© 2024 Cornell University, All Rights Reserved
The Team
Cornell University’s Baja Racing Team is an engineering project team that designs and builds an off-road vehicle from scratch each year to compete in the Baja SAE Series. Our team first began in the '80s, and came back in 2003 after a brief hiatus. Since then, we have grown to be 50 members strong and we have had top 10 finishes for the last eight years straight.
We spend the fall semester designing our vehicle, and the spring semester manufacturing and testing. Each member of our team is responsible for taking their part through the entire design cycle, including research, 3D modeling, analysis, manufacturing, and testing. We manufacture 90% of the vehicle in-house, including machining complex parts on CNC machines, welding our frame, and fabricating our suspension links.
We travel to three competitions each year, where our car is put to the test on tracks with brutal obstacles and our vehicle design is carefully evaluated by judges. This past season, we placed 1st Overall in California, 2nd Overall in Pennsylvania, and 2nd Overall in Michigan. We were honored to receive the 2nd Place Mike Schmidt Iron Team Award, meaning that our team had the second highest aggregate score across all three competitions out of 120+ teams from around the world.
This year, we’re aiming for the top—1st place Iron Team—and designing our best vehicle yet. With your support, we’ll power through every obstacle and cross the finish line in first place!
The Competition
Each competition is a four-day event that is designed to exhaustively test every aspect of our car.
During the first two days, our car undergoes a rigorous technical inspection to ensure rules compliance and safety. We also compete in static events such as Design, where we present about the design of each subsystem on the car and then answer questions from judges.
On the third day, we participate in short dynamic events designed to test specific aspects of our car’s performance, such as speed, maneuverability, towing capacity, and suspension. The most punishing of these events is Suspension & Traction, where the car has to climb over huge obstacles, crawl through rock gardens, and send it over jumps—all as fast as possible.
The final day of competition is the Endurance event. It's a four-hour long, wheel-to-wheel race where all 100+ cars are out on the same track at the same time. Cars often crash, roll, and break—in which case the team needs to go back to the pit, repair the car as fast as possible, and get back out there! It's a grueling and often muddy race that showcases how all of our hard work has come together into a fast and durable vehicle.
Why it Matters
At Cornell Baja Racing, we’re not just building cars—we’re building the future of engineering. Our team provides members with practical engineering experience, and teaches crucial skills that you just can't learn in a classroom context. Many of our alumni credit their time on Cornell Baja for giving them the foundation needed to succeed professionally at cutting-edge engineering companies.
Our team also strongly values inclusion and works to encourage under-represented groups to participate in engineering. Baja has historically been a male-dominated competition, and so several years ago, our team started the #girlsofbaja movement to encourage more female participation. We do outreach programs for girls in high school to get them excited about engineering. Our team has been 50% women for many years now, and it's been wonderful to see a huge uptick of women on other Baja teams recently as well.
Your donation will directly support the next generation of Cornell engineers. Contributions to this campaign will allow us to enhance our education beyond the classroom by giving us the tools and resources needed to succeed. Specifically, your support will:
By supporting Cornell Baja Racing, you’re not just donating to a student project—you’re investing in the engineers who will lead the future of the industry.
Visit the links below to learn more about our team!
Website: https://baja.mae.cornell.edu/
Facebook: facebook.com/CornellBajaRacing
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@CornellBaja
Our fellow student engineers are our daily support network and any help from you is appreciated!
A donation of $25 would allow us to purchase basic shop supplies that we use on the daily, such as shop towels, acetone, sandpaper, or super glue.
A $50 donation allows us to buy important safety equipment such as respirators, gloves, and safety glasses to use while fabricating parts.
A $100 donation can buy us stock material that we machine into parts such as the four-wheel-drive dog clutch, our custom brake calipers, or the bushings for our suspension links.
A donation of $200 will allow us to purchase critical hardware such as bearings for the custom transmission or hub nuts to retain the wheels.
A contribution of $500 will allow us to buy useful shop tools such as an angle grinder, or important sensors for our testing such as strain gauges.
A contribution of $1,000 will help pay for hotels and transport so that all of our team members have the chance to see their part perform in at least one competition.
A donation of $2,000 will pay for us to register for a competition, where we will compete with over 100 international teams!
A donation of $5,000 will allow us to invest in high-quality equipment to push our performance to the next level, such as a precision-toleranced fixture table where we weld our frame.