This year, PTG was able to support the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Baja SAE team (Rebel Racing) with several titanium donations. Below, the Rebel Racing team shares some of their feedback on working with this titanium and utilizing it in their competition.
For the UNLV Baja SAE – Rebel Racing team, last competition year (2019-2020) was the first time we integrated titanium into our vehicle designs. With our goals of aiming for the top spot of the podium in competitions, every ounce of vehicle weight that can be saved drastically helps us achieve these goals. The fabrication and material processing techniques during that time period greatly influenced our design signature when upgrading RR6 for the 2020-2021 competition year. Since the competition year of 2019-2020 was cancelled due to Covid-19 safety issues, Rebel Racer 6 (RR6) did not see much dynamic driving time during that year.
UNLV Baja SAE Rebel Racing: RR6 2019-2020 Spec
However the 2019-2020 competition year was not a complete loss for UNLV Baja SAE – Rebel Racing, during virtual design presentations we were able to take home an overall top 5 finish in all virtual presentations we competed in. Whether it was sales, design or cost presentation the usage and understanding of titanium definitely had a positive influence on our scores as we presented them during virtual presentations and the Performance Titanium Group provided our team the avenue to have a definite advantage over the virtual competition.
UNLV 2019-2020 Results
The 2019-2020 competition year was just a minor speed bump in our path and we always knew we would return back to the in-person designing, fabrication and testing for the Baja SAE series. Once our university opened to on-campus operations in August-September of 2020 for the fall semester, we were finally able to see our design(s) run as we were able to test drive RR6 through the normal testing scenarios. This testing time saw as much as 700 to 800 miles placed on the vehicle. This large amount of testing time placed endurance loads on the parts that we have never subjected our vehicles to. One instance of titanium part failure came from our front upright pins. RR6 had two front upright pins experience failure under live endurance vehicle testing.
