STARKVILLE — Driver Kinsly Burleson is behind the wheel of a formula-style race car, ready to give the crowd gathered around him a show. He revs the car’s engine. 

And then, it revs again without moving. 

Burleson calls back over his shoulder to the waiting Mississippi State Bulldog Motorsports SAE team. Almost immediately, a group of four members in maroon shirts run to his side, going over the components of the car engine that they spent the past 48 hours rebuilding. 

“This is half of what you do, just sit here with the car broken,” Burleson joked from his place behind the wheel. 

But after a minute, Burleson and others realize it’s a simple issue with the car’s shifter. Someone accidentally installed the wrong bolt. The part is swapped out, and Burleson hops back behind the wheel, this time roaring off in the student-built car. 

Jacob Bosarge, team captain for the Bulldog Motorsports Formula SAE team, said he was glad the issue popped up during Saturday’s showcase, held in a parking lot behind the IDEELab, which is in the Patterson Engineering Laboratories on the Mississippi State University campus. 

In fact, he hopes to see “a whole lot more of this” to identify any issues the car may have before the team takes it to competition from May 14-17 at Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn, Michigan. 

Every year between competitions, Bosarge said, the team builds a new car from scratch. The team starts with a design, followed by models, prototypes, and eventually, the final car. Throughout the process, the work is divided into eight teams, each of which works on a different area of the car, Bosarge said. While some focus on aerodynamics, others focus on suspension, driver ergonomics, the chassis and more. 

“Pretty soon, you end up with something that runs,” Bosarge said. 

While that process can be intense, Bosarge said it gives the team “experience like you won’t get anywhere else,” especially since the majority of team members are engineering majors. 

“There’s not a class that teaches you how to design a chassis, or how to design an intake manifold,” Bosarge said. “That’s part of the value of this organization. You can prove to potential employers that you’re capable of doing more than just learning out of a textbook.”

The annual FSAE Michigan competition is divided between static events and dynamic events, Bosarge said. During the static events, teams have to defend their engineering choices to a panel of design judges, who are subject matter experts. Static competitions also include a business element, like cost analysis and a hypothetical scenario presentation. 

Greg Brooks is a freshman who recently switched his major to mechanical engineering, partly due to the influence of Formula SAE. He said last year, the team was required to present hypothetical changes to the international competition structure as part of its presentation. 

The team’s presentation included a focus on adding safety requirements and shifting the focus of the competition to emphasize engineering more and driving less. 

“The point of Formula SAE is to design a car that can meet all of the requirements and exceed all of the requirements,” Brooks said. “And driving is very important, but we want to focus on designing the car and building this machine.”

Still, the dynamic on-track elements help to test the car’s speed, endurance and handling. Events include straight line acceleration drag races, skid pad races with tight corners, autocross events like a traditional Formula 1 track and an endurance track to see if your car can go the distance, Bosarge said. 

Burleson is the team’s driver development lead, responsible for selecting which three other drivers will race at competition. He also personally drives in both the autocross event and the first half of the endurance track. 

Burleson had experience driving go-carts growing up, he said, though joining the team allowed him to learn things about the car’s construction he had never known before, including designing the car’s controls and coding parts of its software. 

“There’s a lot of math in this car that’s pretty incredible,” Burleson said. 

Even with Burleson’s experience and familiarity with the car, he said he still gets nervous when he’s at the competition and about 2,200 eyes are on him at once. 

“I always pray. I meditate with the car just running, because it vibrates a lot and it’s kind of scary,” Burleson said. “But as soon as the flag drops, it’s a really nice moment of peace. Because then you just drive and you don’t think about everybody else.” 

Once the team worked out the issue with the bolt in the shifter, Burleson led the way down to a complicated course of cones in a parking lot where he showcased his driving skills. Drifting, he said, is his favorite part of driving on a course like that, though he has to drive much slower than the car’s top speed of 72 miles per hour under those conditions. 

Burleson ripped around the course a few times before there was a loud popping sound, and the car stopped once again. But after the team ran over, it was able to identify the problem as a spark issue quickly.

Bosarge said he was confident the team could fix the electrical malfunction and get Burleson back in the driver’s seat later that afternoon to continue testing the car, giving them as much “seat time” as possible to identify and solve all of the car’s problems before competition day. 

“It’s a high speed, fast cornering race car, and it’s just awesome to work on it,” Bosarge said. “And the real world, practical experience, I don’t think you’ll beat anywhere else.”