This Northeastern club doesn’t shy away from a bumpy ride
Northeastern Baja SAE has a simple goal at the start of each year — build a brand new off-road vehicle from scratch and take it to competition.
After securely putting on a helmet and harness, Eleanor Johnson had just moments to mentally prepare to tackle the many logs, hills, jumps and potholes that lay ahead on the dirt track.
Participating in the Baja SAE competition in Palmyra, New York, Johnson had been called to be the second of three drivers on the Northeastern team competing in the tournament’s grueling four-hour off-road race.
Johnson was excited to put to test the off-road all-terrain vehicle built by the Northeastern Baja SAE student club, whose sole focus is developing and building such machines. But the rising fourth-year mechanical engineering student and co-design lead on the club admitted to having some nerves.
“One second you are standing there, and the next second you’re strapped in the car and told to go,” Johnson said. “It was kind of insane, honestly.”
But it’s those exact experiences members of Northeastern Baja SAE live for.
Founded in 1985 in coordination with the global Society of Automotive Engineers, Northeastern Baja SAE has a simple goal at the start of each year — build a brand new off-road vehicle from scratch and take it to competition. The name Baja comes from the famous off-road desert races held on Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula.
The students compete in three SAE Baja competitions in the U.S. each year — one in the west coast in the spring; one in the east coast in the summer; and one in the midwest in the fall.
Building a car from the ground up every year, and one that is capable of competing, is far from an easy undertaking, team members explained. But the student team has done it consistently for years.
The club is in the process of building its 27th model, explained Theordore Lourie, a rising fourth-year student majoring in electrical engineering and music technology and one of the co-design leads on the team.
Planning typically starts in the fall but this year, the team started planning this summer to give it more time to prepare for competition, he explained During the first phase, the team comes together to review what went wrong with the previous model and decides what needs changing for the next one.
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From there, the team’s various subteams, which focus on chassis, brakes, suspension and drivetrain, spend the fall at work creating initial designs for the latest model and go through various review stages, including receiving direct feedback from the team’s alums, Johnson said.
“Some of them are working at actual automotive companies like Honda,” he said. “They have real-world experience and they can bring that knowledge to us to make sure that we don’t make simple mistakes.”
Real machining and manufacturing begin in the spring and into the early summer.
Each year, the finished car might look a little different depending on what the team prioritized.
Last year’s model, for example, came in lighter than usual at less than 420 pounds and features a toggle to easily switch from two-wheel-drive to four-wheel-drive. That feature came in handy during uphill challenges.
The students aim to take full advantage of Northeastern’s machining equipment to build out the car. The goal is to build with as many machined-parts as possible, Lourie said.
“It feels more like your car when you’re building it,” he said. “If you send all the parts you design to someone else, it’s still your car, but if you actually build every little piece on it, It feels amazing.”
While an outside observer may think the main draw of the club is getting the opportunity to take its vehicles for a spin, for many the biggest draw is the experience of getting to build the vehicle with their peers.
Joshua Luce, a rising fourth-year mechanical engineering student and a new member manager, said newcomers are often interested in designing cool mechanical parts.
“That’s my favorite part,” he said, adding, “designing things that are really cool and seeing them work together with what my friends have designed to make a really functional, really successful car.”
Although Luce has been on the team for three years, he hasn’t had a chance to test drive one of the vehicles just yet.
But that doesn’t bother him. If he does manage to get behind the wheel one day, it will just be icing on the cake.
“If I’m having this much fun and I haven’t even gotten to drive the car yet, how much fun am I going to have when I actually do,” he asked.
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