Starting A Formula SAE Team From Scratch
I founded University of North Florida’s www.OspreyRacing.org. In 2022, the team celebrated their 10-year anniversary.
Please contact me at if you have questions or you’re interested in starting your own team. This is an area I'm uniquely qualified to mentor.
Your hardest obstacle will be pessimists. 99% of the people you pitch the idea to won’t be supportive. They’ll focus on all the obstacles–tell you it's too hard, too expensive, can't be done, etc. You need to ignore them and focus on the 1% that believe in you.
Surround yourself with 2-3 core supporters.
Plan on a 2-3 year startup. It will take at least 1-year to get the club started and 2 years to build your first car. We started designing the car when the club was 6mo old.
Your only goal for a first year team is, build a car that passes tech on the first try and finishes endurance. Don't worry about making it fast, handle well, aero, or well tuned. If you simply construct the car and pass all the dynamic events, you succeeded.
An ugly, heavy car that finishes endurance is better than a light weight car that never finished build.
Business
You're not building a race car. You are building a business. Businesses need marketing, public relations, accounting, fundraising, community outreach, recruiting (all volunteer), and most importantly money and tools.
See what SBA (small business administration) resources your school offers. I was able to attend free seminars on fundraising.
Contact SAE.org and let them know you're starting a school chapter. They'll send you resources and help you setup a bank account. See if your school has an on-site bank. These are usually for clubs.
Contact student government. They have resources for getting clubs started. They should have options to request funds or pay for travel.
You'll need a place to collaborate electronically. We used google docs/dropbox.
Contact your school administration. Pitch your idea. Present a formal business proposal, you'll get a better reception. Don't know how to make a business proposal? Contact your school's business college, they'll connect you with resources.
Start reaching out to local businesses and pitch your idea. You won't gain much traction at first (which is fine), but you're putting yourself on people's radar, so in a year, when you have a half built race car, you can return to them.
Contact local motorsports, your local SCCA chapter. You might have tons of community racing resources (hobbyists).
Speak to every single person you meet, about your idea!
You'll be amazed at how many people say, "Wow, I know someone who would love to hear about this and help you, here's their number."
Plan on $500 seed money for various expenses, flyers, posters, t-shirts. It's grueling, but we did car washes. It was not efficient use of time, but it raised $100-200 capital per event.
Grow your chapter. Hold monthly public meetings, advertise it loudly. Get free t-shirts from student government. Put meeting flyers on every/entrance to the building. Make yard signs and place them in high traffic areas.
Your school probably has an electronic calendar to publish meeting events.
Your school probably has free conference rooms in your student union.
Team Organization
You'll need 5-10 solid people to build the entire car.
Remember you're running a business, so you need officers. You're also building a product, so you'll need an engineering team.
The President doesn't direct development of the car, they run the business to support the engineers to build the car. Same people will be doing multiple roles, but be aware they are distinct roles.
Team Captain directs all engineering/mfg. activity.
You'll need a lead for each discipline: suspension/steering (tires, wheel package (hub/ upright), chassis, brakes, powertrain (intake, engine, exhaust), drivetrain, engine cooling.
Capital
Plan $15k-20k just to build an Internal Combustion car.
Make a budget to forecast costs and constantly update to keep it current, more so once you start spending money. Get thrifty-search craigslist or eBay for used parts. Craigslist is particularly useful for sourcing engines, OEM parts from wrecked motorcycles
We were lucky enough to have $15k of personal seed money. I think we raised another $5-10k and probably got another $5k in donations (parts, material, services, machine time).
We used to work at the NFL stadium during games selling beer/hot dogs. It was not good hourly pay on an individual basis, but it made $400 for the club each time, so a couple thousand for a whole season.
Ask for seed money from your university. You're more likely to get them to invest in equipment for the school. We got our department to buy a TIG welder. A few years later they added CNC machines to the shop for us.
Anytime you buy anything, always ask for a discount/sponsorship. You'll be surprised what you get. The worst they can say is "no."
See if your school has a "Student Safety Committee" that awards grants. We got $500 of driver PPE donated for safety reasons.
Contact your Alumni Association and get involved in the fundraising they do. See if they can help with your campaign.
Aurora bearing Co. gives FSAE 50% off.
