I designed the wheels for the 2023 car. We buy the wheels in the top left, but there is a lot of extra material that isn't necessary for the part to be structural. I designed the wheel shown in the other photos to minimize rotational inertia and unsprung mass. I knew I needed to strengthen the design because the wheels had yielded on the previous year's car. I used Ansys FEA to test over 15 different designs in 5 load cases. The result is a wheel with a 12% year-over-year increase in factor of safety to yield with only a 0.7% increase in weight. These wheels were also run on 2024's car.

The 2023 car was the first to start using a new type of damper from a brand we hadn't worked with before. Throughout the 2023, 2024, and 2025 seasons, I have worked with other members on my team to design custom shim stacks to tune the damping characteristics of the shocks. These changes were tested using a shock dyno to generate graphs of damping force vs displacement. We also use our track with a section of large bumps to visualize how the different tunes change the suspension response of the vehicle.

I was also part of machining and implementing high-flow shock pistons for these new shocks to facilitate greater tuning ability and to reduce high-speed damping in both compression and rebound to improve performance over large bumps.