Teams

Itemobile

Garage Headquarters: Providence, RI

Driver: Mike Medeiros

Mechanics: Dave Pakula, Joe Gordon, Juris Grauds, Mark Guarraia, Dave Baker

Nuts and Bolts:

The folks at Item Group are great at product design and development. Day in and day out, their first priority is sharing their expertise in industrial design, mechanical and electrical engineering, and more with clients. The only downside is that they never take time to engineer something just for themselves. Or at least they didn’t before Red Bull Soapbox Race came to Providence. Now they’re using their free hours to design a gravity-powered racecar that looks like a mouse. The innovative concept even includes a giant mouse wheel.

“We’ve never built a soapbox car before, but our team has a lot of experience building everything else,” says Dave Pakula, captain of the IteMobile effort. The teammates had so many initial design ideas that it was hard to decide on just one, but a six-foot plush mouse seemed too adorably crowd-friendly to pass up. The challenge lies in that darn wheel. “We’re still running numbers to determine if it’s feasible without exceeding the weight allotment,” Pakula acknowledges. “To make things even more difficult, we need a lot of gearing and a clutch, so that the ‘passenger’ can choose when to engage or disengage from the drive wheels.” He smiles and adds, “Thank goodness we’ve got a bunch of mathletes on the squad.”