Written by Eli Roberts // Photo by Grace Hurt
The Harding University Baja Team is a student-led organization that designs, builds and competes with a single-seat, off-road vehicle every year against schools across the world. Every year, the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) hosts a competition series and releases rules and regulations that Baja and the other teams have to follow to compete.
“The big change for 2023 is, for one, this is the first time we have ever been required to have a four-wheel drive vehicle,” senior Ryan Hankins, the Baja team captain, said. “So every year since the start of the organization, the vehicles were two-wheel drive only. In 2020, they gave us a heads up that this change was coming and to be prepared.”
When Baja heard about the upcoming changes in rules, they began designing and constructing the project. The SAE encouraged teams to start early before officiating the rule in the 2022-23 season. Harding’s team successfully started the four-wheel drive early for the races.
“We built a four-wheel drive vehicle in 2021, and it was very successful,” Hankins said. “We won a lot of the events at the competitions and placed fourth place overall. Then, in being so successful, we have just built off that, which gives us an upper hand.”
Another change the team has to make is acquiring a different engine. Baja believes this engine will be about 20% faster than the older model engine.
“With a new engine, this means all the data we have whenever we started as a team in 2013 doesn’t matter,” Hankins said. “The whole system is so much more powerful, so everything has to be redesigned.”
This new engine requirement is a big deal to the program. The team will now have to reconstruct the whole vehicle to fit the new power and torque of the engine.
“I think it’s going to be really cool,” junior Colton Mercer said. “It is exciting because we had those slow cars the past two years that would not move very fast because of the lack of power. But now that’s going to be different. This means it’s bigger, bigger frame, and everything is made in-house.”
The final change of the season is that everything has to be made in-house. This means that other businesses or companies cannot step in and construct anything for the team, primarily the chassis. Freshman Christian Wilson said that with the new rule in place, Harding students will now fully construct their own chassis or they will be penalized points in competitions.
“You’re supposed to make as much in-house stuff as you can,” Wilson said. “It’s a learning experience. If everybody has professional stuff built, it defeats the whole purpose.”
Wilson said that even with the new rules and changes, the team remains optimistic about their performance in the 2022-23 season.
“[The team is] optimistic, I think,” Wilson said. “The last time there was a major rule change, our team was ahead. We shook up all the teams at once, put in the hard work and came up prepared. I think we can do this again.”
