A team of UVA Engineering undergraduates proved their skill in automotive design and fabrication at the Formula SAE Michigan competition held June 15-18 in Brooklyn, Michigan.Dani Bilali, a fourth-year undergraduate in mechanical and aerospace engineering is the president of Virginia Motorsports Education and also cooling lead of the Formula SAE team.
Four students captained the UVA team: Mason Notz, a 2022 graduate of computer engineering; Sean Donley, a 2022 graduate of mechanical and aerospace engineering; Brett Mihovetz, a fourth-year student of mechanical and aerospace engineering; and Ben Sporysz, a third-year student of mechanical and aerospace engineering.
SAE International, formerly known as the Society of Automotive Engineers, developed and manages the Formula SAE competitions to challenge university student teams to conceive, design, fabricate, develop and compete with small, formula-style vehicles. Teams demonstrate performance of their vehicles in a series of off-track and on-track events against the clock.
The UVA Engineers competed against 47 other teams, placing 18th overall and 10th in the acceleration event — a major improvement from their 2021 rookie year.
Bilali is a research assistant in the research group led by Robert G. Kelly AT&T Professor of Engineering and professor of materials science and engineering. He will serve as a teaching assistant this upcoming year for Introduction to Motorsports and Advanced Motorsports.
The team began preparing for this competition in Fall 2021. Newer team members, who were enrolled in Introduction to Motorsports, learned how to use computer-assisted design tools and learned about various manufacturing processes. Students enrolled in Advanced Motorsports designed parts for the team's car and helped teach skills to the newer team members. In addition to developing hands-on skills such as welding, 3D-printing, using the waterjet, and CNC milling, students gained experience in project management and teamwork.
“Designing a racecar from scratch takes a long time because we want to design parts the right way in terms of using math and engineering concepts in order to reduce the amount of time and money spent manufacturing various components,” Bilali said. “We spend a good majority of the Fall semester designing parts and conducting finite element analyses on these parts to optimize their performance. Sometimes we even 3D-print rough models of parts to see how they actually look in real-life compared to our CAD models.”
At the end of the Spring 2022 semester, the team had separately checked each and every component and put the entire racecar to the test. “This is when we truly determined whether the various sub-systems in the car were operating as expected,” Bilali said.
The testing and validation phase was critical to the team's success. The team adjusted the suspension based on practice runs at UVA and continued to refine the car's performance based on driver feedback during preliminaries at the Michigan International Speedway.
Get Involved
If you are interested in joining the Formula SAE team at UVA, fill out this Google Form to join the mailing list for Virginia Motorsports and follow the team on Instagram. The effort will ramp up in August with announcements of interest meetings.