When Eric Allocco toured Syracuse University before his freshman year, the Racing Club caught his eye. But he didn’t learn about it from an activities fair or brochure – he saw them driving custom-built cars around the Quad.

Allocco, a junior mechanical engineering major, is now the head of the Racing Club’s formula car division. He and about 20 other students work long hours in a small, greasy room in the sub-basement of Link Hall. There, they turn classroom theory into a hands-on project, building a car.

The club will test-drive its formula car in the Skytop parking lot on South Campus this morning in preparation for Saturday’s autocross, the first race of the year. The autocross starts at 10:30 a.m. at Cherry Valley Motorsports Park, a go-kart racetrack in Lafayette, about 15 minutes south of Syracuse.

‘You pay 25 bucks and you get to drive whatever you want,’ Allocco said. ‘You have a really good time.’

Local clubs and organizations race against the clock to beat the competition, and can test their car’s handling. All participants get a placard, and the winners of each autocross are awarded a little metal trinket with a ‘T’ on it.

‘I haven’t picked mine up yet,’ Allocco admitted. ‘It’s all about having fun with it. It’s all about getting to know your car.’

The club has two finished, driveable cars and two that are still under construction. The formula car this year – the engineers couldn’t remember if they had named it Vivian or Susan – is made of steel alloy and boasts speeds up to 90 mph. It runs on 94-octane gasoline and has a standard six-speed transmission. The parts in the car are mainly scraps from various cars and motorcycles. The engine is from a 1987 Honda Hurricane motorcycle.

‘It’s a junkyard car,’ Allocco said.

Junkyard cars, however, are still expensive. This car cost around $15,000. But there are many additional costs, such as race fees and transportation. The team has many local sponsors as well as a few national ones, including NASA and General Electric. ‘The biggest drawback is the fact that most engineering college is theory-based, and it’s hard to get support for this,’ said Jon Rejman, a senior mechanical engineering major. ‘The funding is pretty good – people give us funding, they really work for us.’

The racing season ends in May, when an international race of formula cars is held in Pontiac, Mich. The club’s Mini Baja car, a vehicle that goes off-road, flips safely and floats in water, will attend its own competition in Montreal. Sponsored by the Society of Automotive Engineers, schools from as close as Ithaca and Rochester and as far away as Germany attend the formula race. The multi-part race consists of such evaluations as a 22-mile endurance run and slalom tests for speed and handling.

The cars are also judged on various aspects of their engineering ingenuity, including dynamic and static qualities. Dynamic qualities include things such as durability and maintainability, and static qualities include things such as design and efficiency. In addition to these two categories, teams must make a formal car presentation to the judges and pass a rigorous, by-the-book inspection.

The cars undergo an evaluation of their mass-market appeal in addition to the prestige of winning the SAE-sponsored race. The cars schools build act as a prototype for formula cars that can be reproduced and sold to the general public.

The Racing Club itself consists of mainly engineering majors, although that is not required for membership. All a potential member needs is a love for modern engineering and complicated math problems. The club has existed at SU for decades, but slowly faded out of existence until its revival in the late 1980s. More students have become involved, and the club has become a more prominent campus organization.

After his freshman year, Allocco found himself in charge of building the formula car with a young staff of volunteers after it was dropped as a senior design project.

‘I kind of got things rolling a little bit, so just by default I ended up in charge of this thing,’ he said. ‘I’m happy with it.’

They meet formally every Wednesday at 5:30 p.m., but the club’s members frequent the shop all day long.

‘People claim they live down here,’ Allocco said.

Some members who live nearby even work on the car over the summer to prepare for the fall races.

The process of building a car ideally takes about a year, but this car has taken three. Last year, the members braved an 18-degree first day of spring to test out their new creation in the Skytop parking lot. During the snowy months of the winter, the car undergoes a constant design process, in anticipation for the big race in May.

‘Theoretically, the process of it is you spend a little while designing it all,’ Allocco said, ‘then you spend the winter building your stuff and putting it together, then come the warmer weather you get it out and test it. But a lot of times that doesn’t happen, and the cars will be untested going to Pontiac.’

The project requires a heavy workload and large time commitment, but many Racing Club members wouldn’t have it any other way.

‘This is basically the reason why I come to school every morning,’ Rejman said. ‘I like the hands-on, I like to see how stuff goes together. That’s what I do.’

Additional reporting by Asst. Feature Editor Rob Howard

Published on October 1, 2003 at 12:00 pm