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Ware Lab Spotlight Formula SAE
Formula SAE driver ready for competition.
(2019) Photo / Formula
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Isabella Bartolome (‘21)
What is your name, major, and role?
I am Josh Kintz, I am in mechanical engineering, and I am the 2021 Team Lead. I oversee both the logistical and team side of things, like managing the people. I also am the technical overseer of the project, meaning that I help to make final technical decisions when needed and manage the technical scope of the project.
How long have you been the Team Lead of Formula SAE and what drew you to the position?
We have single-year terms for team leadership. Because we’re on a two-year design cycle, it’s important that the junior class starts identifying leadership within their group. Last year, I led the juniors and then I stepped into the Team Lead position this year.
As for what drew me to the position, I think I was really eager to learn as much as I could as an underclassman. I kept trying to expose myself to learning, and where that left me as a junior and now as a senior is having a pretty broad understanding of the technical scope of the project and being able to understand the leadership side at the same time.
We have sub-team leaders in our leadership committee as well who oversee technical areas, like the Powertrain Team, Suspension Team, and Aerodynamics. That leadership group gets to go more in-depth in their technical fields, whereas I oversee everything. They are very much plugged into their specific fields and, because of that, I choose to have a leadership style which is a little more hands-off and enabling because I trust that my sub-team leads know their sub-teams the best, and they do.
What is Formula SAE?
Formula SAE is a collegiate design series sanctioned by SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) International. The overarching concept of the competition is to have students conceptualize, design, build, and compete with formula-style race cars. The underlying philosophy is that the teams who participate in this series are designing a race car that is intended for people who want to participate in weekend track days, autocross events, or club racing. What it actually looks like on the ground is international universities and technical colleges competing in this design series.
Why should students get involved with Formula SAE and what are some of the benefits of being on the team?
The short answer is to get involved because of the people. As a freshman or an underclassmen in general, when you come into the program, you’re immediately exposed to people who are eager to grab you by the hand and get you involved in the project. Because there is that culture on the team, it ends up being a huge learning experience for undergraduates.
Repairing racecar before competition. Photo / Formula SAE
In my opinion, we do so much learning that you don’t get in the classroom, even in the labs offered in the curriculum. There are just certain things that professors simply do not have the time or the capacity to teach both in the breadth and depth that we’re able to expose people to with this absolutely crazy design challenge.
There are internal benefits to being on the team, which include being with a great group of peers. Our team is large; we carry around 42 active members this year, and on any given year that could fluctuate between 35 and 65 depending on recruitment and projects. So, you’d surely be exposed to people who’d end up being your best friends. For me, the team has become my family. Some of my teammates and I wake up at 5:30 every morning to go to the gym because we like doing that together. There are people on the team who play music together, too.
Externally, because the competition is so large and because its scope is so extreme, there are a lot of corporate sponsors of both the competition itself and our program. The reason they sponsor our event is because they recognize the learning that goes on in this program and what happens to students when they’re exposed to it. Because of this, the job opportunities are fantastic. As a senior now and having been a four-year member of the program, I’m finding that instead of having only one story to tell at an interview, I can pick a different one every time because there’s so much you’re exposed to as you’re learning on the team.
How can students get involved with Formula SAE?
Because the project is technically involved and because we don’t have any prerequisite expectations for students, the process ends up being all about learning. Students who come in on day one don’t have to know anything, they just have to be willing to learn and try things out. For me and most of the folks on our leadership committee, it’s important that we do not have any prerequisites. For example, we don’t even look at students’ GPA or resume because, in my opinion, most of the stuff that makes someone a good teammate just doesn’t show up on paper all the time. That’s why we prefer to get people right in the lab and working with us.
Over the semester, you would be what we choose to call a “recruit”. You are then paired with an upperclassman who you work directly in parallel with and pick up periphery projects that pop up. I don’t intend to have recruits coming in to sort drill bits; that simply won’t let us be a good team in the long run. We want our recruits to dive right in and get involved with a project.
At the end of the semester, we have formal cuts. We invite students to do interviews with teammates of their choosing, which are typically their mentors that they’ve had over the course of the semester. During the interview, they would be asked questions about their vision for the team and their vision for themselves on the team. We also like to pose some thought experiments or fun technical questions to see how they can approach a problem and apply tools that they would’ve hopefully learned throughout the semester.
If you do make it to the end of the recruitment process and you are either a) not chosen for an interview or b) you interview but are not selected for membership, you are absolutely welcome and encouraged to return the next semester if you choose to continue the process. We provide interview and personal feedback to the students from their mentors about areas where they can focus or projects they should consider picking up the next semester to learn more. I was actually one of these students; my first semester as a freshman, I recruited all the way through, interviewed, and was not accepted into the team. I did come back the next semester, and four years later, I’m the Team Lead, so it’s absolutely possible and it happens a lot.
As far as recruiting during the pandemic is concerned, it’s tough and it’s something I lose sleep over. Underclassmen are interested, but we don’t have the opportunity to invite them directly into the lab to work together. What we’ve been doing instead is trying to facilitate that learning virtually, and that’s been challenging. We do have a large group of students who are engaging directly with us in meetings and technical conversations. Right now, it’s our intention that we would be able to conduct interviews at the end of this first semester, but if it gets to the point where we feel that we haven’t been able to offer the level of learning that we would like to, then we may have to adjust.
