A crowd of about 50 spectators cheered as a raw turkey impaled with corn-cob axles and rice-cracker wheels careened down the ramp, only to crash in a spectacular cloud of improvised poultry and vegetable car parts. The turkey car competed against zucchini mobiles and bagel-wheeled buggies at the Xtreme Edible Car Competition last Thursday afternoon on "Manning Speedway," in front of Barus and Holley.
The rules were simple. Teams had one hour to construct a gravity-powered car made entirely out of food that could be found in a typical grocery store. Cars also had to have at least three wheels, "so you can't just roll a cantaloupe," said Julie Sygiel '09, the event's organizer. Once assembled, vehicles were rolled down a ramp and judged on their distance traveled and their appearance. Professors of engineering judged the distance portion of the event, while Brown Dining Services Executive Chef John O'Shea lent his culinary expertise to evaluate the aesthetics of the cars.
The Xtreme Special Events Committee, a group of engineers that organized last December's Xtreme Gingerbread House Building Competition, sponsored the edible car race along with the Division of Engineering and the Society of Women Engineers. However, many of the competitors were not engineering concentrators.
Because every car part had to edible, teams had to employ considerable ingenuity to design their cars. Heavy vegetables such as squash and eggplants were popular choices for their weight, in order to aid acceleration. For axles, peppermint sticks, carrots and pretzel rods were all prevalent, but peppermint sticks offered the best strength-to-weight-ratio, according to one designer.
As for wheels, rice cakes were the most common choice, but other teams went for lollipops, sliced squash, bagels and Oreos. To assemble their edible parts, teams employed various sophisticated engineering techniques: sharpening carrots, applying marshmallow fluff and, for one team, licking a candy cane into the perfect shape.
John Szymanski '09, designer of the turkey car, brought a number of tools to aid construction including a power drill, various knives, a potato peeler and a 114-piece drill set. He said he hoped the weight of the turkey would allow their car to travel farthest. "We're probably going to win," Szymanski said before the competition, unaware of the morbid fate awaiting his Thanksgiving-on-wheels. For a while, his team did seem to be the favorite - other teams nudged each other and praised the impressive car under their breath.
Michael Huang '08 and his team of two engineers and one physicist went for a three-wheeled eggplant-mobile and aimed for nothing short of victory. "We're here to compete," he said, "not to make friends."
Team Beast, a group of thee first-years, expressed similar competitiveness. After winning second place in the gingerbread competition, they had high hopes for their zucchini car outfitted with a Twizzler "roll cage to protect the driver," Peter White '11 said.
John Voorhees '09, Jordan Chesin '09 and Jeanine Pollard '09 had an early setback when their eggplant chassis ruptured while being penetrated by a cucumber axle. It was "very depressing," Chesin said. "Can I just start eating it?" Pollard asked.
Hoping to intimidate the competition, another team designated a member to operate a graphing calculator and murmur faux-physics calculations out loud.
Other teams decided to forgo the physics and focus on the appearance of their cars.
Teams were judged in the categories of "creativity, engineering ingenuity, edible driver, colorfulness and theme and car name," O'Shea said. He said he had been very involved in culinary competitions in the past, both as a judge and competitor, but this was "a little different."
"Some are very creative," he said, surveying the field. "Some I'm concerned about." Ky Krieger '08, a member of Brown's Formula SAE car racing team, said his experience designing and building real cars "did not help at all." Nonetheless, his cucumber and bagel car did well on Manning Speedway, and was one of the few to make it off the ramp and across the bricks to any considerable distance.
The winner of the distance event, mechanical engineering concentrator Andy Nager '09, chose a simple design. He said he figured an unaltered grapefruit rolling down the ramp would beat anything else, so began with a grapefruit and modified it as little as possible to make it comply with the rules.
Is it a coincidence that a mechanical engineering student won, or was this competition a real test of engineering prowess? Professor of Engineering and competitor Bill Curtin was not convinced - it's "engineering on the loose side."
Curtin entered the event with his six-year-old son, Peter. After facing some early trouble with drills and lollipops, the father-son team's candy car did not perform exceptionally well.
He added that the event does teach how to engineer with constraints, which is a legitimate concern for engineers.
Senior Research Engineer Christopher Bull, a judge of the event, saw a purpose outside of engineering in the competition.
"The intent of the 'competition' is not to demonstrate or apply engineering skills," he wrote in an e-mail to The Herald, "but to build community; which perhaps is a skill all of us can improve."
But regardless of the applicability of an edible car race, wacky competitions seem popular among engineers. XSPECS - the Xtreme Special Events Committee - held a gingerbread competition, asking engineers to build the strongest gingerbread house out of limited ingredients like graham crackers and icing.
A team of mechanical engineers won when they crumbled gingerbread flavored graham crackers into a mold and used liquid nitrogen to freeze it into a super-strong gingerbread igloo.
Before settling on edible cars for this competition, XSPEC considered pitting giant paper planes against each other in a throw-off from the roof of Barus and Holley. Sygiel said this idea was abandoned, since we "didn't want people to fall off."
