The good news was that what the BAJA team thought was wrong with their engine was, in fact, completely fine. The bad news was what they found instead: a series of marks where one piece of the engine had been rubbing up against another, stripping the material away. Not good. The engine had crapped out the day before but the car still passed tech inspection. They’d been up all night poring over videos, clocking sleepless hours of intense research on how to fix what they were convinced was the culprit. Now, 6 a.m. had rolled around and they could finally get their hands on the car again, pop open the engine and apply whatever fixes they could. But then there were those marks, a sign of a completely different catastrophe no one was prepared for.
Later that day, the car they built would compete in a two-hour endurance race which, as you can imagine, is a much harder task without an engine. A quick fix was out of the question; to get the car running they’d have to take the engine apart and put it back together again. They were out of time and far from home.
This was how UBC Baja started their second day at the Épreuve du Nord (EDN) Winter Competition at Laval University in Quebec City. It was one of many moments of excitement and panic that followed the team on their first run at competition in seven years — the first year any of the current team members had been to the competition.
Baja is one of UBC Engineering’s six automotive design teams. Named after the Society of Automotive Engineers’ (SAE) annual Baja competitions, the team’s project is to build a single-seat all-terrain vehicle optimized for a series of static and dynamic events. True to their namesake, UBC Baja went into 2026 on track to hit both EDN and Baja Oregon, an official SAE competition set to be held in Washington this summer.
Getting to this point was not easy, though. After going to competition in 2019, the old guard had a car almost ready for the next competition in 2020. The pandemic threw a wrench in things, of course. Throughout 2021 and 2022, the team shifted gears and began work on a more ambitious frame for their next vehicle, during which time the current Baja captain, Oliver Eger, joined the team.
“The issue was this frame was built by really, really good engineers who then graduated,” Eger explained. “It was a very ambitious project.” The frame was designed for a vehicle that would ride on the very edge of the SAE’s rule limits, but this was an ambition of seasoned engineering students with the experience and expertise to bring such a vision to light. When those engineers graduated, the remaining team was left with an unrealistic standard to meet in completing their predecessors’ half-finished design. This is not to say the current team didn’t give it the old college try. Twice they tried to complete the limit-pushing vehicle in time for competition, and twice they missed the mark. “The issues were not just on [one] project,” Eger said, “they were up and down the whole car.”
Going into 2024, the team decided to scrap the design altogether. The goal this time was not to push their design to the rule-limit but instead to orient their entire project around getting a finished car to competition regardless of how it might perform. “As long as we were able to drive in competition and drive a car that doesn't fall apart, that was a win,” Eger said. The new car would be built to last; not necessarily the fastest beast on the track, but one that could take a beating. Evidently, this approach served them well, as they made it to EDN, but it was not without its difficulties.
The gearbox, for one, posed a significant last-minute complication. Due to shipping and manufacturing delays, the gearbox hadn’t arrived at the design bay until about a week before the winter competition. There were also issues after the first test, but these were more or less patched up. It was after the second round of testing that things took a turn for the worse.
“That's when we kind of catastrophically failed with our four-wheel drive,” said Kieran Daya, the powertrain sub-team lead. Powertrain handles everything from the engine to the wheels, so the gearbox failure fell right in Daya’s lap. As a sub-team lead, Daya explained, he spends most of his time on systems-level design and less on the little details. The rest of the time is spent putting out fires when things inevitably go wrong.
The team had been testing the car in a parking lot when suddenly, the four-wheel drive gave out. After transporting the vehicle back to the workshop, the leads assessed what turned out to be significant damage to parts of the gearbox. It was around one or two in the morning. “So our options in that scenario were: we try to run two-wheel drive the next night, and if that goes well, that's what we take to comp,” Daya said, “or we just call it here, and we don't go to comp, because we don't have four-wheel drive.” The goal of this design from the start was to get it to competition, but there were risks involved with switching to two-wheel drive. By sending 100 per cent of power back to the rear wheels, more damage could be done to the gearbox, setting the team back even further. “The flip side to that was, well, we already broke the gearbox,” Daya said. So they ran two-wheel drive.
More stuff broke. With the shipping deadline fast approaching, there was no chance of the replacement parts they had ordered arriving in time. But this was the year they were going to competition, so the team wasn’t ready to give up yet. They shipped the car and met it in Quebec, borrowing a welder from the host university to weld some problematic pieces together. This sealed the gearbox shut, effectively preventing them from being able to repair any further gearbox troubles without fully cutting it open. While it would make installing that replacement part a headache down the line, it was between that and not racing, so the choice was clear. They were going to race.
Despite these frantic repairs, the team was revelling in the competition experience. “It was a lot of fun!” said suspension engineer Ryan Ma. “I think I had a lot of doubts going into it. I didn't think that our car would perform as good, and all of those doubts were basically immediately crushed.” Ma described just how warm and collaborative the competition environment was — rival teams shared ideas, and despite the car’s persistent problems, UBC Baja received a good deal of compliments and support from fellow competitors.
