Gov revs motor, lauds Pell State Motorsports
Lee visits Hardin Valley college Aug. 30
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Gov. Bill Lee in his Pellissippi State Motorsports-built Formula SAE mini racer talking to Motorsports team member Daniel Ray about the machine he was about to try out. - Alan Sloan
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Gov. Bill Lee took this Pellissippi State Motorsports Formula SAE miniature race-car — which finished sixth in the nation against much bigger colleges and universities in Las Vegas recently — for a spin around the school’s practice course, also known as Parking Lot 10, for about 30 seconds during his visit to the Hardin Valley campus Wednesday, Aug. 30. - Alan Sloan
Unique among community colleges nationwide, Pellissippi State’s Mechanical Engineering Technology program has given berth to Pellissippi State Motorsports — and in only six years of existence has been serious competition to major college and universities that also build their own miniature race cars from scratch and compete.
Gov. Bill Lee has taken notice, both with the blessing of state funding and personal admiration, visiting PSCC to get a firsthand look at PSM before taking a spin in the program’s Formula SAE racer during his noon-time visit Wednesday, Aug. 30.
“They’ve been very competitive nationally. … It’s introducing them to, for example, the automotive industry and the parts of engineering and design and manufacturing for automotive,” Lee said. “It’s life-changing work for them. And you get to have a lot of fun.”
Lee “got to have fun” by first trying out a race simulator before jumping in the PSM Formula SAE miniature race car at “Pellissippi Motor Speedway,” better known as the school’s Parking Lot 10, for about 30 seconds of racing around various cones.
“It might have been 30 seconds worth, but it was a lot of fun,” he said.
Background
“Starting with the Give Act, in which we’ve had multiple Give Grants here over the last four or five years investing in you, is what we’re about,” Lee said near the beginning of his roughly one-hour visit. “There’s a lot of folks that have made a lot of financial decisions so that you can be successful. … I’ve heard all about this program.”
“It’s a really unique program’s that we’re able to have here at Pellissippi,” said PSCC Motorsports leader Ethan Crisp, one of a handful of the school’s main after-grad mentors. “… I graduated here with an electrical engineering technology degree, and I’m currently going for electro-mechanical as well as advanced and added manufacturing certifications.”
Sean Liner of Long Island, New York, is studying chemical engineering at the University of Tennessee, “but I’m involved here as a power train and business lead for the team,” he said.
Daniel Rasmussen of Miami graduated from PSCC with a mechanical engineering technology degree, “and now I’m at UT in a material science engineering as a senior. I was lucky enough to be one of the founding members of this team.”
“We were founded back in 2017 by Christian Boone,” Crisp said. “… He was able to put together a really awesome team, including people like Daniel, as well as a lot of other people that have graduated and have gone on to work at Honda, ORNL and lots of other big companies. …”
Liner said, “Of the people who really put their blood, sweat and tears into this program and really dig in and learn all the hard engineering it takes to build a car, those people, as far as our team goes, 100 percent of those have found employment in the field that they’re working on upon graduation. Or in my case, during completion of a bachelor’s degree.
“I work at ORNL full-time through a connection that I made with the race car,” he added. “So we have people who finish this team and they’re working at Honda R&D, Tesla, Toyota R&D.”
Meanwhile, Boone “was able to come to (PSCC president) Dr. (Anthony) Wise, and Dr. Wise thought his ideas were actually crazy enough to work,” Crisp said.
“When the first competition came around in 2019, as a first-year team, we had the rare accomplishment of being able to actually have a competing car for that first year,” he added.
“The current one you all see here ... was able to get sixth place at the Las Vegas event” recently against major university teams such as Purdue, Ohio State, UCLA, USC. “First time we went, we had international universities there from Germany, Brazil, South Korea, Japan.”
Overall, “the main idea of our competition is that we are an engineering design firm and we’re trying to create a car, design it and be able to bring it to a large scale manufacturer,” Crisp said.
“This was a great opportunity for me to interact with these students,” Lee said. “And they’re excited about being a part of this team.”
