Congrats PER.

Last week I was fortunate to witness a most beautiful thing. A team. A longer post.

American culture and education is full of sports and competitions. From little leagues to college basketball, teams, character, relationships are build. Yet, it is engineering racing teams such as Formula SAE, where the diamonds are, where the tire hits the road, where research, design, manufacturing, testing, marketing, management and finally racing all come together. A full startup if you will. Take Purdue Electric Racing. It is 120 students strong, with leads in each area of expertise form fund raising to pedal boxes.

Formula SAE teams build electric cars from scratch and race them at the end of the year. If it were only that simple. To build the car you must have the team. So each year current members must recruit new colleagues among incoming freshmen. They must be convincing enough that the recruits will join for no pay and commit to spending tens of hours weekly to the project.

Then in 9 months, they must build what is basically a large startup. First, they have already built the HR department. Second they need money so a financing and sponsorships team is built. Third, they must split the responsibilities, chassis, drivetrain, electronics, aero, brakes, cooling. All of these teams will need a budget and will be purchasing parts, tools and so forth. Of course all of this needs to be coordinated, morale needs to kept and deadlines are real. There is only one competition at the end of the year.

And then the final stretch, the competition, one week of final tuning, and real tests from rain, to acceleration, to drilling sessions on design. The team works every night, analyzing the days data, making final touches, in a rented house, officially for 4, but in actually 20, stacked up on top of each other in a dizzying mess of mattress, laptops, beer, and an occasional supportive parent that cuts t-bones into bite size slices to get in some proteins.

The camaraderie, the support, the passion, the fun, is what builds friendships that last a lifetime.

And as a side benefit, there is everything that is learned about real life delivery of product and then the ad-hoc interviews from Tesla, Anduril, and other great teams that hover like vultures to pick the very best for the next stage of engineering greatness.

Bravo boys and girls of PER for your first ever full race, with #10 to boot. The next gen will erase the 0.