Drive On

“Yearn to win. If you don’t have that competitiveness, you probably aren’t going to stick around. People are working incredibly hard.“

Hoyt Hicks is exhausted.

You can’t blame him, really. The days and nights before competitions are long; sleep is hard to come by. There’s much to worry about: whether the spark plugs are clean, whether the gear ratio will give you the thrust you need, whether the car’s agility is what you imagined it to be.

As the team leader of the formula side of Knights Racing, UCF’s Engineering Motorsports club, Hicks will be driving the team’s car this morning. It’s a Friday in early August, and he and his team are in Homestead, Florida, competing in a Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) invitational against Florida Atlantic University and Florida International University. It’s a relatively low-key event — friendly and almost quiet, taking place in an empty speedway that smells of sunblock, gasoline and burnt rubber — unlike the larger, more strenuous national competition in Michigan they’ll compete in next May, the prize they have their eyes on.

In between events, Hicks is often slumped over, his orange racing suit unzipped in the morning heat, resting in the shade, gulping bottled water and pushing his hair out of his face. He’s calm and focused, occasionally laughing and joking with his teammates, then returning his attention to the car.

Today, they’re testing acceleration, maneuverability and handling.

A few minutes before the acceleration test, Hicks jumps in the UCF team’s car, which is smaller than you’re probably imagining, almost resembling a souped-up go-kart, only faster and louder and plastered with sponsor stickers. He turns the ignition, but the car doesn’t start. Hicks jumps out and begins sorting out what’s wrong — but time isn’t his friend. The event is supposed to start in mere moments.

With the clock ticking down, he and his teammates finally arrive at an answer: a sensor was dislodged, and the spark plugs got wet. But an answer isn’t a solution; they’ll have to MacGyver something, using only what’s around them. A team member grabs a water bottle and quickly cuts the bottom half off. Hicks places the spark plugs in it while he frantically uses a toothbrush to clean them. Then he lets the plugs dry in the warm morning sun.

A few minutes later, and just in time, he replaces them and the car is ready to go.

Now, wide awake, Hicks jumps in and drives the car to the starting line. There, he revs the engine, a loud, piercing roar, and then floors it. It’s over in a few seconds — 4.76 seconds, to be precise, a half-second behind the victorious FAU.

“The car actually did really well,” Hicks says. The team was able to predict its performance almost exactly, within two percent, and the car dominated in the handling event. But he’s racing last year’s car — and every year, the team designs a new one, if not from scratch then with large chunks of new material, using the previous model to figure out what to do better. The design for this year’s car is already underway. Over the fall and winter, it will be welded into place.

“We’ll fall in love on Valentine’s Day,” he says.

Hicks grew up around cars, as did many members of the UCF formula team. His father owned a Sprint Cup car years ago. When he and his twin brother, Harley — who is also on the Knights Racing formula team — turned 16, they both got manual V-8s and began tinkering with them.

The brothers came to UCF to study engineering. Hicks says he knew immediately that he wanted to get involved with SAE, both because he loves cars and because SAE offers an almost unassailable gateway to the automotive profession. At first, he found the formula side disorganized, the result of a team who had all graduated at once. In his first year with Knights Racing, 2015–16, everything broke. But fixing things — finding a better way to do something — is why many students join Knights Racing in the first place. And so the second year, that’s exactly what they did. They scrapped the old design and started over, building the car they raced at Homestead. They saw a substantial improvement, but it still wasn’t good enough.

For this year’s car, they’ll build a new frame, finish the car earlier and take more time testing it. Hicks is hopeful they’ll have more success in Michigan, where they finished 59th out of 109 teams last year.

His team members, he says, “yearn to win. If you don’t have that competitiveness, you probably aren’t going to stick around. People are working incredibly hard.”

That’s true on the Baja side of Knights Racing as well. The Baja team — which races off-road — has a longer and much more storied history than the formula team does. While the formula team began in 2000, the Baja team has been around since the 1970s, and for a time was one of the top Baja teams in the country. UCF, in fact, hosted the annual competition several times between 1978 and 1996. That last year, 1996, the Baja team came in second at the Mini Baja East competition, recalls Donald Minderman ’88, a former Baja team leader who has worked for NASA ever since graduating.

“The quality of the car itself was obviously a top-10 car. I’m excited to see what happens this year.”

Vicente Porcar, the current Baja team leader, wants to recapture that former glory.

Born in Venezuela, Porcar says he was “always interested in, maybe not cars, but vehicles — motorcycles, off-road, getting dirt on you.” The mechanical engineering student was also drawn to Baja’s hands-on aspect, to figuring out how things work in a tangible way: “The lawn mower went bad. How can I fix it? Where are things going wrong? How can I possibly improve them?”

Whereas formula cars are built for speed and maneuverability, Baja vehicles survive uncertain courses and strange obstacles. To win, your vehicle has to be reliable. “Our courses are almost meant to destroy a car that is not well designed,” Porcar says. “[Formula is] basically fast. In our case, if we don’t do it well, our car is gonna wreck.”

A few years ago, the Baja team was in a tough spot. In 2014, the team competed in national events but didn’t perform particularly well. In 2015, Wyatt Brooks’ first year, things stayed about the same; UCF was ranked somewhere in the middle of the national pack.

But the next year, “the car came together really well,” Brooks says. The team finished 32nd at the national competition — a big improvement, especially considering that the team made some mistakes during the event. “We already built a top-20 car,” Brooks says.

In June, Brooks was the Baja leader, and the team saw even more improvement, placing 17th overall out of 108 teams and 10th in the endurance race. “We actually completed the race, something only 20 cars can do,” Porcar says. “We weren’t very happy with the performance and dynamics events. We didn’t have enough time to test. If we had a little more time to practice, we would have been in the top 10.”

“The quality of the car itself was obviously a top-10 car,” Brooks says. “I’m excited to see what happens this year.”