Teams

Brown Formula SAE

Garage Headquarters: Providence, RI

Driver: Gil Breingan

Mechanics: Mark Fuller, Saben Murray, Jared Slucter, Luke Angelini

Nuts and Bolts:

“Everybody on our soapbox team designs, builds, and drives small formula style racecars,” says Saben Murray, captain of the Brown Formula SAE effort. “Also, as Brown students, we all live atop College Hill, the site of the soapbox race.” Murray and his teammates Luke Angelini, Gil Breingan, Mark Fuller, and Jared Slucter are engineering students at Brown, and as such they collaborate and compete in the annual Formula SAE competition against approximately 120 teams from colleges and universities around the world. But at Red Bull Soapbox Race, motors are a no-no, so they’re adjusting their engineering tactics to focus primarily on steering and handling – because they figure that the less they have to brake, the faster they’ll finish.

The teammates are building their soapbox racer – which is based on a welded, steel-tube space frame – at Brown’s Prince Lab, and they assert that so far it’s looking “sweet,” thanks in part to the efforts of new freshman members of the school’s Formula SAE team who are pitching in on the unusual “extracurricular” project. “We would like to actually have the freshmen driving and as pit crew on October 13,” says Murray tentatively. Perhaps it’s a new kinder, gentler form of hazing.