CSUN Racers’ Hopes Crumble in the Dust

A team of California State University, Northridge mechanical engineering students battled sand and heat and the hand of fate Saturday on a mile of nasty road near San Luis Obispo.

For a moment, it looked as though the students had a shot at the Western States championship of intercollegiate off-road racing.

But finally, fate prevailed.

The CSUN mini-Baja race car limped to an 18th-place finish in Saturday’s four-hour endurance race, giving the team an overall standing of 15th in the three-day event.

It was quite a disappointment after CSUN’s second-place finish last year, their first time in the competition.

There was one consolation in defeat, however. The part that broke, knocking them out of contention, was one of the few they had not built themselves.

“It came straight from a Honda Odyssey,” the team’s faculty adviser, Reza Asgari, said, referring to a popular off-road vehicle.

Lengthy Preparation

Twenty students from CSUN’s mechanical engineering department had been preparing since last summer for the competition, which is sponsored by the Society of Automotive Engineers and engine maker Briggs & Stratton.

They raised nearly $6,000 in money and materials from university grants and private industry in the Valley.

They designed their car and built it from scratch, cutting, milling and welding most of the parts themselves.

The CSUN team hoped to gain a winning advantage by building a car that was 90 pounds lighter than the one that placed second last year. They also improved the suspension and power train.

The team to beat, as usual, was the University of Texas at Arlington, which had won the competition six of the last seven years. To make things even tougher, the University of Maryland shipped two cars out by train. Maryland, winner of the East and Midwest competitions, was hoping to claim a national title.

Title Within Reach

After the first two days of the competition--covering appearance, drag racing, hill climbing and maneuverability--CSUN was in seventh place, only 47 points behind the leader, Arlington. With 400 points at stake in the endurance race, the title was within reach.

“We have to beat them by five laps,” CSUN’s pit boss, Bruce Ryan, said. “It’s going to take great pit work.”

The race began with a roar and a cloud of dust. Thirty cars bounced over hills, spun through turns and spit dust at one another. Two cars died on the first lap, and their crews pushed them into the pits.

CSUN’s driver, Doug Kreinheder, ran several laps in third place, behind Arlington and one of Maryland’s cars.

A shout of joy went up from the CSUN crew when the two leading cars were snagged in a pileup, and Kreinheder negotiated around them for the lead.

The thrill didn’t last long. Kreinheder got too eager on a series of whoop-de-do bumps and was bounced into a leaning turn just beyond them. The car went end over end. When Kreinheder started it up again, he was back in third place.

Trouble Surfaces

At the first pit stop, trouble was evident. The left front tire had been pushed inside the rim. Bits of rock were wedged against the tire. Though half a dozen crew members kicked at it, they couldn’t get the tire into place.

The crew decided to send the car back on the road and get a new tire ready for the next pit stop.

Kreinheder had just returned to the track when the car stopped. The pit crew squinted through the dust to see what was wrong.

“He’s not in the car,” somebody shouted excitedly. Actually, Kreinheder was running after the car, which was driving around in a circles.

“He must have lost that darn tire,” someone said.

Kreinheder subdued the car. But when he picked up the whole tire and wheel assembly, there was a general panic.

“It must have sheared the bolts off,” someone volunteered, too optimistically. They soon learned that the axle hub had disintegrated, completely disabling the car.

A crack from the crash could have done it, or it could have simply been the pounding of the track.

Whatever the cause, it looked fatal. There was no spare hub.

“We never figured this would break,” Asgari said, shaking his head.

The pit crew ran to the field and retrieved the crippled car, two men lifting the corner with the bare axle.

With a great deal of shouting, grunting and sweating, they removed the left front axle and replaced it with a spare, scavenged from last year’s car. They realigned the wheels by eye and shoved the car back on the track in less than 30 minutes.

It was a triumph of pit work designed merely to keep the car moving until someone could go into town and buy another hub. No one expected the car to move very well because the two front axles were of different dimensions.

“It’s just a totally different geometry,” pit boss Ryan said. But the news from town was bad. There wasn’t a hub to buy.

The car had to finish with bad geometry, and it was never again in contention. Texas Arlington cruised to another victory. Maryland’s cars placed second and third.

But the CSUN crew didn’t go home empty-handed. They have a vital lesson to pass on to the next class of automotive engineers.

They’ll tell them to build their own hubs.