The FSU Baja team recently com­peted in the “Big Air” com­pe­ti­tion and came away vic­to­ri­ous for the sec­ond year in a row.

The Winter Baja Invitational com­pe­ti­tion took place at Michigan Technological University. Both of Ferris’ cars fin­ished in the top ten out of around 40 cars rep­re­sent­ing 18 dif­fer­ent schools.

John Bauer, one of the stu­dent cap­tains of the team, said, “As a young team we reached our main goal of com­pet­ing in every event and we made it through all but five min­utes of the endurance race with min­i­mal time off track.”

The Baja team is part of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE). It is com­prised mainly of stu­dents from the College of Engineering Technology, yet the team encour­ages any stu­dent to become involved.

They have been com­pet­ing for the last six years. Bauer said Ferris’ team is rel­a­tively new com­pared to some of the schools they com­pete against.

The main goal of the team is to design, build and test an off-road vehi­cle for the SAE Collegiate Design Competition.

Competitions are bro­ken down into two sec­tions. The first is the sta­tic events, which test the vehicle’s basic abil­i­ties such as maneu­ver­abil­ity, trac­tor pull, accel­er­a­tion, mud bog, steer­ing, and suspension.

The sec­ond part is a dynamic event, which con­sists of a four-hour long endurance race that tests every part of the vehi­cle and how well it is built. These tests exam­ine how the off-road vehi­cle will sur­vive rough ter­rain and some­times even the water.

The Baja team will travel next to Rochester, N.Y., where the team will com­pete for the first time in a water event. For this com­pe­ti­tion the team’s vehi­cle must be able to float and power itself through the water.

Last year the team’s main com­pe­ti­tion was in Burlington, Wis., where they com­peted against over 120 teams from around the world. They fin­ished in the top half of the competition.

For more infor­ma­tion regard­ing the Baja SAE Collegiate Design Competition, visit their Web site at stu​dents​.sae​.org/​c​o​m​p​e​t​i​t​i​o​n​s​/​b​a​j​a​s​ae/. n