With its 400-pound frame, tight form and compact two-cylinder engine, Jayhawk Motorsports’ 2010 Formula SAE racecar is built to go from zero to 60 in less than three seconds, quicker than a Ferrari, with a top speed of more than 100 mph.

Team leader Matt Petty, a senior from Chanhassen, Minn., said everyone had an opportunity to drive the car, but that many would not want a second turn.

“It scares the bejesus out of people,” Petty said. “It’s a powerful car.”

BUILT TO WIN

Building the car was a year-long project. The students, most of whom are seniors in mechanical engineering and are using the car as their senior design project, started designing the car last fall. This semester they started manufacturing the materials and building the frame.

The students in Jayhawk Motorsports, the University’s Society of Automotive Engineers organization, will race the car at the Formula SAE competition in Detroit next week and at a similar competition in California in June. Petty said the University was known for being a top school for Formula SAE. Jayhawk Motorsports had four top 10 finishes in the last five years, he said.

The car has a carbon fiber frame that makes it lighter than most formula cars. Out of the 120 cars in the competition, all but 10 would have a traditional steel frame, Petty said. Carbon fiber makes Jayhawk Motorsports’ car lighter and stiffer than other cars, which makes it faster.

If someone wanted to buy this car on the market, Petty said, it would cost about $500,000 because of the materials and the manpower used to build it. But with help from the School of Engineering and local organizations and businesses, the team has only spent between $50,000 and $60,000 on the car.

Of the 39 students who have been working on the car, 19 are volunteers. Some graduated in December but wanted to see the car through to the end.

The team has been working around the clock to get the car ready for the competition. Most of these students can’t tell you when they last had a full night’s rest. Even as finals approach, the students continue to spend at least 60 hours a week on the car. Some are even taking their finals early because the competition is during finals week.

RACING THE CLOCK

Empty coffee cups and cans of Red Bull and Monster energy drinks littered the team’s shop in Learned Hall late Saturday night. The team wanted the car running and ready for its first test drive before 8 a.m. Sunday. Petty said everyone in the shop had probably slept one night in the last five days — but the energy drinks helped.

“One time a Rockstar rep dropped off a couple of cases,” Petty said. “It was the most productive week you’ve ever seen.”

Faisal Al-Madini, a senior from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, said he’d been in the shop about 10 or 12 hours every day last week. Saturday, however, was a different story. Al-Madini arrived at the shop at 7:30 that morning, but he was still there at 4:30 a.m. Sunday — clocking 21 hours of work on the project.

After sleepless nights and overnight stays in the shop, Al-Madini said he was excited about finishing the car.

“When you build something from scratch and see it all put together, it’s awesome,” Al-Madini said.

Anna Langley, a senior from Overland Park, isn’t working on the car, but said she spent a lot of time in the shop anyway — it was the only way she got to see her boyfriend, Stephen Hinton. At 3:30 a.m. Sunday, Langley was still waiting around to see if the car would be ready to run in the next couple of hours.

“I want to see the thing run,” she said. “It’s been the other woman in his life for the last year.”

Langley said she and Hinton had a habit of texting each other before going to bed. One morning she woke up and didn’t have a text from him. She was angry until she figured out the reason.

“I realized he never went to bed,” Langley said.

Behind a whiteboard covered with task lists for each of the three sub-teams, there’s an armchair where someone occasionally takes a five-minute nap before rejoining the group. Up to a dozen team members surround the car at any time, each with his own job to do. Although they’re tired, they know what they’re doing, and they don’t get in each other’s way.

Al-Madini said it got crowded with so many people working on the car simultaneously, but having such a large team working together was a good thing.

“If you screw up, someone can fix it,” he said.

At least a dozen people stayed all night Saturday and into Sunday morning. Despite their efforts, the team members decided at 4:30 a.m. that they wouldn’t be able to take the car for a test drive that morning. They had to get the car ready for its unveiling that afternoon at Abe and Jake’s.

RACING THE CAR

The formula car has dominated these students’ lives for a year. Now they hope it will dominate the competition.

Hinton, a senior from Overland Park, said the team members sacrificed a lot to spend this much time working on the formula car.

“Girlfriends, friends, family — everything takes a hit,” he said. “You have to try to keep it all together.”

He said the most dedicated people on the team tried to spend as much time as possible in the shop because they wanted to make sure everything on the car was done right. He said building the car was an opportunity to use everything they learned in mechanical engineering classes and gave them an opportunity to see what their careers would be like.

After the car’s first test drive early Tuesday morning, the team spent the rest of the day tuning it up for its next test. Hinton said because it was built for racing, the car didn’t have many parts that could break without causing a big problem.

“We want any problems we’re going to have to surface now,” he said. “What you do can mean the difference between success and failure, life and death maybe.”

The team will spend the rest of this week taking the car through its paces in preparation for the competition, where the car will undergo static tests analyzing its cost and design, as well as dynamic tests of the car’s drag racing and autocross capabilities.

The car runs on E85, which gives it an upper hand as a race car. Because the students built the engine, they can tune it to lower the fuel conversion ratio so the car goes faster. The car’s gas tank holds about two gallons, so it can run for about 30 minutes of hard racing before it has to be filled up again.

Tim McClintock, a senior from Council Grove, said the car’s engine required lots of tune-ups and would need to be rebuilt every 5,000 miles. Before it was put into the car, he said, it required about five hours of work for every five minutes of running it.

“When something goes wrong, it can go wrong quickly,” McClintock said.

And the team doesn’t want anything to go wrong in the coming days.

The students will pack their faster-than-a-Ferrari car in a trailer Monday and then head to Detroit for the competition, hoping to come back with an award for their efforts.

— Edited by Cory Bunting