Lassonde Motorsports: A Formula SAE Chassis, Finished

A multidisciplinary team, one car

Lassonde Motorsports is the student Formula SAE team at the Lassonde School of Engineering, York University, in Toronto. Members work across mechanical design, manufacturing and project management to put one formula-style race car on track.

The school calls its graduates renaissance engineers: technical skill paired with creativity and an entrepreneurial streak. On a Formula SAE team that is not a slogan. One person's bracket is another person's harness route, and the car only works if the whole roster is on the same version of the same assembly.

Two things make that harder on a student team than in industry. The roster turns over every year, and the work happens between classes, at home and in the shop rather than in one room.

Getting the chassis design done

The chassis is the part everything else bolts to, so it sets the schedule for everything around it.

"Most importantly, we have completed our chassis design and will be sending it out in the coming days. It literally could not have been completed without Sibe, so truly on behalf of all of us, thank you!"

— Ibrahim Riffi, Lassonde Motorsports

What the sponsorship covers

The team runs the whole car in a cloud CAD Document Management workspace, at no cost to them.

Nothing to stand up and nothing to administer, which matters more on a student team than most. Nobody on the roster is a full-time IT admin, and whoever sets it up eventually graduates.

What the team works with

• Check files in and out directly in SolidWorks, with assembly references resolved
• Track every version and revision automatically, so nobody overwrites a teammate's work by accident
• Import an existing assembly by dropping the files into the local cache folder and checking them in
• See where every file stands at a glance, from status icons in the local cache
• Roll back to an earlier version when something goes wrong
• Send a public share link to a faculty advisor or sponsor, who needs no CAD license and no Sibe account

No servers, no VPNs, no admin hassles.

What next year's team inherits

Every student team loses people to graduation. What survives is the files, and whether anyone can tell what happened in them.

The revision history builds itself as the students work. A new member opens a part, sees what changed and when, and picks up from there instead of tracking down whoever left.

Following the build

The car goes from design to competition this season, and we will be following it. UNLV Formula Racing runs its build the same way.

If you run a student engineering team in SolidWorks, get in touch. We would like to hear what you are building.

Running the same problem on a production team? Book a free 20-minute demo.