The competition included 54 teams made up of family members, independent racers and a group from Georgia Tech University.
The Texas A&M team worked on its car, “Honey Badger II,” for more than a year. The team is comprised of a group of students who met through the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), a student organization group in the mechanical engineering department.
The objective of the race is to build a high-performance vehicle that will competitively race in several different events for less than the dollar amount of the racing year. This year the grassroots team built and perfected a Mazda Miata for $2,015. The Honey Badger II is fueled by ethanol and dominated the autocross portion of the event, finishing 1.323 seconds faster than the second place team in this category.
The team began racing in the Grassroots Motorsports Challenge in 2009 and has been back to race every year, except for 2014.
Ryan Monheim, a senior in the department who was the team manager and driver, led this year’s team.
“Leading this team has really taught me valuable lessons in business and management,” Monheim said. “Operating on a tight budget and motivating the other volunteer team members on this project has helped develop me in to a professional team manager.”
The purpose of SAE is to provide mechanical engineering underclassmen an opportunity to experience a process similar to the Formula SAE (FSAE) build they will have the opportunity to work on as seniors.