IOWA BAJA

IOWA BAJA: OFF TO THE RACES!

Iowa Baja is a group consisting of mainly mechanical engineering students, but we are open to students of all disciplines. As a team, we work collaboratively to design, build, and test off-road buggies which we take to numerous competitions around the United States.

Each year we attend a small handful of regional races where we take our previously constructed buggies. At these races, we try to take as many members as possible and get them some time behind the wheel of our buggies. The first race we attended this year was at UW Stout in Wisconsin. Stout threw in a little twist and had a six-hour endurance race, typical races are four-hours long. At the end of the six hours, our oldest buggy placed 1st and brought home a trophy! This past February, we traveled up to the U.P. of Michigan to Houghton and raced on Michigan Tech’s campus in the snow with the same 3 buggies we took to Stout. For their dynamic event, a driver started on one end of the track and drove about 200 yards through technical maneuvers. Once through that, the driver stopped in a small box, shut off the buggy, exited the buggy as quickly as possible, then tagged a team member beside the box. That team member then ran 50 yards to a

table where he had to eat a spicy pickled egg as quickly as possible. As with most previous years, we won this dynamic event, which placed us in 1st to start the four-hour endurance race. This race was a little more brutal on our buggies with the jumps they incorporated, but at the end of the 4 hours, we secured another 1st pace finish!

As fun as these races are, we spend a lot of our time designing and fabricating our new buggy which goes to competition in the spring. Over the last few years, the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) which oversees the entire SAE Baja competition made a large change in rules, making 4WD mandatory. Last year we decided as a team to construct our very first 4WD buggy. That year was full of trouble shooting and problem solving as none of the team members knew that much about 4WD. This year, we are currently in the process of building a whole new revamped 4WD buggy.

Currently, the two seniors on the team took advantage of what they have learned in classes while in the Mechanical Engineering program to develop Iowa Baja’s first transfer case which includes a handful of gears to obtain an adequate gear ratio for torque and top speed, as well as transfer power to the front tires. Together, they’ve done gear calculations, integrated the entire 4WD system into a chassis so that other subsystems (such as suspension) can meet their goals, and measured torque in preexisting buggy to optimize the center driveshaft.

As a team, we teach our members all the skills necessary to succeed in the club consisting of the hands-on skills needed to fabricate and service the buggies, soft skills which are used for presentations at our national’s events in the spring, and many skills that they’ll learn within the College of Engineering. Altogether, we work to build better engineers that will thrive in the professional engineering setting.