Lady Tigers to Roar at SAE's Mini-Baja(R) East
12 May 1998
Lady Tigers to Roar at SAE's Mini-Baja(R) East
WARRENDALE, Pa., May 11 -- Eight women will drive onto the
Tennessee Technological University campus in Cookeville, Tennessee, next
week on an engineering mission -- to break the male-dominated hold on the
Mini-Baja(R) East, an off-road student design competition sponsored by the
Society of Automotive Engineers.
These Mini-Bajas have been taking place since 1977, but never before in
the 21-year history of this event has an all-female team entered the lists to
do battle for the contest's title.
The eight women engineers hail from Auburn University, and they call
themselves The Lady Tigers, after the University's mascot. The octet has
designed, built and tested their own vehicle, equipped with a Briggs &
Stratton 8-horsepower motor.
Next week they will compete against 49 other all-male and coed teams from
universities across the U.S. and Canada over rugged terrain to determine which
team has produced the best and most reliable vehicle.
Most of the team members are from Alabama. Team captain sophomore Jacque
(Jackie) Cole comes from Muscle Shoals; Senior Eva Lovelady is from Auburn;
seniors Cammie Gallops and Marla Shelley are from Montgomery; senior Julie
Borstorff is from Jacksonville and junior Sherilyn Posey comes from Hokes
Bluff.
The only two out-of-state members are Andi Hood from Powder Springs,
Georgia, and Christie Coplen from Lima, Ohio.
These female engineers have a simple goal: to build the lightest, most
efficient car without sacrificing reliability. Performance is important,
because it determines the number of points awarded, but reliability is even
more important because there are no second chances. If a vehicle breaks down
during an event, the team receives no points for that event and must repair
the problem immediately in order to continue to compete.
And the events are designed to test the limits of these off-road vehicles.
Terrain varies from high grass patches, sand, mud, dirt bumps and jumps,
tight, twisting turns and even a deep water course. On the final day, the
vehicles must negotiate all these obstacles over a four-hour endurance race.
But the women are ready for the challenge. They have built a new car to a
new design and have developed a team pride and a realistic can-do attitude
toward the problems they have encountered and expect to face in the coming
week.
What are their chances? It's very seldom that a rookie team takes first
place in one of these competitions. But they will be trying to rack up the
most points they can against more experienced all-male teams. And even if
they do not finish in the top ten, the learning experience of designing,
building and testing their own vehicle will be invaluable both in their
future classroom work and in their careers.
SAE is a non-profit educational and scientific organization dedicated to
the advancement of mobility technology to better serve humanity. More than
74,000 engineers and scientists who are SAE members develop technical
information on all forms of self-propelled vehicles including automobiles,
trucks and buses, off-highway equipment, aircraft, aerospace vehicles, marine,
rail, and transit systems. SAE disseminates this information through its
meetings, books, technical papers, magazines, standards, reports, continuing
education programs, and electronic databases.
SOURCE Society of Automotive Engineers
