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Winning Minds in Motorsports at IUPUI

Photo: Courtesy of IUPUI Office of Communications and Marketing.

Students from diverse backgrounds enroll in Motorsports curriculum at downtown Indy campus

“Dream opportunity to work with a major race team”

Imagine a crimson and black-clad couple in a sports bar, he gesturing at the bank of TV’s to his left, she fixated on the screens to her right. “Indiana’s a BASKETBALL school!” he says. “Purdue’s a MOTORSPORTS school!” she screams back.

It’s not too far from the truth that Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis can claim both fans as its own. The Indianapolis campus of the school, and other educational institutions in the state, are trying to help develop the motorsports and auto racing industries into an economic engine similar to the traditional auto manufacturing and insurance industries that have long supported central Indiana.

At Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), a certificate program in motorsports education draws students from all over the country, as well as the urban areas and the nooks and crannies of Hoosierland the way basketball did in the past. The joint campus of IU and Purdue University, the school is located in downtown Indianapolis just minutes away from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

In his role as Director of the Motorsports Program at IUPUI Sports Car Club of America racer Pete Hylton is at ease discussing caster and camber as he leads a group of students through the intricacies of racecar engineering. An acquaintance of the erudite CAN-AM and Indianapolis 500 driver Mark Donahue, himself an engineering graduate from Brown University, Hylton gives his students a veteran’s first-hand taste of what it feels like from the driver’s seat.

Hylton explains that in this program the course focus is on the real world applications behind the engineering concepts. “Experience makes all the difference,” he says. “A student can come here and learn from someone who’s actually driven and drives these cars competitively. They come away with the technical knowledge, sure, but they gain understanding from what I can share with them as well.”

The certificate program curriculum features the expected classwork in the basics of forces, heat and vehicle dynamics, as well as the mechanics of the internal combustion engine. There’s also coursework in automotive safety, and a novel data acquisition and manipulation course to prepare the student for the ever-growing demands of the trackside DAG (Data Acquisition Guy).

In the classroom Hylton is surrounded by real racing drivers, and by real racing technicians, as he teaches. In the corner is a racing MGB-GT the class has prepared for competition.

Lynsey Tilton, an honor student and female racecar driver hailing from San Diego, California is a member of the class. The daughter of a racer, Lynsey began karting at around age 8. After winning five class championships between her first race and sixteenth birthday, she graduated to the United States Auto Club’s Midget series, where she currently races in the USAC Regional Ford Focus competition on pavement and on dirt.

Classmate Josh Gish grew up in small-town Indiana and watched each weekend as his neighbors piled into a pickup with their racecar in tow. He caught the racing bug and now aims for a career in motorsports at IUPUI.

Mike Sheridan, recently placed as an intern with the Indy Racing League’s Panther Racing IndyCar team, studies with a group of students nearby. As a senior in the program he has his mind set on joining a team permanently after graduation. On his resume already is a “dream opportunity to work with a major race team while finishing my education at IUPUI.”

Other students in the Motorsports Certificate Program have had a hand in assembling and competing a racing kart for the 2006 Purdue Grand Prix and serving as interns on the technical inspection team of the Champ Car World Series.

The courses in the program are centered on projects that involve design and analysis of actual motorsports situations. In the past two years, the students have worked on three different types of competition vehicles, and have recently completed the real racing MGB. So far, the project’s a winner as Hylton gave the car its initial competition run at an SCCA Solo event, taking a first-in-class trophy.

In the future is a promise to assemble and deploy an Indy Pro Series effort made up of students from different disciplines all over the school’s campus: marketing, communications, management, hospitality, and others with the many skills needed to field a professional sports team, to compliment the strengths of the Motorsports certificate students working on the track and in the garages.

So maybe it’s not an either/or thing after all, for the couple at the sports bar. He’s got his traditional sport, she’s got her auto racing, but both wear the red and black Jaguar colors of IUPUI.

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The Purdue School of Engineering and Technology has programs available to prepare students for a career in the fastest moving industry in the world

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