Race team helps tornado victims

Dr. Eric Klang’s Centennial Campus office is sprinkled with photos of the Wolfpack Motorsports club team’s many top 10 finishes over the years. Soon he’ll add a different photo: Students lending a hand to those in need.

In May, the club’s Mini-Baja Society of Automobile Engineers (SAE) team, which Klang advises, embarked on a three-week trip to competitions in Kansas and Illinois. But what will stay with the students was their side trip. Team members spent four days helping residents of Joplin, Mo., clean up from the devastating tornado that killed 160 people a few days earlier.

“It was a life-changing experience,” said Justin Howell, the team captain and a senior in mechanical engineering. “It was the biggest community outreach effort I have ever seen.”

The Joplin twister was huge and deadly, destroying about 2,000 homes, schools, churches, apartment buildings, big-box-stores and fire stations. A regional medical center was abandoned and about 180 of its patients were sent to other hospitals in three states.

The team arrived at the tornado site after finishing a race in eastern Kansas in which they finished ahead of their counterparts at Georgia Tech, Clemson and Purdue. They camped out for four days and helped a woman clean her trash-strewn yard, visited with many of the victims, and repaired a roof of a local church.

“Even though the church was standing, its roof was destroyed,” Howell said. “We helped pull out insulation and sheetrock, and then we did the roofing.”

After leaving Joplin, students traveled to their next competition in Peoria, Ill., and placed ninth overall out of 119 teams. In individual events, NC State placed third in the rock crawl, ninth in cost efficiency and 10th in the endurance, maneuverability and hill climb events.

Wolfpack Motorsports consists of the Mini-Baja and Formula SAE teams and has about 20 student members. Club members meet weekly throughout the school year to design and build their vehicles. They also host fundraisers to build support for the club, which takes its vehicles to races against other top engineering schools around the country.

“A lot of companies attend the competitions,” said Klang, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State. “If you have this type of hands-on experience, companies want to hire you.”

In fact, several former club members have landed jobs in the automotive engineering field, working for companies and organizations such as General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Honda and NASCAR.

Employers also like to see community service on students resumés.

“Students in this club are a tight-knit group,” Klang said. “And I’m so proud that they banded together to help out those tornado victims in Joplin. It’s a wonderful story.”