On the field, first-year student Preston Roach plays for the lacrosse team as a midfielder and keeps up his competitive attitude.
But off the field, the mechanical engineering major wants to put his skills and desire to compete to work and bring people of all kinds of majors on one goal — building a one-seat race car and winning a race with it.
The Bison Racing Club, which Roach is the leader of, hopes to compete in Pittsburgh’s Formula Society of Automotive Engineers (FSAE) league. Other participating universities include the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Penn State.
Roach noticed Point Park was absent from that list and wanted to change that. Now, he says he’s built up enough interest to get the wheels turning on the FSAE club and hopes to get a car built and in the upcoming Pittsburgh Shootout FSAE race.
“It was just kind of a thing that spurt on me at the moment,” Roach said. “We had a bunch of people already interested in this type of idea and we noticed it was a club previously, so we kind of just rebirthed it into our own club and it started from where they ended at.”
Matthew Pascal, chair of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Technology department and Bison Racing’s academic advisor, said the club isn’t completely new but rather something Roach and some other students have revived.
“Five-ish years ago, it was started by some mechanical engineering students and they made some progress, and then they all graduated,” Pascal said. “They build a car that seats one person and there’s a racing circuit.”
Pascal said the club is no different than having a sports team, as it’s a group of people competing against other schools to win.
SAE racing clubs have several different disciplines according to both Pascal and Roach. Bison Racing is focusing on building a formula race car, while other disciplines focus on off-road rally racing as well as an aeronautics version, typically with drones.
As Pascal mentioned, the previous iteration of the club was not able to get much attention from the student body and never got into a race. However, Roach said he doesn’t want the same thing to happen, so he has recruited help from students of varying majors, not just engineering students.
“It’s a great resume builder to have a type of FSAE background, especially for people in business or [public] relations or anything like that,” Roach said. “We were having to get separate teams for that, not just the engineering position, so people can experience the real world of how to handle the money, pitches and also the calculations and everything behind the logistics of actually building the car.”
Beyond getting students to design a formula-one race car completely from the ground up without buying kit pieces or borrowing design elements from already existing cars, one of the biggest challenges for the organization and any SAE racing club is money, according to both Pascal and Roach.
To mitigate this, the club is hoping to secure plenty of sponsorship deals, almost like how NASCAR drivers and cars are sponsored, such as branding on the car itself or on the suit the driver must wear.
As far as how much money is needed, Roach said it will range anywhere between $60,000 to $80,000. The club will not see any money from the university for support either, which is normal for any SAE racing organization on a college campus.
Pascal said he hasn’t reached out to any companies yet to try and secure sponsorships, but said it’s on his list of things to do. For now, he’s hoping to get those in the car dealership world interested in the project to throw their support at it, along with other companies which don’t necessarily deal with cars.
The sponsorship money, Roach said, is for building the rest of the car as well as machinery. He said Gregg Johnson, an electrical engineering professor, is also helping out with the effort.
So far, Roach said there are about 14 people in the club, such as business majors and PR majors, along with people in the NSET department. Roach said there are COPA students involved as well.
When Bison Racing’s car will be complete is up in the air. Pascal said the students got started a bit late if they wanted to get the car fully finished and in a race by this year, which would take place in August at Summit Point Motorsports Park in Summit Point, W.Va.
The Pittsburgh Shootout Race, which utilizes this track, is where Pitt’s Panther Racing team and CMU’s Carnegie Mellon Racing team races as well.
Beyond just asking for sponsorships, Roach hopes to create brochures which explain the purpose of FSAE racing and what Point Park’s role in it could be, such as what happens if Bison Racing were to win a race. He hopes to have tiers for sponsors, which could range from $500 to $1000 per sponsor.
Even though the team may not be able to race this year, according to Pascal, he still wants to be there for them and let them succeed.
“If they’ve got a group of students motivated to do this, I’m ready to do whatever I can to help them out,” Pascal said. “It’s not going to happen right away, but we’ve had mechanical and electrical and civil engineering for decades. There’s no reason we can’t do this.”
As far as membership goes, Roach said the racing club is open to all majors for anyone who wants to help build the car and possibly drive it.
