Start of Something New

The first of week of school marked the beginning of yet another exciting year for the Duke Motorsports team. In this week, we hosted a barbecue for new members outside of our garage, we participated in the Duke University Activities fair, and even had a driving day. 

Team recruits new members at Duke's annual activities fair

With more than 50 new people attending our annual barbecue, we are confident that we will be able to meaningfully expand our team.

Team hosted barbecue: excitement and burgers everywhere

Emily imparts wisdom

BONUS: SNEAK PEAK 

We've started designing and manufacturing for the new year already and are hitting the ground running. Here is a sneak peak of some of our team building the frame jig and welding the frame!

Ella and Keith trying on the frame for size

The End of Another Season!

With the competition season over, the team has taken a break for a bit to recoup and regroup. To recap our year, here are a couple of the big things we accomplished:

1. Moved from 13" diameter wheels to 10", which required a complete redesign of the suspension and significant alterations to the frame to accommodate. In addition to the design work, these changes also required the team to fabricate all of the required parts from scratch; nothing could be taken from any of our past assemblies!  
2. A new pedal assembly was designed by our senior mechanical engineering members. This design improved throttle response and braking performance while keeping on-car packaging simple.
3. A renewed focus on member development and recruitment which has resulted in the effective size of the club almost doubling in less than a year! 

Overall, we placed 44th out of 118 teams that participated at competition this year. A special thanks goes out to our seniors for all of their hard work and the incredible level of dedication they've shown to the program. We also would not have been able to make it through without the support of our various alumni and faculty adviser Dr. Neil Simmons. Thank you everyone for all of your hard work and effort to help make the "GF-1" possible! 

The final group photo of the team post-endurance race finish with GF-1