Matador Motorsports, the California State University, Northridge (CSUN) Formula SAE (Society of Automobile Engineers) team, placed 12th overall in the international student Formula SAE competition.
The annual competition was hosted at the Michigan International Speedway during the second week of May. A total of 120 teams, composed of university graduate and undergraduate mechanical engineering students, were judged on the design and performance of Formula 1 style vehicles.
CSUN placed as the third-best team from California, and the top team out of Los Angeles County, surpassing the team’s previous year’s standings.
“We obviously wanted to be a top 10 school. Didn’t get that, but we had other achievements,” said Austin Gomez, a graduating senior and team member from Sylmar.
“We’ve always said we can build a fast car. We couldn’t necessarily explain … how we got there. And this year we put our focus into being able to speak clearly and well about our engineering practices.”
Their efforts paid off, earning them an eighth place in the design portion of the competition and a spot in the design finals, something CSUN hasn’t done since 2018.
The competition is broken into two parts; static events, when the students present their designs, and dynamic events, when the performance of those designs are measured and tested.
Matador Motorsports ran into a problem during the dynamic events, when their electrical throttle body malfunctioned, forcing them to switch it out for a mechanical system overnight.
“You know that’s engineering, sometimes something doesn’t work out and you can’t just sit there and pout. We just have to figure something else out that’s gonna work,” said Gomez.
The CSUN Formula SAE team is a year-long class, one of the nine required project-based senior design classes that engineering students can choose from.
On top of classes, finals, homework, jobs and social relationships, these students dedicated days – and sometimes nights – to preparing for this momentous event.
“It’s surreal,” said Gomez about being surrounded by so many like-minded students and professional engineers.
“You get goosebumps. You feel like a little kid,” he added about getting to see their car drive on a professional track. “They say like, ‘When you get older, your toys just get bigger.’ That’s what it felt like.”
Beyond the event, it was many of his teammates’ first time outside of California. Their eyes were opened to the vastness of the country as they drove through the rain and snow, across mountain ranges and sprawling fields, to get to Michigan.
The seniors made it back just in time for graduation, excited to share what they learned, in the hopes of helping propel next year’s Matador Motorsports cohort into the top 10.