2020 Texas A&M BAJA Team

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The 2020 SAE BAJA team began the season strong with ambitious design goals for an endurance-focused vehicle. Midway through the vehicle’s design, SAE announced their new set of rules for the 2020 season that strongly incentivized teams to pursue a 4WD/AWD vehicle, in preparation for the 2021 season where 4wd/AWD would be a required for all teams. As only a 3rd year team, they saw this as an opportunity to level the playing field against the schools that have been building 2WD BAJA vehicles for decades, and unanimously accepted the challenge to build a 4WD/AWD vehicle. They then had to completely start over on their vehicle as they conducted research, created decision matrices, and finalized details of integrating a 4WD/AWD system into the car.

The team worked diligently to create suspension dynamics models, manufacturing tolerance calculators, and acceleration simulations to validate their designs throughout the fall semester, and began manufacturing over winter break. Almost every single day of the Spring semester was spent welding, machining, and assembling the 2020 vehicle to complete the team’s manufacturing goal of having a rolling chassis by the end of spring break. The team had had completely finished the welding of the chassis and was in the process of assembling it’s completed suspension components at the end of spring break when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The university closed all shop access and SAE made the difficult decision to cancel its in-person competition.

Unable to complete their vehicle build, the team pushed on to compete in SAE’s virtual competition where they polished their designs and were given the opportunity to present their hard work to a panel of industry engineers who served as judges for the event. Despite working together virtually, Texas A&M SAE BAJA team placed 16th out of the 100 teams registered to attend the BAJA SAE Louisville competition! Given the global circumstances at the time, to place top 20 was a huge success for the team, and was the highest placement in TAMU SAE BAJA history. The team worked extremely hard to make it as far as they did, and many of the team’s hard-working students continued onto the 2021 TAMU SAE BAJA team where they will hopefully carry with them the knowledge they gained in building a 4WD vehicle into the next season.

project manager

Christopher Larson

Chassis

Team Lead: Matthew Dorn
Dominic Kinsey, Killian Loshelder, Aqil Ali,
Sofia Loya, Jacob Chaparro, Cole Reneer, Faith Gonzalez, Eric Israelson

powertrain

Team Lead: Ni Jay
Alyssa Byrd, Henry Roland, Ethan Boyle, Jonathan Rought, Breanna Alvarez, Tres Domian, Reed Rogers, Sven Lohse

business

Team Lead: Hunter Scott
Kyle Sanborn, Olivia Lesnick

Electrical

Team Lead: Nicholas King
Johnny Feng

suspension

Team Lead: Randall Schank
Christopher Larson, Aryan Minooe, Ethan McPeek, Ediverto Chavez Pintor, Andres Illarramendi, Leonardo Bush, Thomas Roger