The Fastest Final Exam on Earth

The trucks and trailers started arriving on Wednesday, packed with racing hardware, tools, food and people. They streamed onto the proving grounds, past the miles of test roads to a gravel parking lot set aside as the paddock area. Pitcrews spent the rest of the day setting up the cars while team "suits"-those tasked with more businesslike responsibilities-performed dry runs of the next day's oral exams, off by themselves gesturing into the air.

Thursday, the competition's first day, was a blur of PowerPoint slides and interrogative scrutiny during separate design, cost and marketing presentations for a panel of industry pros: Why did your engineers choose this particular suspension geometry? Why a pneumatic shifter instead of a manual one? Think of it as the oral-defense segment of the college gearhead's thesis.

"Our job is to look at the car and make sure it has some engineering elegance and that [the groups] understand the reason for their choices," says Paul Haney, a tire expert and FSAE design judge. "They have to be able to explain why they did what they did. I just keep asking them 'Why?' Eventually they either get down to first principles or they run out of explanation." The latter costs them points.

Today, Friday, is set aside for qualifying events. Failure means teams will be ranked low for Saturday's race and dooms them to a sad weekend of going through the motions with no hope of a medal. With the sun barely up, teams are already scrambling to tune their cars before heading down to the skidpad, acceleration strip and autocross course. How deftly they can cut through tight corners, fire off upshifts, and dodge orange cones will determine their standings for tomorrow's make-or-break endurance run. Today's first test is of decibels (no car can exceed 110), and the preparations are deafening. After a few minutes standing near the University of Manitoba's base camp, I wonder how many more revs it would take for their 600cc motorcycle engine to match the resonant frequency of a human eardrum, splintering mine like a champagne flute. Just as I'm about to scream mercy, the team's leader cuts the engine, and 105.5 decibels dissipate across the flat expanse beyond the paddock. I now understand that the next 48 hours will be bedlam.

Each team's base camp quickly becomes an all-in-one competition headquarters. It's a place to work on the cars, wait, goof around, sleep, offer free mohawks to anyone interested, pin up a life-size poster of David Hasselhoff, or otherwise chill out between events. Drivers retire to base camp for high fives and a shaken can of ginger ale after nailing a top score, or trudge back to be talked down after succumbing to pressure on the skidpad. Some teams assemble ersatz kitchens, with crock pots set up next to giant plastic jars of cheese balls or baskets of apples. Others rely on simple coolers of sandwiches or raid the on-site snack bar when hunger pangs hit. It's typical dorm life, lived in a parking lot.

But by mid-afternoon, the wide concrete field is dotted with 19- and 20-year-olds trying to mask their terror. Rutgers senior and team captain Alton Worthington, for example, is keeping his composure, but only just. Yesterday, instead of donning cap and gown with his fellow Rutgers grads, Worthington spent his last day of college defending the design in front of a panel of judges. Such sacrifices are normal-the Rutgers car has already consumed 3,500 hours of the team's academic career. But now their racer, a photogenic specimen sporting an F1-style wing, might not even reach day two. It's a seized engine, Worthington tells me through clenched teeth, before darting off to borrow a socket wrench from the University of Kansas.

As Worthington plots his team's next move, his competitors-from the University of Arizona, Clemson, the U.S. Naval Academy and 100 other institutions of higher learning from the U.S., Canada, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Finland, Japan, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Singapore, South Korea, the U.K. and Venezuela-are coaxing their racers through tech inspection and then out to the tarmac. Though home-brewed, the cars are much more than glorified go-karts. They were born from a sober engineering exercise that simulates a professional assignment, right down to a requisite marketing and cost plan. Even if they're designed and constructed with the youthful abandon of a punk album, they're as rigorously considered, and scrutinized, as a concerto.