NUS engineering race car wins 7th spot at international competition

SINGAPORE - A team of 14 engineering students from the National University of Singapore (NUS) emerged seventh in the world at the Formula SAE competition held recently in Brooklyn, Michigan, in the United States.

The NUS race car is the only one created by a Southeast Asian and Singaporean team among the 120 contenders.

Formula SAE is an annual student design competition organised by SAE International. Each student team designs, builds and tests a prototype based on a series of rules designed to promote problem solving.

This year's competition was held from May 13 to 16 at the Michigan International Speedway in the United States.

Last year, the team achieved an overall placing of 25th, and the best placing achieved by the NUS FSAE team previously was 19th in 2009 and 2012.

The NUS team also bagged several other accolades at this year's competition.

The team's wireless telemetry system developed by final-year student Shia Junjie won them the world champion title for the Cummins Inc. Applied Technology Award.

They emerged first for the business presentation event, second in the world for acceleration drag race and third overall for FEV Powertrain Development Award, which recognises teams for overall performance in acceleration, fuel economy, cost and the 22km endurance race.

The team also came in fourth for the Bosch Engineering Design Drawing Award.

Professor Seah Kar Heng, NUS FSAE Advisor, said, "We are very proud of the achievements of the NUS FSAE team. This is a project like no other. It pushes the students to work hard and work smart to design and build an efficient and safe machine to race on the speedway. This is why many universities use this project to benchmark their student quality."

He added: "The students are thrown into the international arena, so they are no longer competing with their classmates at school. Our students put up a very tough fight against formidable teams from Europe and the US and we managed to complete all the races reasonably well. It was indeed a great learning experience for all of them."

debwong@sph.com.sg