The Associated Students Board of Directors approved funding for Spartan Racing in a meeting in the Student Union on Wednesday.
Spartan Racing at San Jose State is a design team of over 100 students, who manufacture and compete with a Formula One style open-wheel race car against other colleges in the U.S.
The team applied for $4,736.62 financial support from the board to support their car assembly.
Business administration senior, Aaron Hylton, is Spartan Racing’s treasurer and business lead.
“In our current season budget, we have around $55,000 unfunded right now, most of which are coming from competition expenses we requested to alleviate some of our members so they can actually come to compete with us,” Hylton said.
The A.S. Board approved $4,330.64 from Spartan Racing’s initial request.
Spartan Racing is also a conglomerate of several student organizations including Spartan Racing, Spartan Racing Baja, Spartan Racing Electric and a mechanical engineering team.
“Coming to this, we try to obtain appropriate funding, not too much, because we understand we have to share this with the rest of the college and we try our best to do that,” Hylton said. “We knew that some of the more critical components, such as the vehicle control unit, dev board, tires and rod ends are some of our big ticket items this part of the season.”
Mechanical engineering senior, Ashwin Viswesvaran, is the chief engineer for Spartan Racing and represented the organization for their funding proposal.
“Our goal on the team is to provide our members a practical experience of working on a system in the car that’s directly relevant to industry standards – and very similar to vehicles you see on the road today, while simultaneously improving our vehicle and competition performance,” Viswesvaran said.
Viswesvaran said the tires, rod ends, control unit and development board are important assets to their vehicle design to ensure the vehicle does well at competition and mechanical designers can get data based on execution.
“It’s critical that we have appropriate tires to really extract the true performance out of the car to get amazing data to look at and learn from,” Viswesvaran said “Our vehicle control unit and development board is extremely critical to not only operating the car and allowing the driver to actually accelerate and slow down the vehicle – but it’s also critical to the advancement of our control systems that will allow us to implement many systems you see in Formula One such as drag reduction system, trash control and regenerative braking.”
Viswesvaran said Formula Society of Automotive Engineers is an important experience for many people in college.
The Formula Society of Automotive Engineers is an international competition of university teams who design and manufacture race cars to see whose vehicle performs best, according to the Formula Society of Automotive Engineers website.
“It not only opens the door to many interning full time positions, but it also gets the team and the school a lot of attention from prospective employers and sponsors,” Viswesvaran said.
Magnus Herrlin, A.S. director of internal affairs , said he approved Spartan Racing’s funding.
“Some RSO’s [recognized student organizations] need more money and other RSO’s don’t touch a nickel, so we want to get the money to students who need it,” Herrlin said.
He said recognized student organizations that need funding have a limit of $2,700 when applying. However, when organizations need more money, they ask A.S. for more.
“I believe that all RSO’s should be entitled to the exact same amount, it may not be fair to others,” Herrlin said.
Herrlin said A.S. would like to change the hard limit, so more student organizations can receive funding.
“It’s a massive relief for us,” Viswesvaran said. “We have extremely high expenses, especially with inflation and cost skyrocketing every year, so it’s great to have this money at this time of the season.”
