Not a chance.
Aidan Dufault ’25 was watching the live stream of the Formula SAE Michigan awards ceremony as he headed back to Lehigh for graduation. Back in Brooklyn, Michigan, where the competition had been held, presenters were naming the top three in the efficiency category. And while Dufault and his Lehigh Racing teammates thought their vehicle had done pretty well, as the third- and then second-place teams were called, a single, self-defeating thought went through Dufault’s mind. There’s no way.
“Then they announced us for first place, and we were surprised and elated,” says Dufault, who majored in mechanical engineering and served as captain for the Lehigh Formula SAE team during his senior year. “It was a crazy finish for us for sure.”
Crazy or not, it was—for Lehigh—historic. Winning the efficiency category was a first, and it gave the team enough points to finish 28th overall—their highest finish ever.
“The past three years, we’ve finished no better than 65th place,” he says. “Performance-wise, we did very well this year.”
The overall lineup is determined by scores that teams accumulate across a range of categories. In winning the efficiency category, the Lehigh team’s custom formula-style, single-seat, open-wheel racecar had essentially used the least fuel based on the speed at which it completed a 22 kilometer (14 miles) endurance event.
“Our car was really light, and running on a single-cylinder engine, and so that helped us a lot,” says Dufault, who noted that it has been more than a decade since Lehigh had notched a score at all in the efficiency event. “In the past, the cars either hadn’t finished the event, or hadn’t gone fast enough.”
He attributes the performance turnaround to a range of factors: strong leadership across groups within the team, more efficient design practices, and ensuring those designs were successful on paper before fabrication began.
“In the past, we ran into issues just rushing into stuff,” he says. “Putting more forethought into everything really paid off.”
As for what’s next, Dufault is headed to SpaceX in Texas, where he’ll be employing experience he gained on the team leading the vehicle’s chassis design to help build Starship structures. And for the students returning to the Lehigh Racing team, there’s a higher bar to clear for next year’s competition.
“They have to come up with a new frame, but after that, they’re free to use whatever designs from past years they like or change the things that aren’t working,” says Dufault. “They’re putting a lot of thought into growing the team from a population and expertise standpoint. But knowledge-wise, they’re in a pretty good spot already.”
