and Wyatt Rasor
Three students from Oregon Tech’s Baja Racing team traveled to Gray Court, South Carolina, Oct. 2-5 to compete in the 50th Anniversary of Baja Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Carolina, where college students test their self-built off-road vehicle for performance and endurance.
The team of Matthew Haines, Owen Haugh, and Wyatt Rasor finished 18th out of 66 teams in the three-day competition, which included both static and dynamic events. The static events consist of engineering design, inspections, and presentations. The dynamic events include an acceleration braking event, a maneuverability event, a hill climb, and a four-hour endurance race that pitted all the vehicles against each other on an extreme rough off-road course.
In addition to ranking in the top 20 overall, Oregon Tech Racing ranked 20th for design, 12th for maneuverability, and placed 13th in the endurance race. The competition included schools such as Johns Hopkins University, Cornell University, University of Michigan, and Purdue University.
“I’m so proud of our Oregon Tech Racing Baja students for their remarkable performance and teamwork,” said Dr. Neslihan Alp, Dean of the College of Engineering, Technology, and Management. “They represented Oregon Tech with excellence, and I’m deeply grateful to Professor Stover for his exceptional mentorship and dedication to the team.”
Oregon Tech Racing advisor Cliff Stover is also a Professor of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering and Technology and believes that combining an engineering education with the hands-on aspect of building and testing a racing vehicle from the ground up enhances student education.
“The Baja SAE project is a very time intensive international design competition. Students must cover a wide range of disciplines and be able to competently present and compete with a vehicle that has been built from the ground up in less than a year,” Stover said. “This is truly an international competition that encompasses all levels of engineering, management, business, marketing and hands-on design, fabrication, and testing of real-world projects.”
Each year, Oregon Tech Baja students build a new off-road vehicle from scratch, sometimes using the knowledge gained from students in the previous year but many times experimenting with their own mechanical engineering skills and fabrication techniques.
Stover said that this is the first time in 50 years that the team has run a fall competition with their previous year’s car. While many of the students who worked on the car graduated in the Spring, the support of family members and their advisor helped them be successful at this event.
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