{"id":140171,"date":"2023-05-23T17:13:59","date_gmt":"2023-05-23T21:13:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/?p=140171"},"modified":"2023-05-23T17:13:59","modified_gmt":"2023-05-23T21:13:59","slug":"the-right-formula","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/2023\/05\/23\/the-right-formula\/","title":{"rendered":"The Right Formula"},"content":{"rendered":"

She was told women can’t drive. Now she designs top-speed racecars<\/strong><\/h3>\n

By Patrick L. Kennedy<\/strong><\/p>\n

When Anna Saad (ENG\u201920) arrived in Boston, she had never taken the wheel of an automobile. In fact, she was forbidden from driving\u2014by royal decree.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Anna Saad (ENG’20)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The daughter of a Dutch mother and an Argentinian father, Saad was born and raised in Saudi Arabia during a time when women were legally banned from driving. Fortunately, her parents had brought her up to believe there was nothing she couldn\u2019t do, and when she came to BU to study mechanical engineering, she was reunited with two older brothers, also in school in the area, who taught her to drive on the roads outside Boston.<\/p>\n

But more than driving, what really revved Saad\u2019s engine was designing and building racecars.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat first week, I saw Terrier Motorsport, then known as BU Racing, had set up the frame of a car they were building,\u201d Saad recalls. \u201cSomething clicked, and I said, \u2018That\u2019s what I want to do.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

She joined the club, which was developing an open-wheel, single-seat electric vehicle that they hoped would some year hold its own against collegiate rivals in events such as timed laps and acceleration at the annual Formula Hybrid competition.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Saad as a senior during Terrier Motorsport’s test of the Stella vehicle.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By sophomore year, Saad was head of the club\u2019s bodywork and aerodynamics subteams. \u201cWe were building the nose and front part of the car out of fiberglass, working with composite materials,\u201d she says. By junior year, Saad was club president and taking as many aerodynamics electives as she could, even adding summer classes. \u201cI was applying what I was learning to a real-world project.\u201d<\/p>\n

On a cold day in early spring of Saad\u2019s senior year, Terrier Motorsport tested their auto, which they nicknamed \u201cStella,\u201d on Cummington Mall. It was a success. \u201cWe were only allowed to go 25 miles an hour, but just having it start and work and move was really a big deal and super satisfying,\u201d Saad says.<\/p>\n

The club was confident heading into the big meet. Unfortunately, COVID-19 spoiled those plans. The competition never happened.<\/p>\n

But the following year, Saad landed just the job she wanted and had spent years preparing for. Now in Italy, she is a junior aerodynamics engineer\u2014on a career track\u2014for a Formula One (F1) racing team, tweaking and testing one of the world\u2019s fastest regulated road-course racecars.<\/p>\n

\u201cFormula\u201d refers to the rules followed by all of the elite open-wheel, single-seat cars that compete in the Grands Prix, a season of professional races held on both loop courses and closed public roads all over the world. Saad\u2019s team is sponsored by machine tool maker Haas.<\/p>\n

Naturally, driver skill plays a role in race results, but an enormous amount of work goes into iterating and rebuilding the cars from one meet to the next in order to gain any edge. As a test engineer, Saad spends half the week in the office, designing new surfaces and geometries for the car, and the other half in the wind tunnel testing those changes on a 60-percent-size scale model of the Haas vehicle.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the nature of F1,\u201d says Saad. \u201cYou\u2019re swapping out pieces and moving them a tiny bit, reshaping the car by millimeters at a time and seeing if that\u2019s worth however many tenths of a second per lap, and you just cycle through that all year long. It\u2019s the perfect foundation to learn because I\u2019m physically doing the changes and seeing the results live.\u201d<\/p>\n

Saad thrives at that fast pace. \u201cIt\u2019s a demanding environment,\u201d she says. \u201cThere\u2019s no room for mistakes. It just pushes you to another level. I get a lot of satisfaction out of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

The female proportion of the F1 workforce, while growing, is still stubbornly small, but Saad says she has never considered her gender to be a professional barrier.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wasn\u2019t allowed to drive a car; now I build them for a living,\u201d Saad says. \u201cI had supportive parents, and their message was always so clear to me that regardless of what\u2019s around you, if there\u2019s something you want to do, you can go do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Banner photo courtesy of Haas F1<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI wasn\u2019t allowed to drive a car; now I build them for a living.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2662,"featured_media":140299,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[236,982,908,1],"tags":[1006],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140171"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140171"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":140306,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140171\/revisions\/140306"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}