Australian Collegiate Team Wins Formula SAE Competition

TROY, Mich., May 23, 2003 -- In only their second year of Formula SAE competition, The University of Wollongong (UOW), of New South Wales, Australia, emerged from over 100 university teams to capture the coveted championship. The event, which has been held annually since 1981, concluded last weekend at the Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan.

UOW came into the final event, the Endurance Race, in third place and used an outstanding performance to edge out the University of Missouri-Colombia and Michigan State University for the top spot, overall. The team also benefited by capturing the top spot in the engineering design category.

"Apart from the obvious technical benefits, this has been an extremely worthy management exercise," according to Chris Cook, UOW Faculty of Engineering Dean Professor. "The students had to raise $55,000 in sponsorship to get themselves and their car over to Detroit, which is a considerable achievement in itself."

Three teams returned to the top ten from the previous year. Georgia Institute of Technology slipped one position from 2nd to 3rd, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University gained a position from 7th to 6th and Cornell University's two-year championship streak was broken by a very respectable 9th place finish.

The top ten finishers are listed as follows. The overall score is the sum of individual scores in categories of: cost demonstration, oral presentation, design, acceleration, skid pad, autocross, and endurance race.

 Rank  Team                                       Car#    Overall Score
 1     University of Wollongong                    136         895
 2     University of Missouri-Colombia             43          882
 3     Michigan State University                   107         875
 4     Georgia Institute of Technology              3          810
 5     Auburn University                           40          765
 6     Virginia Polytechnic Institute and
        State Univ.                                 7          750
 7     University of Minnesota- Minneapolis        111         702
 8     North Carolina state University-Raleigh     24          692
 9     Cornell University                           1          687
 10    California State University-Northridge      74          650

Formula SAE is part of the SAE Collegiate Design Series, which will hold nine (9) individual competitions in North America during the spring of 2003. "Engineering is about building better vehicles, these competitions are about building better engineers," stated Bob Sechler, SAE Education Relations Manager.

The SAE Midwest Mini-Baja competition will be held June 5-8 in Dayton, OH and the SAE Aero-Design West Competition is slated for Palmdale, CA, June 6-8. For additional information regarding all of SAE's student competitions, log onto www.sae.org.