Cornell's Formula SAE student team won a national competition May 15-18, beating student teams from 75 other colleges and universities in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom in the design, construction and performance of a Formula SAE race car.

In nationwide trials held in the Pontiac Silverdome in Pontiac, Mich., last week, Cornell upset heavily favored University of Texas at Arlington with its Cornell-red car named "ABA-97" (the initials of the team's faculty adviser, A. Brad Anton). Texas had won the competition the past two years.

In addition to the first place prize, Cornell won $7,500 in cash awards, including $3,000 for the Spirit of Excellence Award and six Goodyear racing tires.

Sponsored by General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, and administered by the Society of Automotive Engineers, the event pits teams of students against each other in a competition to design and build an open-wheeled, formula-type race car that is put through a battery of performance and design tests each May.

This was the fourth win for Cornell, which won in 1988, 1992 and 1993, and almost always places in the top 10. Last year Cornell finished fourth.

But this year had all the right ingredients for a victory, said team adviser Anton, associate professor of chemical engineering. (Albert R. George, the J. F. Carr Professor of Mechanical Engineering, normally the team's adviser, was on sabbatical leave this year.)

"We were fortunate to have the right mix of students on the team," Anton said. "They have skills both technical and practical that allowed us to develop a very effective design and fabricate it very well."

Cornell team leaders are Dea Good and Adam Kwaitkowski, both senior mechanical engineering majors.

Also, two significant design changes helped the Big Red to a dramatic victory, Anton said. The first was a switch from racing gasoline to M85, which is 85 percent methanol and 15 percent gasoline. Used in a turbocharged engine, "there is a performance edge," he said. "We had done development work but had not made the change. This year we made the change."

The other advance was going from an outboard to an inboard suspension. An inboard system puts the shock absorbers and springs near the center of the chassis. "That was new, and it was a very effective design," Anton said.

Cornell amassed 847.38 points out of a possible 1,000 to slip past the Texas team, which had 829.66 points, by a margin of only 17.72 points. Another perennial powerhouse, Rochester Institute of Technology, came in third with 799.19 points.

Cornell's advantage was produced in three events: acceleration, skid pad and endurance/fuel economy. In acceleration, teams are judged on the total time required to travel 300 feet from a standing start. Cornell received 59.94 points out of a possible 75, while Texas came in at 24.45.

The skid pad is scored by measuring the time it takes for the vehicle to complete one left hand and one right hand 50-foot-diameter circle, which demonstrates the vehicle's suspension design characteristics. Cornell had a perfect score of 50, while UTA came in at 38.67.

The final event, endurance/fuel economy, is run as the best of two heats of 13.66 miles each to evaluate the overall performance of the car and to prove the car's reliability. Cornell edged UTA 367.28 to 362.06 in this grueling test.

"We knew we had a good car, but it was nerve-wracking because we didn't get all the driver training in that we wanted to and didn't know how well the drivers would do," Good said. "And we had lots of things break in the past few weeks.

And the competition was intense, she added. "Everyone had trouble in the endurance race. Our first heat was clean and fast and that was our best time. But we blew an engine in the second one," she said, adding that it was the first time she could get any real sleep in the three years she has been part of the team.

Students receive academic credit for their work, as a year-long special project in Cornell's Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. The Cornell car was sponsored by General Motors, with additional support from Boeing, Lear Seating Corp., Procter & Gamble and many other companies that donated parts and supplies.

Cornell results at the 1997 Formula SAE Racing Competition

Awards and Prizes: