The Fastest Final Exam on Earth

Cooper Union's team was born just two years ago with an engine that the founding members bought on eBay with their own money. The team set their sights on the FSAE cup during the second semester of this year, with a promising design and a core group of irredeemable pistonheads but few resources and no facilities suitable for fabricating a car-in the end, they sneaked their work in and out of a school lab.

Team members worked like mad through the spring semester, sleeping in their makeshift shop some nights, before rolling out their creation a month before the Michigan event. The past few weeks, team leader Peter Andruskiewicz told me, had been a blur of sleepless nights.

The car had to drop out of the skid pad and acceleration events early on, and Cooper was the last team to finish the endurance run. Yet they finished. Their racer wasn't pretty-a mishmash of metallic shards and duct tape-but it had the goods. It endured the entire 13.67 miles (take that, MSU) and walked away with a total of 183 points out of a possible 1,000 overall: an 89th-place finish for the weekend. Frankly, it was a miracle. "We're going for a reliable car the first year," Andruskiewicz said proudly. "Next year we'll go for speed."

And Rutgers? In the end, they overcame the oil leak plaguing their Yamaha powerplant. With minutes to go, the team passed the visual tech inspection and headed out to the tarmac. At a full run, they shoved the car along using an FSAE-standard, removable T-shaped bar down the long service road that led from the paddock. At the fueling station, the car aced the tilt-table test-a check for gas leaks-as the teammates bounced on their heels impatiently. Then they stopped by the noise station, where officials determined their engine to be below the 110-decibel threshold. Check. But at the braking test, where drivers must lock up all four wheels on cue, Rutgers was dealt a knockout blow. After growing frustrated with the driver's inability to stop in a prescribed spot, Worthington pulled him from the car, climbed in, and tried it himself. On the final run, he stamped the pedal with the accrued force of a weekend's exasperations, and the assembly bent under the weight. "I thought it was a driver problem," he said weakly, as he rose from the car.

Afterward, as other teams found ways of unwinding from the tension-Auburn throwing teammates into a murky pond, Michigan State bickering while wheeling its slightly charred racer to its trailer-Worthington looked around at his Rutgers teammates, gathered up his dignity, and found a silver lining. "The new members on the team stepped up when things were getting tough," he said. Faces brightened. "They learned that racing is hard and you need a lot of focus. I was a little worried about the team's future, about who was going to take over a leadership position. But it was good to see there were people who were willing to take up the slack."

Things wrapped up quickly after the endurance event, and in the end, the podium finishers spanned the globe. The well-oiled, well-financed Wisconsin-Madison team took home the Formula SAE trophy, with the University of Western Australia in second place. No one seemed resentful of the victors.

I took a last walk around the paddock as the stragglers packed up their things. The PA system crackled, and the announcer, a little hoarse now, cleared his throat for a final announcement to the esteemed students who will someday form the backbone of the automotive industry: that the Rochester Institute of Technology will be gathering in the parking lot of the Big Buck restaurant in Auburn Hills. Everyone's invited.

To see more images of the 2007 Formula SAE, launch the slideshow here.

Mike Spinelli is the editor of the car-culture blog jalopnik.com