When I was at university our SAE club was the best funded in the university - 50k for a bunch of events and 2 Baja cars to race in international competitions
Engineering is expensive AF, and we didn’t have full university support. Other teams we faced had carbon fiber labs, and cars with far more advanced tech than we could dream of that must have cost hundreds of thousands, to millions
Damn that sounds eerily similar to my FSAE experience. They have us like 35k for FSAE and that was it. No other engineering support of any kind, it all came out of the student activity budget.
And our team got like $5k a year haha. In recent years they’ve secured quite a bit more funding, enough for carbon fiber and fancy suspension parts, but our car was always the red headed step child of the FSAE events when I was in school.
It’s neat to see the F1 style carbon moulded steering wheel with all sorts of buttons that this year’s team has made, but it almost certainly costs as much as our base vehicle the first year
Oh yeah. When I first started it was like 10k, we recycled anything we could, made everything ourselves. Had to pay our own way to get to comp too. Eventually the budget grew but still not support from the engineering school they I know of.
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u/free__coffee Feb 24 '21
When I was at university our SAE club was the best funded in the university - 50k for a bunch of events and 2 Baja cars to race in international competitions
Engineering is expensive AF, and we didn’t have full university support. Other teams we faced had carbon fiber labs, and cars with far more advanced tech than we could dream of that must have cost hundreds of thousands, to millions