They build cars that travel on land and water. They conquer every step from designing the vehicle to racing it at competitions throughout the country. This small group of engineering majors known as the Mini Baja Team work together all year to design and build a car of their own and prepare it for competition against other national universities.

“We design and fabricate the car ourselves. We build the entire thing,” said engineering graduate student and co-captain Chris Mickiewicz. “They give everybody the motor and you have to build around that, that’s the only requirement.”

There are three regional competitions — east, midwest and west — and this year, the NU team is expanding its participation to include both the east and the midwest contests.

“We’ve done pretty well in the past [in the east] and we just wanted to see what it’s like in the other competitions,” Mickiewicz said.

In April, the team scored sixth place out of about 50 teams at the eastern competition in Florida, the best Northeastern has ever done.

The eastern competition is unique because the car must also be designed to float and propel itself in water, not just run on land as in the other competitions.

The members experienced a lesson in teamwork this year when their car stopped running while in the water during an endurance race. Instead of panicking and withdrawing from the race, they managed to restart the car without having to remove it from the water.

“We were the only team at the competition to get the car running [after it went in the water],” said junior mechanical engineering major and co-captain Lucas Murphy. “In what is typically a major problem, we were able to work together and get the car going.”

The team members spend about one night a week in their lab in the basement of Richards Hall throughout the year, and nearly every night for the two months prior to the competition.

They raise money to build the car through donations from the school and corporate sponsors, and make sure that it is kept under the budgetary standards of the competition.

Along with the car design, the members have to submit a cost report before the competition. Building the car typically costs them between $7,000 and $8,000 a year, Mickiewicz said.

This year’s midwest competition will be held June 6 in Dayton, Ohio. So far about 140 teams have registered to compete.

“It’s our first year going to this competition,” Murphy said. “It’s a much bigger competition. “We just want to try it out and see what the difference is.”

Mickiewicz and Murphy, who have both been part of team for a number of years, feel that they have gotten a lot out of their experiences with the club.

“It’s an actual real-world engineering problem that we manage ourselves. Even with co-op, you don’t really design anything that in-depth,” Mickiewicz said. “It’s a challenge, it’s a big, big challenge.”

“The Mini Baja is a place where everything you are doing in class is real and hands on and it’s completely independent. It’s student run, 100 percent,” Murphy said. “You have a complete, all-encompassing engineering project that has everything you’ve learned about engineering.”

Though right now the team is made up of only mechanical engineering majors, Mickiewicz said that anybody who is interested is welcome to join.

“We’re always looking for new team members,” Mickiewicz said. “We’ve had computer science, we’ve had electrical engineering majors, we’ll take anybody.”

Though he enjoys being part of the team, he said, “It does take a lot of work so it kind of scares away a lot of people.”