History

Getting an off-road competition club started was “more of an evolution than a revolution,” Spetzler recalls. During his first year, he heard about a transfer student from Penn State who was trying to start a team with a car he was building. So, Spetzler dragged his friend Edwards to one of the meetings to see what it was all about.

As soon as Edwards learned he could build and race cars from scratch he was hooked.

“I wanted to design cars since I was seven years old, and I raced everything with wheels I could ever get my hands on growing up,” Edwards says. “Just a desire to create this thing from scratch and go racing to see if we did a good job or not. The competition aspect was a huge motivator!”

That car, however, never made it out of the garage; but their potential team leader from Penn State did. They never saw him again.

With nothing left but a hunger to build, Spetzler, Edwards, Starr, and Brooks decided to start from scratch. They found space in the old foundry in the mechanical engineering building and, after many rejections, found a faculty advisor in Professor Emeritus Kenneth Cunefare, who was also the advisor for GT Motorsports and Wreck Racing.

After a few trips to Home Depot and some questionable materials they started to build. It was a lot learning on the fly as they installed their first transmission – backwards – and then wondered why it had no power.

Eventually, they got their first car up and running and even made it to their first competition in Wisconsin, which Edwards remembers was a real effort.

“There were so many difficulties to overcome that year from finding the money, finding a location to build it, finding teammates that would actually spend the hours and hours it took to create it…this list is really long. So, just overcoming the obstacles the first year felt really good,” Edwards says.

Edwards painted the tire treads yellow to match the frame. As a result, the team had to carry the car and the wheels separately about a quarter of a mile to the staging area to avoid messing up the paint.

“It was a huge pain, but Goodyear came by and talked to us about colored rubber for their tires and they offered to sponsor us since we put a focus on the tires,” Edwards says.

Spetzler remembers the car looked good but it wasn’t very fast. “It was not designed for speed. It was not designed for much,” Spetzler says. “We kind of just got something working, so I think we ended up somewhere in 55th to 60th out of what must have been like 70 or 80 on the series, but that was the starting point for the endurance race.”

The endurance portion of the race, which is a four-hour open wheel race, was on a muddy motorcross track and Spetzler recalls it going much better.

“A lot of people were jumping and flipping or breaking, and at one point we got up to I think eighth or ninth place, which we were very happy about.”

The race was flagged for rain at one point, stopping the cars on the track, but the car behind Spetzler didn’t stop. It rammed them from behind shearing the wheel of the tie rod.

“I ran a mile to the trailer to get a portable torch to remove the sheared rod. We got it replaced, and Matt kept racing,” Edwards says.

With the mud and rush repairs, the team ended up placing 13th, which was the highest finish for a rookie team in that competition.

By the following year, the team reached as high as third place among all competitions. Bringing the car back with a few personal and practical wins, the team was starting to expand and raised enough money from sponsors to get new equipment and upgrade their space.

GT Off-Road now has more than 40 undergraduate student members, most of whom are engineering students.

Present

In May of 2024, the GT Off-Road team finished seventh out of 107 teams at the Baja SAE Williamsport competition.

Francesca Turrinelli is the current GT Off-Road team lead. She is a mechanical engineering major and going into her fourth year with the team.

The hands-on engineering is what initially drew Turinelli to join GT Off-Road. As one of the smaller SCC teams at Georgia Tech, she says it is easy to get to know her teammates and everyone gets to be involved in all the hands-on building. She attributes much of her academic success to her experience in GT Off-Road.

“This club has probably been the biggest learning experience in my college career,” Turinelli says. “The very foundation of my educational experience as an engineer is from GT Off-Road and just the experience of being on a team doing project management stuff, working with all these other people, it's just an amazing experience. I'll remember it forever.”

GT Off-Road accepts students from any major. Some members have secured internships and jobs with companies such as SpaceX, Microsoft, Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Volvo, Yamaha, and Lockheed Martin.

The team is working on their next vehicle, the OR10, and hopes to have it ready for competition by 2025.

Securing Essential Resources to Compete

The biggest hurdle the early teams encountered while on the GT Off-Road team was getting the funding to build the cars and take them to competition. They hope students will worry less about the financial burdens and focus more on the fun and creative aspects, which is what they loved the most.

“Designing and building a functioning car is a lot of work,” Edwards says. “We put almost all our free time into this pursuit. Having to worry about how to get sponsors to get materials, how to get funds for travel, to be at the competition, to have a place to sleep — these were all administrative necessities, but they weren’t the point of the competition. Having funding taken care of so you can pursue improvements in design and fabrication is not only a huge weight off, it also frees up significant time so you can focus on refining the car and working towards winning the race.”

When Spetzler reflects on his time at Georgia Tech, the hands-on engineering experience was something he says was more informative for him than some of the classes. He wants to give back to something that was so influential for him, as well as honor former teammate David Cox, who passed away in 2020. Though Cox suffered from spinal muscular atrophy and was bound to a wheelchair, he was an integral part of the initial team's success by engineering many parts of the car and driving the team's van. Cox became GT Off-Road's sixth president and Spetzler's gift will help continue the legacy Cox helped build.

Jake Tompkins, PFE 2006, M.S. ID 2009, SCC manager and mechanical engineer in the Woodruff School, says, “The people who are thinking about the next generation, how to give back to Georgia Tech, and how to develop what they had for others are amazing.”

Turinelli is grateful for the GT Off-Road alumni who are supporting the team that was started 25 years ago. “It's amazing. I mean, that's what I imagine I'm going to be doing in 25 years because this club is so impactful.”

To make a gift or commitment to GT Off-Road, contact Senior Director of Development for the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering Jaimie Hayes at jaimie.hayes@me.gatech.edu.

For international alumni and friends of the Institute interested in making a gift to GT Off-Road, contact Europe Development Associate Sandrine David at sandrine.david@gatech.edu. 

All gifts to GT Off-Road are included in Transforming Tomorrow: The Campaign for Georgia Tech, a more than $2 billion comprehensive campaign through 2027 designed to secure the resources that will advance the Institute and its impact — on people’s lives, on the way we work together to create innovative solutions, and on our world — for decades to come.