Youngstown State University dune buggy team to hold spaghetti dinner fundraiser for travel to competitions

A team of student engineers from Youngstown State University is getting ready to take their dune buggy to a national competition. The students have formed the Penguin Baja Racing Team. They design, build, and compete with their all-terrain vehicle yearly. The team competes in an international college-level student engineering design competition against around 250 teams from other universities from around the world.

This May, the team will be competing in the competition in Wisconsin; the ten seniors on the team will be missing their graduation ceremony in favor of the competition.

The captain of the YSU Penguin Baja Racing team, Katie Chludzinski, was quoted in an article from WYTV, saying, “For the seniors, this has been our life’s work for an entire year. It’s really brought us together. There’s been a lot of difficulties but also a lot of successes, so for us, it’s absolutely worth it to see it all the way through.”

Jared Bryaly, another team captain, also weighed in, saying, “We’ve worked so hard on this all year long, and we’re really excited to bring our college career to an end with showing the rest of the world what Youngstown’s all about.”

The team finished in ninth place at the end of last year’s racing season, the first time they had made it into the top ten in the world. This year, they hope to move up into the top five. 

Of the design, building, and high performance testing, Hazel Marie, who is the program coordinator and distinguished professor of mechanical engineering at Youngstown State University, said, “This is the epitome of engineering in action. They go through a complete design process so this is not garage engineering. This is high-level engineering.”

The team has plans to compete with their dune buggy in Ohio and Washington, but they will need the help of the community to raise enough money to be able to travel to the competitions.

In order to fund the travel, the team is holding a spaghetti dinner tonight at Boardman Park. They are hoping to raise enough money to cover the cost of hotels, flights, and any incidental costs that may arise.

Team member Landon Morucci talked about the effort to fund the team, saying, “In order to do that, we work with a lot of manufacturing companies in this area, but even after we get all the money from them, we still need more so that we can get all the way out west with our huge team.”

The spaghetti dinner will take place tonight from 4-8 pm in the Rotary and Stambaugh rooms at Boardman Park, and is $10 to enter. There will also be cookies, raffles, and to-go boxes.

More information about Youngstown State University can be found at the school’s website.