Anteater Baja Racing (Baja SAE)

Background:

The UCI Baja SAE team competes yearly in the Baja SAE West Collegiate Design Competition hosted by the Society of Automotive Engineers. Each year the team develops a brand-new single-seat off-road vehicle for the competition based on research into the dynamics of off-road vehicles and a critical analysis of the previous year’s car. The yearly competition hosts 100 collegiate teams from across the world and consists of a series of static and dynamic events culminating in the 4-hour, 100 car wheel-to-wheel endurance event.

Goal and Objectives:

The objective of the 2020 UCI Baja SAE team is to develop a reliable, competitive single-seat off road vehicle to place among the top 10 teams in the upcoming 2020 Baja SAE West competition. In order to accomplish this, the 2020 competition vehicle, named Vandal, must be the lightest, fastest, best performing, and most reliable vehicle that the team has ever produced.

In contrast to the history of Baja SAE at UC Irvine, preparation and design began during the previous year’s competition. This allowed for the design of the entire vehicle to be finalized and validated against the Baja SAE rulebook before the beginning of instruction on September 26th. As the competition was on-going, returning members created a document of issues, concerns, and lessons learned to be addressed for the upcoming 2019-2020 team. This allowed for the consensus of redesigning components on the car only if it failed in order to focus on improving performance. Based on this analysis, the team established the following overall objectives:

Ensure testing of the vehicle is done two months before competition
Have a Tech Ready car one month before competition
Decrease torque ratio from 5.4:1 to 7.2:1 in order to increase torque output by 25ft lb
Reduce turning radius from 16ft to 7ft
Decrease overall weight of the vehicle
Validate all fabricated components against design requirements

Timeline:

09/26 - Design Complete ✓

12/06 - Subsystem Fabrication Complete ✓

01/16 - Rolling Chassis ✓

03/06 - Running Car ✓

03/16 - Tech Ready

04/16 - Competition: Tucson , AZ

Team Website:

https://sites.uci.edu/uciracing/

http://instagram.com/anteaterracing

Contacts:

Faculty Advisor(s):