Virginia Tech Grand Touring Race Team

We're Virginia Tech grand touring race team. It's a mouthful. So we'd like to say VT GT. I honestly like to say we have the coolest project out of the entire engineering department. We're building a race car. We bought a 2005 Mazda 3S, and we modified it to race in the 12 hour ChampCar endurance race. It's a 19 year old car with 240,000 miles on it, so there's a lot of stuff that we had to repair when we first got it back. A lot of our stuff was reliability based, like my project being oil pressure. Someone else was doing cooling the brakes. Making the exhaust flow nicer. It just makes the engine a little bit happier when you're demanding so much from it over a really long period of time. Senior design as a whole, the whole point of that course is to get people kind of that hands on experience and start to get people ready for the transition from class work to actual engineering field work. So what we're doing in this lab and what we're learning about is really just trying to push the limit of engineering through motor sports. You can do as much CAD and engineering design as you want, but until you actually fabricate something and you're using tools yourself, that's when you learn all the hardships, and you're like, Okay, this might not work out. I need to redesign this. Working on a race car can be really challenging, and there are some really low moments. And we faced a pretty low moment. All last last semester we're prepping for the race, the big day. We're getting close to the race week and we get to the day where we're supposed to start the car and the car doesn't start. We're like, Oh, my gosh. Nobody knows why everyone's brainstorming. Can't figure out what it is. We literally printed the entire electrical schematics and put it on the wall. We were able to chase down a few wires behind the dash that we have no clue how got cut, but they were cut when we found them. So we finally went through, put everything back on the car. And then we turned the key. (Cheering) Once we came off of our high off of that, "yay, the car started" and we're like, we have so much to do. We have to pack, we have to get car ready, all the other sub projects ready to go. We're all running on 2 hours of sleep, and we managed to get the car to VIR, we passed tech inspection, we race and it's just very rewarding. Finishing that college and going off in the real world. You feel like you can attack anything.