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This paper discusses a project intended as a design study for a team of college students preparing for careers in motorsports. The project's objective was to conduct a design study on the possible redesign of the suspension for a dirt-track sprint car. The car examined was typical of those which race on one-quarter to one-half mile dirt oval tracks across the United States. The mission of this concept study was to develop a different configuration from the traditional torsion bar spring system, for the front end. The design included moving the dampers inboard with the addition of a rocker to relate the movement through the front suspension system. For the rear end, components were designed to allow the radius rod to be adjustable from the cockpit, thus providing the driver with adjustability to changing track conditions.

A number of performance and safety related aspects of motorsports have begun to receive increased attention in recent years, using the types of engineering analysis common to other industries such as aerospace engineering. As these new engineering approaches have begun to play a larger role in the motorsports industry, there has been an increase in the use of engineering tools in motorsports design and an increase in the inclusion of motorsports in the engineering education process. The design, modeling, and analysis aspects of a recent project examining the design of roll cages for American short-track open-wheel racing cars will be discussed in this paper. Roll cage structures were initially integrated into cars of this type in the 1960s. Countless lives have been saved and serious injuries prevented since the introduction of cages into these types of cars.

A number of performance and safety related aspects of motorsports have received attention in recent years, but not at the same level of in-depth engineering research analysis that other similar highly technical industries have. Part of this can be attributed to the fact that motorsports has not had the same close working relationship with the students and faculty in the academic research arena that other industries have historically had. This is changing as more institutions of higher education are building closer relationships with teams, businesses, and sanctioning bodies in the motorsports industry. This paper will discuss how the motorsports engineering faculty and students at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis have utilized the traditional research approach of academia to assist in the design of new aspects of competition vehicles aimed at increasing safety and also enhancing performance.