SKF bearings are free (up to a certain amount). All our wheel bearings were free.
Google "FSAE sponsorship".
Building the car
There are some practical obstacles that you can't avoid.
You need space to build the car. At minimum, a steel table. Work with your school admin to carve out a build area. We started outside in the truck dock, eventually moved inside, and now the team has their own facility.
You need a machine shop to build the car. You need a machinist to teach you machining. If the school doesn't have one, contact the local trade school. We were very lucky to have an industry mentor.
You need a TIG welder (some will argue with me, trust me, plan on needing it).
Contact SolidWorks. They'll send you free copies of the software. Teach yourself as much as you can.
Google "FSAE tutorials". There are tons of SolidWorks FSAE specific tutorials published by Dassault in collaboration with SAE.
Once you have SolidWorks, you can start designing, while you solve practical problems like funding and manufacturing.
Buy as many parts as you can. You want to be a parts integrator. Sounds lame and super un-sexy. But you will have your hands full with all the parts you can't buy.
Read the rules. Don't be foolish and get disqualified because you missed a rule. Engineering is a detail oriented career. Pay attention to the details! We had a committee meeting before we released the chassis and checked off every single rule.
I went to a print shop and had small spiral bound rule books printed and distributed to every team member.
Someone on the team needs to know vehicle dynamics. Whoever is going to develop the suspension needs to learn Vehicle Dynamics. Start with all the Carroll Smith books and Milliken's Racecar Vehicle Dynamics (RCVD).
Google OptimumK. I think you can get a free trial of the software. Plan on purchasing it.
Each year in Michigan, OptimumG hosts a 3-day vehicle dynamics seminar for FSAE. If you can attend each year, your school can have a consistent new group of engineers to design suspension/steering.
Since the suspension is the cornerstone of the car, it should be developed first. We had a 4-man team propose this as their senior capstone.
I would say suspension/steering/tires are the only "specialized" disciplines that need to be learned outside of school. Everything else (maybe not aero) can be designed with general courses taught in school.
Contact your school's library and find the process to purchase new books. I got the library to purchase $500 worth of books that are now part of the library collection.
Ignore tire data for now (maybe controversial!). Make a simple histogram of tire sizes, maybe cross reference that with vehicle weight, track width, wheelbase, pick a tire and move on. You won't have the skills to use tire data effectively. You won't have the money to spend on it. Once your team has raced a few years and has sustainable cashflow, work to get tire data. Once you have the data it's a whole other project to make MATLAB/excel tools to post-process the data and make it actually useful enough to drive engineering decisions.
Project Management
Get a copy of Microsoft Project (I prefer the desktop version, not the cloud). Learn gantt charts, tasks, predecessors, etc.
Create a schedule with these basic milestones.
Preliminary Design Review
Detailed Design Review - Approval to make/buy parts
Drafting
Release to Manufacturing
Manufacturing lead time
Purchase parts lead time
Assembly
Debug
Testing / Tuning
Competition
Plan to be done with design 4-months before comp, 6-months if you want adequate testing time.
Force yourself to stop designing. If you don't, you won't finish the car. Perfect is the enemy of good.
You will severely underestimate how long it takes to manufacture something. Expect everything to take 2-3 times longer than you planned, even if you accounted for a 2-3 margin factor.
No matter what your schedule says, you'll be working up to the very last moment and more so during comp.
Conclusion
Always be laying the groundwork for future growth/sustainability. Each new year should build on the previous. Develop excel calc sheets that can be used to design your systems from scratch. Include equations and references off to the side so new members have a starting point. Eventually you should have a very mature design library/process for each system.
Apply fundamental engineering principles to your designs. Use this project as an example to become a professional engineer. Build a design portfolio for your career.
Always be marketing your team, take pics, show 3D renders, whatever. Make it interesting for people to follow your social media.
If someone is good the photography or video editing, ask them for support. Here’s an example of our promo video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3wv7jtVgOQ
Make life-long friends.
Develop skills.
Learn to weld.
Learn CAM / writing gCode.
Learn vehicle dynamics, engine thermo, drivetrain mechanics, brake mechanics, suspension tuning.
Learn CAD/FEA.
Have fun. The whole effort is a learning exercise.