From Concept to Checkered Flag: How a Team at KU Builds a Race Car from Scratch.

At one time years ago University of South Florida Engineering students in Tampa Florida did the same thing.......pioneered way ahead of their time....

By Prescott Deckinger

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November 27, 2025Inside Learned Hall, the hub of KU’s engineering complex, Room 1109 thrums with the whir of tools, the pulse of machinery and the focused chatter of the Jayhawk Motorsports (JMS) team. Most of the rest of these pictures have been deleted from being posted...although the captions still remain.
-Bob Vail
Students weave between workstations with practiced composure, each movement feeding the controlled chaos of a car coming to life.

Everything they do in this room points toward a single goal: building a machine worthy of the world stage.

Jayhawk Motorsports gives students hands-on experience designing and building a race car from the ground up to compete in Formula SAE — one of the world’s most demanding collegiate engineering competitions, where universities from across the globe race to prove their technical prowess.

“You have 100 engineering programs with their smartest engineering students all at the same place at one time,” says Kyle Maddox, a senior and the manufacturing director.

Since 1994, JMS has provided students with the opportunity to design and construct a machine optimized for speed and acceleration, enabling them to apply their engineering knowledge and skills to a real-world application.

The program has welcomed not only engineers from every discipline — mechanical, aerospace, civil, computer science and beyond — but any student eager to take on the challenge of designing a vehicle born to shoot across the asphalt.

One of those students, senior Christian Cox, has been a part of Jayhawk Motorsports all four years of his college career, starting as a freshman volunteer and now heading the organization as team lead.

“My job is to solve problems, so if something needs to be done, I get it done or find somebody who can,” Cox said. “My goal is to keep the team on track, and make sure where we need to go, where we need to be and where we are all in line with each other.”

As team lead, Cox’s duties start well ahead of the fall semester, with months of design work on paper and screen laying the foundation for the car’s performance before the first bolt is fastened.

“We’re all engineers, we get really excited if we say we’re going to go design a new car,” Cox said. “It’s not feasible for us to redesign every single part on the car every year, so we really take into account what the previous designs were and figure out how we can improve them.”

The design process for a new race car begins in the summer before the fall semester, providing JMS members an ideal opportunity to collaborate and outline the vehicle’s schematics and details before classes and coursework start to demand their attention.

Drawing on over three decades of experience from past builds, every team member contributes something to the car’s design, bringing distinct perspectives and voices to the blueprint that will eventually come to fruition later in the semester.

Consisting of nearly 40 individuals, ranging from volunteers to full-time team members with specific roles, the JMS team ensures that they are well-equipped to begin construction once the fall semester kicks off.
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Senior Noah Alsup tinkers with the interior of the race car on Oct. 23, 2025. Alsup is part of the electronics team and is responsible for high-voltage components, the inverter and cooling.
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Funding and the Workshop

Constructing a race car is no small feat, and it demands extensive manpower, extraordinary precision and a significant amount of financial support.

“If I had to give an estimate, I’d say it’s around $100,000, but we have fundraising we do ourselves, we get donations from companies and we are funded through the engineering department and endowment,” Maddox said.

“Count all donations we get, and it might be about a million dollars – definitely at least $500,000 worth of material and machining each year.”

This extensive backing allows the team to turn their most ambitious ideas into reality each year. They remain deeply grateful to the university, engineering departments and donors whose contributions make such progress possible.

“It’s inspirational because that support goes back into the team, so that new young engineers can continue the cycle of doing this program,” Maddox said.

The impact of that support is clear, with last year’s car relying on a meticulously assembled system of more than 1,300 parts.

JMS receives support from alumni contributions, corporate donations from companies like Tesla and sponsorships from organizations such as the Kiewit Corporation.

That funding turns immediately into shop-floor action in the basement of Learned Hall, fueling a workspace where students fabricate most of the car’s parts amid rows of mills, saws, lathes and drills.

It’s a collection of high-performance tools that demand skill and steady hands to produce the parts needed for a car built for top-tier handling, acceleration and control.

However, the human touch can only go so far, so the team turns to computer numerical control (CNC) machines for precision work.
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The interior of the CNC machine sits idle, its precision tools ready to fabricate custom parts for the Jayhawk Motorsports team.
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CNC machines are advanced automated tools that follow digitally coded instructions to create custom parts and are used across industries such as aerospace and telecommunications.

Senior Miles Worick is one member of the team who can operate the intricate machine instrumental to the race car’s construction.

“I do manufacturing, and I know how to run the CMC, which makes a lot of parts for the car,” Worick said. “Right now, I’m working on the outer wheel hubs, which help with support and rotation for the tires.”

Outer wheel hubs aren’t the only part the machine makes, as it can carve metals, composites and advanced materials like carbon fiber using precision techniques such as milling, turning and drilling, all of which are invaluable during the design stage.

The design process typically wraps up by the start of the fall semester, just as students return to campus, after which the JMS team transitions into the construction phase.