This cooperative culture would be the team’s saving grace. With an engine that Ma described as “basically scrap metal” on the morning of the big endurance race, UBC Baja had neither the resources nor the time to make the necessary fixes. Luckily, they didn’t have to. In the generous spirit of the competition, Laval University lent the team a replacement engine before events began for the day. “They had five engines,” Daya said, “so they lent us one of theirs. And I guess that gave us perspective on how the engine is meant to work, because neither of our engines work like that.” This kindness in itself was a learning experience for the team. By working with one of the Laval team’s engines, they got a better sense of how to go about redesigning their own for the next competition. Best of all, though, they were back in the game. UBC Baja would be taking on the endurance race for the first time in seven years.
EDN, like the Baja SAE competitions in the summer, features a number of static and dynamic events. Static events, like the technical inspection, put the vehicles under intense analysis to make sure they are fit to run the dynamic events, while the cost event judges how financially efficient each team’s designs are. Dynamic events include all variety of tests on the vehicles, such as the sled-pull and the innocuously-named “suspension and traction” in which the car is driven off of a five-foot cliff to test its durability.
The crown jewel of the competition is, of course, the endurance race. EDN’s endurance race is a two-hour marathon over rough terrain, one which many teams fail to even complete without their vehicle falling apart. The endurance race at the upcoming SAE competition this summer will be twice the length. Arthur Speirs, the chassis sub-team lead, was in the driver’s seat for a portion of the race. While the drive itself was exhilarating, so was witnessing the material result of years of hard work and, in Speirs’s case, sitting at the heart of it.
UBC Baja’s car did in fact break down before the end of the race, but not until the last 15 minutes. Unlike the complications with the engine and the gearbox, Eger claimed the issues that arose with the throttle cable will be an easy fix before the next competition. With that, the competition was over. The UBC team placed third from the bottom overall, but to see the car in action and to have performed as well as they did considering the countless complications was a major victory in itself. After all, this car was designed with the sole purpose of making it to competition — and finally, that goal had been achieved.
When the team returned to Vancouver, their car was still being shipped back by train. If there’s one core quality of UBC Baja, however, it’s their dedicated work ethic, and so even without their vehicle, the team continued to work. The focus now was to start preparing for the summer competition, having learned several important lessons at EDN. Engineers like Ma work on their assigned projects through modelling software and run the mathematics on proposed design changes in lieu of having the car in front of them. Even without a vehicle, Baja has no time for idle hands.
Whether the car is in the bay or not, the Baja team works late nights and long shifts — Daya recalled toiling on until 5:00 a.m. on some occasions. It is a major commitment, and juggling that commitment with school is not easy. While not everyone pulls the 14-hour days Daya reported, working on a design team in any capacity demands a good deal of time and effort.
This is especially true for individuals like Marisa Fox, the team’s technical director. “A big part of my job is looking at things from a top-down perspective,” Fox said. With so much intensive work being done in each sub-team, it can be easy for engineers to get tunnel vision and lose sight of how their project fits into the larger structure of the vehicle. The newly-introduced role of technical director has helped improve communication across sub-teams in the past couple of years, Fox reported, along with a more thorough onboarding process. “From an interpersonal standpoint, there’s been a ton of cohesion lately.” No doubt the bonds forged at the crucible of EDN have something to do with that too.
In exchange for all the time and effort Baja engineers put into the team, they all feel consistently rewarded. “I don't know if there's a way I can describe the feeling of having a car that you've just spent two years designing and building actually work,” Daya shared. “It's so exciting and so fulfilling.” While working on the car might take away from study time, the work is itself a hands-on reflection and application of those same academic subjects. For newer members to the team like Ma, some of the lessons learned from their fellow engineers on the design team come before they are taught in class, giving them an edge in schoolwork.
With the end of the school year approaching, Eger will be exiting the team in accordance with his graduation from UBC. “Overall, I'm very proud of the team,” Eger said. “It is in a much better state than when I first became captain, and I think that's the most important step forward.” Eger spoke passionately about all he’s taken away from his time on the team and the community he has found therein. “Honestly, I'm probably going to be a bit lost on what to do with my Saturdays going forward.”
Now, Eger and the team are gearing up for the captain’s last project. “By rounding off the sharp edges and polishing up the little blemishes, I am fully confident we're going to have a great car running and fully ready for our summer competition,” Eger said, “and we should have a blast there.” While its gearbox may be busted and its engine destroying itself from within, UBC Baja’s first completed car in seven years approaches a bright and exciting horizon. With the grit and passion this community has displayed in the last couple of years, there seems to be little that can stop them on the road to summer competition this May.
