Offers a hands on experience designing, manufacturing, and marketing a technically advanced product: a small scale formula racecar.
UF Chapter Officers:
President – Dylan Balkaran
Email: uffsae@gmail.com
VP – Rachael Carlin
Recruitment Coordinator – Tristan Jackson
Recruitment Coordinator – Sean Barney
Treasurer – Alaina Gordon
IT Specialist – Jason Beckmann
Shop Manager – Matt Jeffries
Faculty Advisor:
Prof. Sean Niemi
Email: srn@mae.ufl.edu
Shop Information
- Address: Room 133 – 134 MAE-C, Gainesville, FL 32611
- Hours: 6-11PM Monday-Friday, 12-10PM Saturday-Sunday
Activites
At Gator Motorsports, the opportunity to design, manufacture, and build a Formula-style racecar is more than just an extracurricular pursuit; it is a passion. Each June, Gator Motorsports competes against teams from all over the world in the Formula Society of Automotive Engineers (FSAE) design competition in Michigan. This competition assesses the team’s ability to not only engineer and produce a reliable, high-performance vehicle, but also its ability to organize and manage a team to develop a feasible product for market.
Our program provides students with the technical, teamwork, and project management skills required to transition seamlessly into careers in industry. Since the team was founded by a few students working out of a shed in 1991, we have grown to become an organization focused on raising well-rounded engineers with hands on experience and a strong technical knowledge base. Despite so many students coming and going throughout the years, the team maintains a constant design philosophy of elegance through simplicity and cost effectiveness. This has remained paramount to the success of every generation of young engineers that has been a part of our program. Although we are proud of our team’s more recent accomplishments, we are humbled to remember our program beginnings in that storage unit 30 years ago. It is the legacy that team members leave behind season-after-season that allows us to learn from both their failures and their successes. Over the years, designs have been conceptualized, tested, and refined to create what our vehicle is today. Our team is still forged from the principles that brought us together in 1991: dedication, ingenuity and perseverance.
As for who is eligible to join, the answer is anybody! We teach you everything you need to know here in the shop. Our shops are open every week day after 6:00 PM, and noon on the weekends. We are located right across the street from Gator Corner Dining. You can also email us at recruitment@gatormotorsports.com. When you get to the shop, ask questions! There will always be someone at the shop working on the car, and they will be happy to answer any questions. Coming to the shop and asking questions how you become a member of GMS, so don’t be shy!
We hope to see many new and eager members as we continue to push the boundaries of various aspects of our formula-style race car to represent the engineering talent at the University of Florida against 120 other programs.
