After seeing our last year’s car in competition last year, the SAE Baja team is designing Raider (our 2016 car) to be significantly different from its predecessor. The vehicle will be shorter by almost 20 inches and considerably lighter in an effort to achieve the agility that the competition series calls for. We’ve made good progress on our chassis in the past few weeks after measuring last year’s rigidity (both by SolidWorks simulation and real-world testing) and constructing a mock-cockpit out of PVC to get invaluable feedback on driver ergonomics. While there are still improvements to be made, we’re happy to say that we’ve already cut down our chassis weight by 20 lbs compared to last year!