June 8, 2023
Written by Emma Ryan | Photo courtesy of Savoy Motor Museum
When Georgia Tech Motorsports (GTMS) began building a vehicle for the 2019 Formula SAE Michigan competition, they had no idea it would be three years before the vehicle competed in the event. The No. 70 car faced many obstacles, including the pandemic in 2020 and an unexpected crash in 2021, and was unable to compete until 2022, finishing 23rd.
“Car 70 is a story of redemption and resurrection,” said Eli Cooperman, president of GTMS and a fourth-year business major. “Just as the 70s persevered to compete, our team overcame tough times to get to where we are today. We built the No. 82 car and finished seventh, our best finish since 2004. The success of the 82 is due to everything we learned from the 70.”
Car No. 70 is one of five cars currently on display at the Savoy Automobile Museum in Cartersville, about 45 miles northwest of Atlanta.
“GTSCC is ground zero for fostering engineering innovation among our hundreds of students,” said Tom Sinar, director of development at Savoy. “We want our visitors to be amazed by the talent and skills of our student engineers. Automotive is the future of the industry and this exhibition will help show where the automotive industry is heading.”
This exhibit will feature five of the seven teams that make up the Georgia Tech Student Competition Center (GTSCC): GTMS, Georgia Tech Off-Road, Wreck Racing, Hi-Tech Racing, and GT Solar Racing. Their vehicles are on display alongside Porsches, British roadsters and American pickup trucks. It’s all part of Savoy’s mission to connect visitors with the beauty and history of the automobile.
“All of these competition vehicles started as ideas in students’ heads, and it’s a real honor to see them come to life and now on display at the museum,” Kupelman said. “Dedicated students put thousands of man-hours into these vehicles and they feel as if they are part of us. It is humbling to see them so highly recognized. That’s how I feel.”
Ready for off-road or really cheap cars
GTSCC teams are entirely student-run and led, giving students hands-on experience designing, engineering, and testing vehicles from start to finish, as well as managing people, projects, and deadlines.
“The team at SCC offers an experience like no other,” said Alex Repp, a fourth-year biomedical engineering major and SCC dean and GTMS driver control engineer. “This is a way to bring the engineering processes and methods taught in class to life in a tangible way and learn concepts that may not be utilized in class, but are essential to success in engineering and motorsports. ”
Anna Risner, president of GT Offroad, agrees: Learning theory in class is one thing, but applying that knowledge to a physical project is quite another. ”
GT Off-Road races single-person off-road vehicles in Baja SAE competition each year, facing challenges such as drops from several feet and four-hour endurance races. His OR-7 Resilience, currently on display at the Savoy, is his 2022 vehicle for the team, where he finished seventh at the Baja SAE Tennessee competition.
“Throughout the year, we faced setback obstacles, and it wasn’t easy to make up for that lost time,” said Risner, a mechanical engineering student. “The team is very proud of the fact that they spent so many hours building the vehicle and performed so well in the competition.”
Wreck racing teams face different types of challenges. To participate in the Grassroots Motorsports $2000 Challenge held at Gainesville National Raceway, a team’s vehicle must cost less than his $2000. With tight budgets, the team must push the limits of their ingenuity, sourcing materials from dumpsters, junkyards, and the Internet to keep costs as low as possible. The team’s display vehicle, the 2001 Chevrolet S10 Extreme, won him second place in the final competition of 2022.
Like Rep and Risner, Rec Racing president and third-year mechanical engineering student Kyle Socha finds the hands-on experience he gets from his team invaluable.
“Every student should join a team like Rec Racing so they can apply the knowledge they gain in the classroom to real-world problems,” he says. “With each car and competition, we learn from our failures and successes and apply them to the next build cycle. It’s very rewarding to see the changes we make improve performance. That’s it.”