By Anais Hernandez, Sept. 27, 2022
Bronco Motorsports revs its engines preparing for another successful year at competition. Cal Poly Pomona’s very own Formula Society of Automotive Engineers team has been working on their race car for the first competition of the season this upcoming October.
The team has been competing since 1986 and has won multiple awards over the years. Their most recent win came in June. Bronco Motorsports placed 13th out of 50 combustion teams, beating Ivy League universities and other collegiate organizations worldwide. They also won second place in a sales presentation, third in the skid pad competition and ninth in overall design.
Following CPP’s “learn by doing” philosophy, the motorsports team designs, builds and tests their car before racing it at the Formula SAE international competition, with the upcoming event taking place in May 2023 in Michigan.
Bronco Motorsports scheduler and cooling captain Isaac Haynes stated that the team works arduously to improve the current race car design.
“We’re looking to take the same platform that we used this past June in Michigan and really fine-tune every single subsystem on the car to make it as fast and efficient as possible,” said Haynes. “A lot of the manufacturing process and plans that gets done in the spring has been started now to tackle any problem early on.”
The team has started making changes to their race car, the BM-22, to increase their chance of making it to the top 10 in the overall design category.
“We felt like we were pretty close to the winning car at the competition this year,” said Bronco Motorsports’ vice president and aerodynamics captain Alex Yuen. “Our car was similar, so we’re trying to improve it so we can actually compete with a winning car and maybe get top three … that’d be really cool.”
After going through many restrictions because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the motorsports team designed and built the BM-22 with a shorter time frame and a team of 22 members.
“Because we didn’t get the ability to work in Building 17 lab — late end of the year in 2021, early 2022 — one of the big goals this year is to do a lot more testing,” said tires captain Sahil Intwala. “Just dialing all of the setup like the aero validation, suspension and working on decreasing the weight and reducing the size before the competition.”
Although this team is significantly smaller than their competitors, they have shown their hard work, dedication and resiliency through the performance of their race car. The CPP motorsports team is steadily growing as they have welcomed new interns and prospects to help with the manufacturing process this season.
“Considering this was the majority of this team’s first time building a car, the manufacturing process is learned along the way,” said undertray and diffuser captain Orestis Metaxas. “We run tests to see if we’re getting as close to our design as possible … We get the most out of our car if we can get it to go quicker around the corners.”
The team voiced its excitement to finally be in the workshop and prepare for the upcoming SoCal Shootout organized by Adams Motorsports Park this October.
The team’s race car will partake in a friendly competition between local motorsports teams from the University of Southern California; University of California, Santa Barbara; California State University, Northridge and many other universities.
“It’s a fun and relatively chill event where we’ll be able to just drive our car and race against other teams,” said Yuen. “It should be good for publicity and public outreach as well as learn a lot about the car … learn what works well and get feedback from other teams.”
Throughout the next few months, the team leaders and prospects will continue testing the race car at Cable Airport to validate the subsystem and evaluate performance tests and experiments.
“We hope to come back stronger than the year before. We’ve learned from our mistakes and we’re going to do our best not to do them again,” said Metaxas.
Michigan International Speedway will host the international Formula SAE competition in May 2023, when the Bronco Motorsports team will gear up for another hopeful win.
The campus community can visit the team website to learn more about CPP’s Motorsports team.
Feature Image by Anais Hernandez
