Student racers compete at Baja Butler Bash
CLAY TWP -- Engines revved and dust flew as students set off to the races at the second annual Baja Butler Bash on Saturday, Oct. 22.
The competition, run by Grove City College Racing at the SwitchbackMX race track in Clay Township, highlights student racing teams and off-road vehicles from colleges and universities across the region.
Students from Johns Hopkins University, Ohio Northern University, University of Maryland College Park, Miami University, University of Pittsburgh Johnstown, and Grove City College competed in a number of events with a total of 15 vehicles. Drivers entered into a non-stop, four-hour race designed to test their cars’ engineering and endurance.
The 20-student Grove City team has been working on preparing its two cars, Red October and Liberty Bell, since the beginning of the semester, said Olivia Whiteman, vice president of marketing for the Grove City College Racing Baja Society of Automotive Engineers Club.
Red October is about 3 years old and Liberty Bell is about 8 years old, she said.
“We have to make sure that everything is running well,” she said. “Since we don’t make a new car every year, we try to make them lighter, faster, and more agile, because that is really how you win.
“Everything on the car, we built or manufactured ourselves, except for the engine.”
The Grove City club organizes the Baja Butler Bash event, which originally started last year as an opportunity for the club to compete while national competitions were still postponed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The group was able to travel to Rochester, N.Y., to compete in a national competition this past June.
“It was kind of our solution to not being able to travel to nationals; we pulled this plan together,” Whiteman said. “The teams that came last year absolutely loved it, and they also wanted to come back.“
The endurance race challenges teams to build a car that can hold up and complete the most laps over a four-hour stretch. Teams can repair their vehicles, making a “pit stop,” during the race.
“If you can keep your car running for the total four hours, you never have to pit, but a lot of teams end up pitting because something breaks or they need to switch out a driver.” Whiteman said. “We make the decision to change drivers every hour and fifteen minutes, but it can be the same driver the entire time. Basically, what limits you is if you run out of gas, because we are limited with the amount of gas that we can have on the vehicles.”
Whiteman herself took the first shift driving Red October, but unlike some of the other members of the club, she is studying entrepreneurship, not engineering. The club includes students specializing in a variety of areas of study, she explained.
“We let anyone from any major join our club,” Whiteman said. “We’re willing to teach people any new skills they need. We always have specific leadership set in place that are able to teach people. If you’re not an engineer, you’re probably not doing a lot of the design, but you’re absolutely going to be hands-on on the car.”
Professor Michelle Clauss, chair and professor of mechanical engineering at Grove City College, said the program is great for building collaboration among students.
“In mechanical engineering, we have a number of different team activities that students can participate on,” Clauss said. “We see it as a very vital component of their education because it’s a lot of hands on and learning to interact with others, which is definitely important, because teams are from this point on in their careers.”
There is room in the program for students studying a plethora of topics, she said.
“We need to promote information, we need to design things, we need to build them, we need to have electronic components,” she said. “It brings together a whole diverse group of majors.”
Whiteman added that the program gives younger students a chance to contribute to something big.
“We have every year represented within the club. We have freshmen all the way through seniors,” said Whiteman, a senior. “It’s often times the only chance that the freshmen will get to be in our machine shop and really be hands-on, because normally, they wouldn’t get to that point until later on in their academic career.”
