel cell-based. We’ve seen pretty interesting stuff in the market space when it comes to fuel cells. I think the entire industry is moving away from your classic internal combustion to be powered by green sources of energy. I think it’s our job as a student team to also do the same and move in that direction because we want to build engineers who are familiar with systems like this so that they can have jobs in the market or engineers who are thinking about these problems before they even get to industry. If we can develop engineers with that mindset and have experience already in where the industry is headed, we’re doing our students and our members a great service because we’re setting them up for what’s coming.

Greg Arnot: Before we wrap up, I’d love to hear a bit more about the fun side of Rensselaer Motorsport. You’re both quite lucky to be students in one of the most exciting industries in the world, working to create formula-style cars. Do you or will you ever get the chance to race the cars that you design? Are they ever all on the track at the same time?

Levi Hlavac: We don’t race wheel-to-wheel, unfortunately. It is a pity. Maybe in the future, hopefully, that’s where the FSAE competition is headed soon. But our competition is mostly a design competition. A lot of the points we get are from the design event where we go up to industry professionals with our car, and they completely tear us apart. The best teams are the ones who get the least criticism from those judges. The rest of the competition dynamically is four events: the Acceleration event, where it’s just a straight line, how fast can you go; we have the Skidpad event, which is a figure-eight; we have our Autocross track, which is just a normal racing track that we’ll run multiple laps on; and then an Endurance race where we run basically an entire season’s worth of track in one race. That’s really a testament to how reliable your car can be. Most teams don’t even finish. I think last year in the EV competition, there were maybe eight or 10 people who even had points in that event, so that event really takes it to your car and makes sure that you have reliable designs. 

Greg Arnot: Are you able to actually sit behind the wheel of your own creation?

Levi Hlavac: We do end up getting to drive the car, luckily. Everyone who makes a big contribution to the car gets to drive it in the fall after its season is over. We, obviously, like to test our car as much as we can. Before the competition in June, we tested as much as we could. But after that competition in the summer, we’ll also just keep running it as much as we can as well. Almost right up until that car is done with, and we start building the next car, we’ll have our Team Drive Day. So, everyone who’s made a big contribution to the car gets to get in it and run a couple of laps. A lot of times, some funny things will happen. So, when we were IC, we burned out a couple of clutch plates pretty fast from maybe not operating the vehicle properly. It’s a race car; it’s not easy to drive if you don’t know how to operate a manual, but even just the car itself has its own character. This year, we’re EV, so luckily, no one has to shift; it’s a little easier to drive. But that brings its own plethora of challenges. Luckily, we do get to drive it.

Greg Arnot: Well, that must be incredibly exciting for you.

Levi Hlavac: I’m looking forward to it this year, totally.

Greg Arnot: Of course, I can’t let you go without answering the most important question of all: What Formula One teams are you each rooting for?

Elliot Wilk: I would say Red Bull is my favorite Formula One team. When I used to watch heavily, they were always the third-best team, not the first, and they would always break into the top two occasionally. That was really exciting to watch. Max Verstappen and I believe Daniel Ricciardo would try to take down Mercedes and Ferrari back in the day.

Levi Hlavac: I’m a bigger Ferrari guy. Just the classic. The best team and makes the best cars. They’ll always be one of the top teams, historically. They have such a rich history. So, I’m kind of a sucker for that.

Greg Arnot: Levi, Elliot, thank you both so much for joining us today. It’s been wonderful speaking with you and getting to learn more about the Rensselaer Motorsport club. Thanks so much again to both of our guests for joining us today, we hope to speak with you again soon. Thanks also to our listeners for tuning in to today’s episode. Join us next time for more discussions about the latest in design innovation and software applications.  If you haven’t already, consider subscribing to our podcast on your favorite platform. And if you’re enjoying the content, please leave us a review. I’m your host, Greg Arnot, and this has been the Next Generation Design Podcast.