Hello to everyone reading this
First off, I would like to thank every member who considers this opportunity and to the administration team for backing me in this endeavor.

Many of you don’t know me, my name is Aaron Courain, I’ve been restoring my 74 914 for about 3 years now and id be nowhere without the assistance of this club, its one of the greatest groups of people that I know.

I have been around this club for a few years now, and I have seen everything that we have to offer and how many of us can really come together and make a difference very often. I have been lucky enough to meet and interact with some of you and it’s been great and I hope I can continue to do more and more and help as much as I can.

I am going into my junior year at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), with a major in Mechanical Engineering. For the past two years I have been part of our school’s SAE Mini Baja team, and I have learned a lot in those two years.

Since I Heard of the Formula SAE event, it’s always something that I have wanted to compete in, but unfortunately my School did not already have an existing team. So after lots of discussion and research with fellow students, we have decided to construct a team to engineer and build one of these cars for the 2008 event. Since we will be a first year team, we decided on a 2 year build time to allow for the unexpected.

Formula SAE is a worldwide automotive design competition for college students. The goal of the competition is to have students engineer and construct a Formula car, which will be evaluated among entries from universities around the world.

At this point in our team’s progress we have started designing certain components of the car, and have been seeking sponsors to aid us. One of the first ideas I had was this club, having seen how helpful it has been in the past on many occasions.

I know that not everyone is able to be a financial aid to us, and that is fine, as a new team we have many things that we will need aid with, and I know that the diversity of the members of this club represent expertise in almost every aspect of motor racing. If you can give financially, then by all means feel free to do so, we cannot have a team without funding. But we are also in need of basic tools for our new shop at school; anything at all can be helpful. Advice will never be turned down, and I know I will be coming here with questions.

For more information on the Formula SAE event, you can visit
www.sae.org/students

for more information and to follow progress, of our team, you can visit
www.njit-fsae.org

I believe it would be easiest to donate through paypal, so I set up an account at
adc6@njit.edu
I would like to thank everybody very much for reading and considering this, and I encourage people to contact me about any questions or ideas they have or if you can assist in any way, I will also keep the club updated with everything that goes on with our team.

Thank you for your time

Aaron Courain

Click to view attachment

In July's Automotive Engineering International magazine edition there is an article on the results from this years FSAE, a team from Australia won....that must have been an expensive trip !!!

Good luck with it, I'll be sending some funds your way once I read a little bit more on the program at your school....

Hey I'll donate a good, used 911 steering rack if you need it.

PM me.

Good Luck and enjoy the competition!

Aaron,

I'm a 3rd year ME major at University of California at Irvine. I have a few tips for you. First; you need to innovate to get money. Let your ideas start to flow then present them to corperations to get funding. 500 bucks here and 1000 dollars there helps you get a car to competition, but it wont help you get a competitive car. If you can proove to a corperation (or club or individual) that your ideas are solid and they should stand behind you, you will get some real funding to carry out your project.

Second, dont use any full size car parts. It was a nice offer, but nothing from a full size car (even a porsche) should be used because it is WAY too heavy for a FSAE car.

Lastly, get your car done by October at the latest if you want go for a win. The most mediocre cars with the most track time often win the competition. Get as much track time as you can with a short, lightweight, good driver (in that order).

-Matt
'07 UCI FSAE - powertrain designer

matt thanks for the advice, ive scheduled a 2 year build to alot time for testing and breaking stuff....and the unexpected

im planning to go to the even this year to visit, will you be there?

2 years is a good plan.

I'll be at FSAE West. I was there last month. Detroit is a long drive from so cal.

Cool stuff, I was on the University of Texas team back in '98 or so. I was a blast.

-Britain

Hmmmm......

What about parts donation? There are a LOT of people in manufacturing around here.

...... Bet someone could chuck up some "government jobs" for ya.......

We just finished up our first year and competed at FSAE West last month. It will be a steep learning curve, but if you and most of your team stick with it there are many good things to be learned for not only engineering's sake, but also for life in general (ie management skills).

While Matt R says not to use a 911 rack, use whatever you think is best in time, cost, and performance. We're going to try to use one this year, and I'm going to start lightening it this week probably. Lafayette University basically took a Volkswagen Rabbit and built a formula car out of it for the west event and did extremely respectible for a first year team even though their car wasn't the prettiest.

Also I'd put driver skill over how heavy a driver is any day of the week. We've ran quite a few auto crosses and I'm about 80 lbs heavier than one of our drivers. We usually run 1-2 and the other drivers who aren't quite as experienced and weigh in the middle run farther back.

October is a good time to shoot for because you will find parts of the car that need to be redesigned/remade and it will give you time to find those parts. Our car had a terrible design and while we did pretty bad in the static events we were able to finish relatively respectibly in the dynamic events and we finished every event which was our initial goal any way.

Now if I could only get my D-jet to run as well as our performance electronics set up......

Just build a car and sort it out. 90 percent of the teams that show up won't finish. Shit breaks and the cars don't finish. Don't worry about being innovative your first year. But you better have a sound engineering reason for doing what you did and you better be able to explain it. I went through this with the team I was on a few years ago.

You don't need a carbon fiber chassis with a turbo motor and titanium parts. You can build a simple, lightweight steel tube chassis with a simple stock motor with a custom intake and header. Use a Suzuki motor. Build for a broad power curve, your power will be down below 12500rpm.

yeah, having 2 years on the baja team i know about stuff that breaks, ive seen some pretty nasty failures due to design flaws, and i know that a simple plan is a better way to go than something radical....my goal is to get to the event and complete it successfully without breaking, if i can do that ill be extremely happy...but i have to get to the event first!

Aaron...."Movie Time Cars" has some pretty good resources. Let me know if you'd want to sit down with them for a chat. They've been pretty generous with their time and facilities up to this point....

....after your done with the car, you could lease it to them for Fast and the Furious VI

You need to write a solid business plan to get funding. Have somebody who's studying business help out. I need to see your plans for the money and your ideas for the car before I pull out my wallet. Not trying to be hard on you, I'm sure I'm not alone in my thinking.

If in need of any spun fab parts ie. stacks intakes or what ever just drop me a line and I'll see what I can do for ya

I feel like I've met you before...

My brother Adrial just graduated from Rutgers and was suspension team leader for '06. I think they placed 15th overall.

Ray, thats something i thought of too...maybe we could work something out

Mark, i understand totally, i would feel the same about my money. our team has done research, talked to other teams, looked at cost reports etc, and we have put a goal of 25,000, this number is not just for the car..but also for the event expences and such....if you want to see a breakdown of where money will go to, on different components of the car, i can do that for you, let me know

Yarin, we met at the first NNJR AX this year and talked for a bit, i know one guy on the Rutgers team, he spent a semester at NJIT, and i want to get in touch with them and see if we can come down and look at their car and talk to get a better feeling of things...

thanks guys
-Aaron

does anyone on the site do shirt embroideries? i want to make some shirts for the team
thank
-Aaron