Engineers Ride Crash Course to Victory

Westmont engineering’s fifth annual remote-control (RC) car showdown was packed with crashes, flips, stalls, missed turns—and, for the first time, a three‑car championship race. When then dust finally settled, the team of Ben Mandani and Isaac Silva, who launched their car, named NESI, more than five feet off a ramp to win a one-jump playoff, hoisted championship trophies Dec. 5 on Kerrwood Lawn.

“This has been a long journey, putting bags of parts together to eventually create a car we could be proud of,” Mandani said. “This is an accumulation of all our hard work over the semester from every little piece built from the ground up into a cohesive machine.”

“It's been a great journey, because NESI isn't just an RC car that's here to compete, she’s a teammate,” Silva said. “This has been a story of our growth, our teamwork and overall, our learning concepts, engineering and problem solving.”

In explaining their victory, the two described how they utilized engineering concepts such as fatigue loading to reinforce certain parts of their car, such as the shocks, to minimize vibration and maximize acceleration.

Part of the overall competition included a 90-second elevator pitch where each team describes the key engineering lessons they learned making their 500-piece RC car.

“Hopefully, you're thinking these students don't communicate like engineers, they communicate like human beings,” said Dan Jensen, Allder professor and director of Westmont’s engineering program. “It’s so important for them professionally to be able to communicate well, and Westmont’s curriculum does a wonderful job of providing that foundational skill set that makes them well-rounded people — in addition to obviously all the geeky stuff that we do as engineers.”

President Gayle D. Beebe, who announced the winners of the competition, congratulated the competitors and donated $2,500 to the engineering program.