Perhaps inspired by NCAA hoops, each May teams from over 100 international universities gather outside Detroit for the Formula SAE world championships. The FSAE competition covers designing, building, marketing and racing an open wheel car that complies with a complex set of rules defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers. This year’s competition began on Thursday, at Michigan International Speedway. After the first day of events (cost, marketing, design, noise, and braking), both historically strong teams and upstarts were represented on the leaderboard. Top teams in the marketing event were the National University of Singapore, Technical University of Delft, Munich, Florida and Colorado. Heading up engineering design were Helsinki, the Technical University of Graz, Ecole du Technologie Superieur, and TU Delft.

On Friday, the dynamic events began in earnest. Top teams in skidpad were the University of Texas at Arlington, the University of Applied Sciences Graz (free Red Bull in Austrian Universities?), Rochester Institute of Technology, Cornell, and Stuttgart. Surprise leader in acceleration was Saginaw Valley State, followed by RIT, Rensselaer Polytechnic, Western Australia, and Cornell. An exciting autocross event involved lots of missed and crushed cones, but the best clean runs were posted by Missouri Science and Technology, last year’s overall winner Wisconsin, RIT, UT Arlington, and Western Australia. We’ll post another report tomorrow, with results from the critical endurance event as well as the finals of design.

-- T. B. Martin