Northwestern Formula Racing - Testing Funding

What We Do

Northwestern Formula Racing is an undergraduate student group that works to design, manufacture, test, and compete a Formula-style open-wheeled racecar. Our mission is to produce the world’s best engineers by building critical engineering skills, producing a competitive vehicle, and placing alumni in top engineering jobs around the world.

We compete in SAE International’s Collegiate Design Series and race on an international platform against 120 teams. Each student team designs, builds, and tests a prototype based on a series of rules whose purpose is to promote complex problem solving.  

We are a relatively new team with an impressive history and an even more promising future. With six cars completed, we now have years of experience to draw from, and a growing network of alumni helping us to advance and improve each car. Given the extended project format, our team familiarizes students with the planning, execution, troubleshooting, and maintenance that is expected from many engineering graduates. Ultimately, these skills are what makes great engineering employees, and it’s clear that Northwestern Formula Racing creates leaders in the field.

The Project: Testing and Validation

After years of developing our program, the team has found a rhythm for design and manufacturing. We design all components of the car in CAD and run advanced analysis on each piece of the car before it is built and assembled. From there, we manufacture components in our state-of-the-art on-campus machine shop. Then we put them on the car and race.

However, this process is missing an essential step: testing. Testing is arguably the most essential part of the engineering cycle because it is how you learn whether or not your design works like you expected it to. We’ve never been able to do proper testing and validation on our cars. Our first few seasons, this was because we were building our cars until competition day, but this year will be different!

Our car will be completed and road-ready five weeks before our competition, which leaves ample testing time. The problem now is that we don’t have the facilities to do it. Much of our testing used to happen in on-campus parking lots, all of which are now under construction, so we need your help to take the car to the racetrack for tests.  

We need your help:

Our goal is to raise $10,000.  This will allow us to purchase a data acquisition system, relevant sensors, and rent testing time at local racetracks.