BROOKLYN — SAE International will hold its annual Formula SAE competition at Michigan International Speedway on May 13-16. The competition has been held at MIS since 2008.
The Formula SAE Series competitions challenge teams of university undergraduate and graduate students to conceive, design, fabricate and compete with small, formula style, autocross vehicles. Teams typically spend eight to 12 months designing, building, testing and preparing their vehicles before a competition. The competitions themselves give teams the chance to demonstrate and prove both their creation and their engineering skills in comparison to teams from other universities around the world.
“We continue to find ways to aid in education of students interested in science, technology, engineering and mathematics,” MIS President Roger Curtis said. “It is always interesting to see all the innovations the students in the Formula SAE have developed throughout the year. The students compete against the best in the world in the four-day event and it allows us to continue to show off the Irish Hills while providing an economic impact to the local community.”
Over the course of four days, the vehicles are judged in a series of static and dynamic events including: technical inspection, cost, presentation and engineering design, solo performance trials and high performance track endurance. The events are scored to determine how well the car performs. In each event, the manufacturing firm has specified minimum acceptable performance levels that are reflected in the scoring equations.
More than 100 teams from countries around the world, including Austria, Canada, Germany, South Korea ,and the United States are registered for this year’s competition.
For more information about the 2015 Formula SAE Michigan competition, including a full schedule of events, visit the organization’s site, students.sae.org/cds/formulaseries/fsae/.
