Northwestern Baja racing team brought 47 members to Michigan Saturday to compete in its second off-road car racing competition of the year.
The team builds, designs and manufactures an off-road racing car annually to compete in events run by the Society of Automotive Engineers. The team races their new and existing cars at multiple competitions annually. McCormick junior Lochlan McGinnis said that overall, it’s “a hell of a lot of fun.”
“You get to learn engineering, you get to learn manufacturing,” McGinnis said. “It is where I have put all of the stuff that I’ve learned in class to work.”
McGinnis said the team brought three previous years’ cars to the competition: Bucket, Gnubs and Toro. These cars all have four-wheel drive, and are around 400 pounds each, he said.
The competition is called Blizzard, and McCormick senior and Baja chief engineer Konrad Laudon said the frigid event lives up to its name.
“We’re looking forward to standing in the freezing cold for 10 hours or so and racing a car intermittently,” Laudon said ahead of the competition.
Baja project manager and McCormick senior Jared Bubser said a highlight of this competition was allowing new members to drive the cars for the first time. However, McGinnis said unexpected traffic jams made it impossible to do so.
“60 to 70% of the videos that I have are just of cars sitting there in line waiting for the traffic jam up ahead to get cleared,” McGinnis said. “We’ll make it work in the future, though, try to get some driving days for the new kids.”
Rather than ranking high in the competition, McGinnis said the real takeaway for the team was the broader experience.
McGinnis said this was especially true this year after Baja doubled its number of active members from around 35 to 70. He said that having Blizzard in the Winter Quarter encourages newer members to stick with the club.
“We got to give a ton of people a really fun experience,” McGinnis said. “This is the moment when you’re on the team where you realize, we’re building a car from scratch. That’s insane. And we’re college students, and it works, and they drive really well.”
Baja will debut this year’s car at their final competition of the year, the Baja SAE spring competition in Arizona.
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