These Columbia Undergrads Spend Friday Nights Financing And Building A Race Car From Scratch
Oct 23, 2014, 00:23 IST
Knickerbocker MotorsportsMost college kids are probably spending their weekends studying like crazy or partying into the night.
But for around 40 Columbia University students, a typical Friday night consists of welding metals and writing budget reports in the basement of an engineering building.
The Knickerbocker Motorsports team is hard at work building a race car that'll go from 0 to 60 mph in 4 seconds over the course of one year.
Team members split the work between engineering and managing the car's budget. This year the whole project will cost an estimated $30,000. The financing primarily comes from donations from sponsors and the university itself.
The project starts in September and goes all the way through finals week at the end of the spring semester. In May, the team enters the Formula SAE collegiate racing competition.
Five team members are taking a related 1-to-3 credit course to have more time to work on the car. But for the rest of the team, this is purely an extracurricular activity with no financial payoff and no class credit. They do it because they it's fun.
The team has improved in terms of both engineering skill and budget management over the last few years. It's also grown in numbers. Back in 2012 there were only 17 members on the squad.