The checkered flag might wave early for a team of race car-building students.
The Formula Society of Automotive Engineers is an annual international collegiate engineering competition where students design and build their own race cars. The School of Engineering plans to cut funding to the program that sends a UNM team to the competition. It’s supported the group since 1998.
It costs $55,000 to run the program. Students raise $25,000 of the funds primarily through donations from Sandia National Labs and the Unser Racing Museum.
Last week Arup Maji, interim dean of the School of Engineering, guaranteed to pay UNM’s summer portion — $30,000 — for the next two years.
But in 2011, the team will have to fend for itself over the summer, or possibly shut down, Maji said.
“I am saddened that enthusiastic students might not have this opportunity, because some students certainly look forward to and are very energized by it,” Maji said. “Because I am interim dean and the financial challenges that we face, I am not in a position right now to commit summer salary for 2011.”
The team’s project manager, Joseph Conroy, and deputy project manager, Niki Naber, started two petitions to voice concern for the future of the program. The petitions have received at least 40 signatures, Conroy said.
Of the $30,000 provided by the School of Engineering, $25,000 goes to the summer salary of the team’s director, John Russell. According to the UNM salary book, Russell makes $117,513 a year.
Russell said 15 students participate in UNM’s FSAE, and 220 students have completed the program since it started.
The program lasts a full year, including the summer term.
If the program is not funded in the summer, Russell said the success of the program will suffer.
“One year of not conducting the program kills all the continuity necessary for a successful program,” Russell said. “Would an interim university president think of canceling football for a year while he waited for a new university president to be appointed?”
Steven Carpenter, a junior in the School of Mechanical Engineering, was going to start FSAE program in the spring, but the program has been taken off of LoboWeb.
Carpenter said the FSAE program was one of the programs that brought him to UNM.
“It is heartbreaking to know that something I’ve been working towards for the last two years is gone,” he said. “I am unsure if I want to finish my degree at UNM.”
Russell said students in the program would likely be unable to raise funds to make up for the University cuts.
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“The team barely raises enough money to support the program costs beyond what we get from UNM,” he said. “It would take a tremendous effort — beyond what we are doing now — to fund the summer.”
If the University decides not to fund Russell’s summer salary, the program may continue as a one semester course, Russell said.
He said the program ran as a one semester course before 2004, but it wasn’t as successful as the three-semester model.
“For what I could teach in one semester, there wasn’t enough time to build a car,” Russell said.
The FSAE competition takes place in seven locations around the world — with one in Michigan and California, Russell said. Because of an increasingly tightening budget, the UNM team traveled to California last year to save money, even though 40 fewer teams competed.
In Michigan’s 120-team competition, UNM’s FSAE team placed 39th in 2004, 14th in 2005, and 60th in 2006 and 2007. In 2008, UNM came in 24th in California’s 80-team competition.
