Baja Preparations the night before the competition begins for Auburn University who conduct last minute refinements to their vehicle design at midnight in the hotel parking lot observed by SAE-UK President Dave Smith. The SAE-UK.org team arrived on the Baja Site for the first main day of the Competition. We were welcomed by Sam Barill (pictured right on the central image of opposite page), SAE-International Manager of Collegiate Programs who attends all of the Baja events in the USA. Sam explained some of the major points of the Competition to us about the timescales involved in setting up an event like this which would take some 12 – 18 months. He gave us a break down of last year’s event which involved the creation of a bespoke Baja course on the grounds of the engineering faculty of Auburn University

Last year’s event at Auburn attracted slightly more teams totaling 75 in number. Surprisingly, in the preparation of the Baja Courses each year it is the use of bulldozers that is avoided as they tend to be driven by operators more accustomed to building roads. No such surface would suit the drivers and vehicles of Baja SAE who require a more challenging course complete with undulations less easy for bulldozers to accomplish. The course was created without the use of bulldozers and so constituted a more demanding and expensive task. It took the owner of the land at the Hard Rock Cycle Track, Glenn Knox, 6 weeks work to develop the course, a panorama of which is featured across this page.