With three hours to go, the students stared at a useless transmission in disbelief. The Georgia Tech Wreck Racing team had spent the past year tweaking a 1969 MG Midget to near perfection, and much of the crew was already in Gainesville, Fla., preparing for the Grassroots Motorsports Challenge.
Those still in Atlanta had decided to run their creation through some last-minute testing—but then the panhard bar mount broke away from the body of the vehicle, fracturing the transmission tailshaft housing.
Nearly a year’s worth of work went up in smoke with the transmission, and the vehicle was unsalvageable. The team had just a few hours left before they had to leave for the competition.
“We called up the guys to figure out what to do,” said Matt Meister, a fourth-year mechanical engineering major and president of Wreck Racing. “Our options were: We could do what we could to just get the Midget running and bring it down. We could go ahead and use our same car from last year, which was still in the shop. Or we could just not go. “
The Grassroots Motorsports Challenge, held in the fall, is Wreck Racing’s main event.
Teams from across the country receive a dollar amount matching the year (it was $2,012 last year) to put together a competition vehicle to go through a series of races.
“Not going was never an option,” Meister said. “Everybody agreed with that.”
They were going to compete to the end, win or lose.
The teammates pushed and pulled the vehicle through a series of events, finishing more than 90 seconds behind the field in some—an eternity in racing time.
For their efforts, Wreck Racing garnered the lowest point total of any team there, but the group was presented with the Spirit of the Event award.
It’s a testament to the passion and dedication of Wreck Racing, a group of students who love working on cars. The club offers them access to a large garage on campus and resources through the Institute.
Some students work on the car almost every day. Others migrate in and out as class and homework allow. The hours can grow long, and the work can be difficult.
But for those students for whom cars are a passion, there’s nowhere they’d rather be.
“I just love cars,” said John Gattuso, a third-year mechanical engineering major and press secretary of Wreck Racing. “I’ve had a rough week at school or a rough day, and I can come to the shop and just turn a wrench or cut something or machine something. It’s just relaxing. You can’t get that in the classroom.”
That real-world application is just one of the benefits for crew members, whose majors run the gamut from mechanical engineering to physics to mathematics.
There’s a place for people with all sorts of interests in the Wreck Racing garage. And the benefits of the hands-on experience often carry over to the classroom.
“When I came in [to Wreck Racing] as a freshman, I got to do a little bit of modeling and solid works,” Gattuso said. “When it came time to take the 3-D Tech class, it was like, I had already done the leg work—I already knew where stuff was. So it was a really easy jump to start that class.”
Twitter