‘Everything’s up to us’: RedHawk Racing’s fight to return to competition

On Tuesday nights, long past when most Miamians have gone home for the day and tucked into bed to watch Netflix or hit the town to enjoy Oxford’s nightlife, an eclectic group of students meet in the engineering building. They’re not there for a study group or to catch up on homework.

They’re there to build a race car.

They commiserate on the difficult course load that engineering students face, type away on sticker-covered laptops and discuss Chipotle fundraisers, but their goal is clear.

RedHawk Racing has not competed in a formal competition since the fall of 2022 due to multiple factors, including funding issues and low participation. However, they plan to return to the track soon, and until then, it’s all hands on deck.

Photo by Kethan Babu | The Miami Student
A member of RedHawk Racing working on the team's vehicle

There are two sub-teams within RedHawk Racing– Formula and Baja. Both are categories under the Society of Automotive Engineers, an industry standards organization that also organizes competitions at the collegiate level.

The Formula team builds cars to open-wheel specifications, similar to those racing in Formula 1 or INDYCAR. RedHawk Racing competes in the electric category, where the car is powered by an electric battery rather than an internal combustion engine. The Baja team is centered around an off-road vehicle that will survive a challenging endurance course. The races typically last four hours and are typically split between three drivers.

It’s not just a test of a driver’s speed. The real focus in student racing categories is the construction of the car. The work that goes into designing and building these cars is brutal, especially when combined with the challenging engineering courses that most team members are in.

A big challenge for the team is getting the funds necessary to go racing. They estimate that $30,000 is needed to design and build new cars for each category.

The team has one major sponsor, but without university funding, it must look for other sources of funding. Due to conflicts with the engineering department’s rules about senior capstones, the team doesn’t currently receive any funding from Associated Student Government.

Most of the team’s money comes from yearly grants. This is, in some ways, part of the process for student racing teams. At Baja competitions, the team is expected to present a written proposal as if it was a real company manufacturing the car.

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Regan Jones, a sophomore business economics major with a minor in sports management and leadership, participates in the team on the business side of things.

“Obviously I’m not an engineer, but I love cars and motorsports,” she said.

Part of the $30,000 valuation derives from the frame of the car, which costs about $5,000 to order, cut and bend to design specifications. The electric batteries for the Formula car are expected to cost close to $10,000.

While it is cheaper to run an internal combustion engine, the team prioritized the expensive electric system because it believes it aligns realistically with the automotive industry, where electric vehicles are becoming increasingly popular.

The suspension assembly, motor mounts and other smaller hardware for the cars have to be built in-house. They are first designed in computer-aided design softwares and later built and attached to the car.

Photo by Kethan Babu | The Miami Student
A car that RedHawk Racing has been working on this semester

It’s easy to get caught up in the level of attention to detail required to prepare a project of this magnitude, but the team members take it one step at a time, doing what they can to make progress.

Natalie Klein, a first-year mechanical engineering major, credits her interest in motorsport to her family attending the Indianapolis 500 each May. The race is the crowning jewel of the NTT INDYCAR series, and considered one of the parts of the Triple Crown of Motorsport.

Racing is a male-dominated sport, with only nine female drivers in the history of the Indy 500. Klein expressed that seeing other women, like Emma Flower, a co-captain of the team, at RedHawk Racing is a nice change.

“I try not to let it get me down too much,” Klein said. “I try to say that it’s just because I don't have as much experience as other people, but sometimes I just feel incompetent. It’s definitely also motivating in a way. I know, like Emma, she’s somebody I know not just as a friend but as a mentor, just cause she’s super, super smart and is in a club full of guys. She’s leadership.”

Juan Moya, a senior mechanical engineering major and captain of the Formula team, found out about the club at Mega Fair. Through his time in the organization, he has risen to a leadership position.

“The main thing that kept me here was that I had figured out how to do something that nobody knew at that point,” Moya said. “In terms of the leadership skills and everything, I learned a lot because I had to step out from nowhere.”

Moya also shared that participating in RedHawk Racing has taught him skills that he feels will prepare him for a professional career in the automotive industry or engineering more broadly.

Alex Ivanov, a junior mechanical engineering major, emphasized how the design process creates a unique challenge for student racing teams. He cited problem-solving with limited resources as a key skill that the team cultivates.

“We want to do something specific, but we don’t have a way to make it, so we’ll have to figure out how to do it,” Ivanov said. “We want to make carbon fiber body panels, but we don’t have a way to do that, so we’ll have to go with a plastic route.”

RedHawk Racing continues to prepare for the day they’ll see the checkered flag wave again, but like every student organization, members will graduate and leave the team behind as they start their professional careers. With them, they’ll take experience and confidence that can only be built through the long hours they dedicate to the team.

“It’s different from in class because in class you can have things constrained to a rubric or things that you already know are impossible to do,” Moya said. “But here, everything’s up to us.”

@wahllily

wahllm@miamioh.edu