This is Part 2 of a series written by guest writer Ricky Nietubicz on his experience on the Formula SAE team at the University of Delaware. FSAE is a competition where students design, build, and compete with small formula-style racing cars. Ricky was President of his FSAE club, and his team went to the Nationals in Detroit during the 2006-2007 season.

FSAE requires manpower. Lots of it. Nobody will have much experience, and the sum total of the knowledge on many teams is less than the knowledge gained by Ferrari’s F1 team in a single testing session, and that’s just fine. There are many things that must be remembered when forming a team and recruiting, not the least of which is the fact that you are essentially constantly forming and re-forming your team, as people graduate and move on, run out of time, or simply drop off the face of the earth (Garrett, if you ever read this, give me a call. Or give anybody a call. We just want to know how your ///M3 is doing. And whether or not you’re alive.) freshmen and upperclassmen join to replace them, every team is in a state of constant turnover.

Problem number one is to get warm bodies into the shop and onto the team. Problem number two is retaining said warm bodies, and problem number three is getting them to do something useful and/or productive. Sounds easy enough. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be on a racing team? Who wouldn’t want to build race cars and get to drive the crap out of them? Plenty of people, unfortunately. And lots of other people would be more than happy to, but they never know your team exists, or they don’t have the time to participate.

A later installment will focus on organization within the team, this installment is dedicated to forming (and re-forming) the team on the fly. Number one is to advertise, as much as you possibly can. Get out there, and bring the car. Advertise to new students, current students, everybody. Post flyers, show up at events. Talk to your school newspaper and see if they can run an article or two or ten about you. The best rule of thumb is that you can never advertise too much. Don’t stop recruiting with Mechanical Engineers. Of course you will need engineers, but you’ll need some good old-fashioned backyard shadetree mechanics who know what works, and you mustn’t lose sight of the fact that you also need people to fill plenty of non-engineering roles, I’ll address this in the “team organization” installment. Be sure to point out the plethora of roles, you don’t know what a few fishing expeditions can turn up. As a point, two of my best engineers had no interest in cars, but loved the engineering challenges, and one of our most knowledgeable machinists and general car problem-solvers was a Criminal Justice major.

Now you have warm bodies. The key to retention is involvement. Period. And sweeping the floor of the shop doesn’t count as “involvement.” What you need to do is get everyone to do something. If people come in with experience, great, they can work on something that they already know. If not, that’s just fine- I mean, really, how many college freshmen have wired a car from scratch, or designed a set of pedals? This is where you have to have good communication between the upperclassmen and the freshmen, so that the freshmen can get involved and up to speed. Teamwork counts, looking down on freshmen doesn’t.

Social events. The backbone of college, right? Have them. Invite everyone. Yes, even that annoying freshman who talks nonstop trash about everything. Get everybody together, and become friends as well as teammates. Make sure people enjoy being around the people that they will be working with. BBQs, trips to the local drag track, whatever. Just get together and have fun. Unless you are consistently a top-10 team, people are coming around to enjoy their time at college and meet people, not just so they can put it on their resume, and unless you are a top-10 team regularly, I’d bet dollars to donuts that you don’t exactly have people beating down the doors to get on the team.

The upperclassmen really need to sit down before the school year and new recruiting begins, and decide exactly what projects need to be done, and which ones are good projects to involve the newbies with. For instance, designing a frame is better left to those with experience who have shown their skills, but some basic machining tasks can be handled by anyone with a scratch of mechanical aptitude. Assembling suspension components, transplanting motors, changing oil and coolant, touching up paint and the like are all things that need to be done. When the newbies come around for a while, they’ll quickly learn (hopefully) some more basic skills, and sooner or later, one of them will be a natural welder, machinist, engine tuner, whatever. You just have to let them somewhat sort themselves out, and careful observation by those with experience is key.

What this somewhat touches on is that the team should be organized into subgroups working on specific tasks. More on this will follow in later installments.

Another thing to keep in mind is that experienced team members and newbies alike will screw things up from time to time. It happens. Yes, encourage people to be careful and think twice before they act. But at some point, a bolt will get cross-threaded. Somebody will be machining an aluminum carrier for the diff to replace the heavy iron one, and on the sixth or seventh hour of machining, they’ll start the CNC on the wrong step, sending the cutting head straight into the piece. And yes, that happened- I couldn’t make that stuff up.

The point is, even the best people are still, well, people. They make mistakes. Somebody will flub an assembly, somebody will order the wrong part. The thing is, you can’t ride those guys too hard about it. On an FSAE team, there is a place for everyone, and it’s important that everyone feels welcome. If you start driving people away, nothing will get done. If you don’t include newbies, they won’t stick around.

Another safe bet is to get them into the car as soon as humanly possible. Doesn’t have to be the newest car, it can just be a junker that’s sitting around. Driving a purpose-built race car is the reward for the times you’re in the shop when you should be studying, knocking a full point off your GPA, your utter lack of social involvement outside the club, everything. At the end of the day, it’s all about the car, and the key is to get the car and the team tied together.

One last and final note on retention- you have to make sure people get at least a minimal amount of work done. Over the years our team suffered pretty high rates of attrition. Many members started as Mechanical Engineering, but ended up as Criminal Justice, Civil Engineering, Engineering Technology, and who knows what else. That’s fine, plenty of them were never really cut out to be engineers. Some had to leave the University entirely. While it’s important to encourage people to come out and work on the car, it’s important to make sure they stay in school so that they can continue to work on the car.