You do not have to be a specific major to join. It typically works out that most of the students are engineers and within that, the majority are mechanical engineers and electrical engineers. Our team right now represents business majors, ESM (Engineering Science and Mechanics), Materials Science Engineering, and Computer Science; we’re pretty much across the board.
One of our business students is a motorsports enthusiast and he’s actually a participant in Teen Mazda Spec Miata for NASA, so he likes to get his hands dirty on the car and there’s no reason he shouldn’t be allowed to do so. I tell people all the time that just because you’re an Electrical Engineer doesn’t mean you can’t work on a structures project. You don’t have to be stuck in a role because of your major.
We love to get students involved early because it gives them the most opportunities to learn, but we recruit through junior year. It depends on what the junior leadership group decides, but in the past, the cutoff to recruit is at the end of fall semester junior year, the spring semester of your junior year, or the year before you graduate. The reason we don’t wait until students are seniors is because we’re on a twoyear design cycle and they’d likely be too far behind in their learning to enjoy being on the team.
What is the design and competition process for Formula SAE?
Two years before you compete, you start conceptual design. Typically what that looks like is understanding our past and conceptualizing what trajectory we want to have in the future. A lot of the design process is iterative, and we must understand what opportunities we have to create new concepts, solve new problems, and engineer solutions. Sometimes we’ve reached the limit on an idea, so we’ll start something new and create more potential for the vehicles.
After that conceptual process, we hold a design review. We invite alumni, seniors, technical experts, and faculty advisors to provide direct technical feedback on these concepts. This typically happens in the fall semester of junior year, and the spring semester of junior year is when we flesh out a concept selection and begin work on iterative CAD design and validation. By senior year you are either totally wrapped
Metal part milled on a 5-axis machine. Photo / Formula SAE
up with or are actively wrapping up your final design since senior year is all about building and testing.
The first event we’ve attended historically is typically in May, and we also attend another event in June. The first event is in Michigan and that’s one of the larger competitions globally; it’s a combustion-only competition. The second event used to be in Lincoln, Nebraska, and they’ve recently moved it to California; this is a combustion and simultaneously electric competition.
I’ve been to the Michigan competition and the way I’d describe it is magical in the nerdiest way possible. The Michigan competition invites 120 teams and it’s the craziest sight in the world because you have all these undergraduate students from the United States or overseas there to show off and compete with this race car that they’ve built. The environment is buzzing all the time. When you’re trying to compete at that high of a level, problems come up almost all the time, and that creates a lot of stress. The design part of the competition, where you are critiqued by industry experts, is also stressful, but when you peel back all of the problems and anxiety, it’s absolutely incredible. The stuff students come up with is technically and visually amazing.
Formula SAE detail shot. Photo / Formula SAE
The rules mandate that before teams get their vehicles inspected for safety, they’re not allowed to turn them on. This is unique to the combustion competition, but there’s a certain point in the week of competition where the majority of people start getting their technical inspections completed and then the paddock areas start becoming live with the sound of people turning on their cars. For me, as a motorsports nerd, that’s absolutely magical and it’s such a cool feeling. Competition is amazing and a lot of fun.
There are both static events, which are the judging events, and then the dynamic events, which is the actual racing, so you can be a winner in an individual event and/or an overall winner. Traditionally, because we have 33 years of program history, we are a very strong team. The level of competition in the past ten years has really increased, especially due to the overseas teams, who have very good programs themselves, but Virginia Tech typically does achieve in the top ten of American teams. We’ve had top ten finishes in the past five years and we’ve also had some top three finishes. We bring home a trophy almost every year.
What is the best thing/favorite moment you have gotten out of Formula SAE?
Externally, my favorite memory was that first time at the Michigan competition when all the cars start firing up and everything comes alive. To me, that’s better than Disney World, so it’s a really cool feeling. Internally, I think the best memories happen with the people on the team. After late nights of work, I have really good memories of decompressing with a meal or going downtown to The Cellar to wind down with my teammates. When we’re not super busy, we go hiking, have cookouts, or have Super Bowl parties; those are some of the best memories. For me, after four years of being on the team, it really feels like a family.
Any last thoughts for potential team members?
Formula SAE at Virginia Tech represents a pretty unique opportunity for an undergraduate student to challenge yourself and grow as both an engineer and as a teammate. Formula SAE is as magical as it is because when you ask undergraduate students to go racing, it forces them to think very hard and very critically to come up with neat engineering solutions. Because of that, it provides an opportunity for students to catapult themselves into a totally new category of engineering.
This is something that happens for most, if not all, the design teams in the Ware Lab, maybe more so for Formula SAE because of the nature of the competition being so extreme. Even if you don’t want to go work for an automotive OEM, engineering military contractor, or anything like that, by the time you leave a program like Formula SAE at Virginia Tech, you have such a large toolbox to carry with you as an engineer or even as a non-engineer, and that’s a direct result of trying to push yourself.
Driver in Formula SAE vehicle. Photo / Formula SAE
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Welding the chassis. Photo / Formula SAE
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