The cluttered garage is a hive of activity.

Students move across the room, navigating hardware and workbenches, picking up tools and relaying them back to their friends. One club member uses a winch to fasten two metal plates together, nodding his head along with rock music blaring out of a nearby radio.

The garage, bustling behind the door of room 1229 in the J.M. Patterson Building, serves as the workshop for Terps Racing, a campus club in which students design and build cars. Every year, the club’s two teams produce cars and race them at competitions.

Terps Racing takes its trade seriously, said Jaime Berez, a freshman mechanical engineering major. But novice builders with a passion for cars shouldn’t be discouraged by lack of experience, he said.

Terps Racing

The club welcomes all students with a passion for cars, prioritizing commitment and enthusiasm over experience, mechanical engineering junior Mark Nathanson said. There is no application process to join and no particular time commitment, he said, and car enthusiasts from all majors only need to attend the weekly meetings to get started.

“We call it ‘self-selection,’” Nathanson said. “If you aren’t really interested and you don’t really want to help, then you’re just not going to come. But if you’re interested, you’re going to come.”

The club is divided into two teams taking on projects of different difficulty levels, almost like junior varsity and varsity teams, Nathanson said: Team Baja builds an off-road Baja car, while Team Formula builds a formula-style racecar.

Nathanson is the leader of Team Formula, which is typically composed of about 50 students, most of whom are upperclassmen enrolled in ENME 408: Selected Topics in Engineering Design; Automotive Design, which requires students to work on the club’s cars, he said. With three meetings a week, Team Formula is divided into six sub-teams, each of which focuses on a different component of the car, Nathanson said.

Team Baja is less structured and its members are usually students with less experience or less time to commit, said Berez, who is a co-captain of the team. This year, the entire Baja team, about 30 members, is made up of either freshmen or students who have never worked on cars before, he said. The Baja team, which meets once a week, is what Berez called “a stepping stone,” focused on giving club members a hands-on chance to learn how to build cars.

“The Baja team is a really great experience to learn because it’s a little bit easier, and there’s less variables that can go into your car,” Nathanson said. “We’ve been trying to get younger students to work on that, and once they learn a lot, they come and then help out on the formula team already having that foundation.”

Terps Racing

Both teams enter their cars in annual SAE International events to compete against student teams from schools around the world in car performance tests as well as design and presentation competitions judged by SAE International officials. SAE International holds Baja and formula competitions at different schools every spring and summer. The Terps Racing formula team always competes in Lincoln, Neb., while the Baja team travels to different locations.

Terps Racing leaders select which team members will drive the cars at competition based on how well students perform in driver training as well as how committed they are, Nathanson said. Using cars from past years, potential drivers train on a practice course for the fastest times. The club aims to reward students who put significant time and effort into it, but ultimately, the team is competing in races and needs its fastest drivers to be the ones in the cars, Nathanson said.

Terps Racing

When Nathanson was on the Baja team last year, he drove the team’s car for half of the four-hour endurance test. Nathanson piloted the Baja car through an off-road-style course, climbing over logs and hills and navigating streams and mud pits two feet deep.

Not all of the events are about driving. Senior mechanical engineering major Jacob Vaughn leads Team Formula’s business presentation sub-team. He and his sub-team will be responsible for delivering a mock sales pitch to SAE International competition judges in Lincoln this June.

“We’re designing to sell this car,” Vaughn said. “At competition, we actually have to give a straight business presentation of why somebody would want to buy this car.”

The teams update their designs every year, revising and improving the cars for each year’s competition. Some years require more updates than others, Nathanson said, so the designs for the cars have changed over time. Parts of cars from past years’ competitions are scattered around the club’s workshop: Some components can be reused, while others are destined to sit in the garage, serving only as trophies filled with memories.

Certain standards for the cars don’t change, Nathanson said. SAE International regulations require certain safety features every year, including an average piston speed of about 35 mph for automotive engines and a maximum top speed of about 70 mph.

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At Maryland Day tomorrow, the club will unveil their formula car in front of the Jeong H. Kim Engineering Building. Terps Racing team leaders and members will answer questions, and if the Baja car is finished in time, it will join the formula car, Berez said.

A week away from Maryland Day, a marker board on the wall of the Terps Racing design studio counted down the days to the unveiling. Nathanson pointed around the workshop at different car parts — engine, suspension, instruments — and indicated where they’ll attach to the metal pipe structure that will serve as the frame of the team’s formula race car.

“It’s all assembled,” Nathanson said. “The frame’s assembled; we just have to put all of the different components on.”

But for Formula Team’s core group of dedicated members, there’s no concern whether the car will be ready in time for the unveiling, Nathanson said. The team is committed to having it done by Saturday.

“We’ll be ready,” he said. “It’s one of those things where it’s more, ‘How much time is it going to take us?’”