RIT Baja Racing finishes season No. 2 in North America
RIT also topped 83 teams to win BAJA SAE Ohio
Eric Schilling/RIT Baja
RIT’s Baja team vehicle, driven by fifth-year electrical engineering student Nick Lee, battles through obstacles during the SAE event in Ohio.
The Baja team from Rochester Institute of Technology captured first place at the Baja SAE Ohio competition, outperforming 83 collegiate teams from around the world. The win positions RIT Baja No. 2 in North America for the 2026 season.
RIT Baja Racing, which has around 50 members, is one of several performance teams at RIT. Others include Formula SAE Racing, Hot Wheelz Solar Racing, a clean snowmobile team, multiple rocket teams, an e-motorcycle team, and an aero flight team. Students participate on the teams from all colleges, and the experience positions them for co-ops, internships, and careers after graduation.
In Ohio, RIT topped the field that included national foes Purdue, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and other collegiate teams from Canada, Mexico, Türkiye, and China.
“Everybody on the team put in their hours and paid their dues to make this car do what it does,” said Nick Lee, a fifth-year electrical engineering major from Vermont. “It’s great to have all the hard work you put in pay off and get such an exciting result.”
Over the course of the four-day competitions, racing teams put their cars through technical and safety inspections, present their work in design, cost, and business events, compete in dynamic events that test acceleration, pulling power, maneuverability, and suspension, and perform in four-hour endurance races where all the cars share the course at once and part failures are repaired in the teams’ pit areas.
Over the summer, the team worked hard to get the vehicle ready for Ohio, which included changing the rear gearbox’s reduction ratio which improved the car’s pulling power and top speed. The work continued even though many team members were away on co-op, and those students brought industry experience back to the car. That includes design techniques, engineering software, and project tracking practices that help the team spot problems before and during a race.
Eric Schilling/RIT Baja
The RIT Baja team finished its season with a victory in Ohio, finishing as the national runners-up in the Mike Schmidt Memorial Iron Team Award, named after the RIT alumnus who died in 2001.
“People are coming back from their co-ops and they just come back with valuable information,” said Miles Tallia, a fifth-year software engineering major from Brooklyn and the team manager. “It was incredible to see the team come together over the summer, when many people aren't even here, and keep improving a car that had already raced twice.”
The team credits RIT's support for much of its success. RIT Baja Racing has its own shop with extended hours, where members often work late into the night, and two CNC machines that let the team build about 90 percent of the car in-house, including its shocks. The team also has a test track on campus, where members recreate the obstacles they see at competitions. Sponsors and benefactors, including Andrew Jacobson’90 (hotel management), ’96 MS (service management), also support RIT racing teams.
“It speaks to our dedication as students who are here, but it also speaks to RIT being able to give us that ability to perform,” Tallia said.
Added Grant Bierce, a fourth-year mechanical engineering student, “There isn’t a day when people aren’t in the shop until 10 or 11 p.m., if not later, doing what’s needed for the team to succeed.”
