Mahindra Baja 2016: COEP takes top spot

The Mahindra Baja is no longer just an event, in the nine years of its existence, it has snowballed into nothing short of a phenomenon. It is the single largest Baja Buggy build off among engineering students in the country, with over 4000 hopefuls entering every year. Standing in the burning heat in Indore, watching teams and their buggies thrash through some of the toughest terrain you can imagine. One finds it increasingly hard to fathom that for most of the 4000 entrants the journey started with a virtually designed Baja buggy.  This year’s championship went to the Pune based, College of Engineering Pune, they won a total of 9 awards that led to them taking home the entire championship.

In the early stages when Mahindra were announcing this year’s Baja campaign they promised that this year they would continue raising the bar from where it already was. They kept their promise. Everything about this year’s event was bigger than last year’s edition. In totality, 395 colleges/teams made to the Virtual Baja round, and following a rate of attrition higher than 50%, 179 buggies were selected to run the event. However only 144 made it to the track to compete.

The attrition continued as the event begun with 18 vehicles failing to pass the on-ground scrutiny only 126 made it to the following rounds. This year’s endurance run had the most punishing track in the history of the SAE Baja with traps, mud-pit, water crossings, log crossing and a steep hill climb. The track even included driving through an untouched forest. In totality the track length was 5.2, 400 metres up from last year’s 4.8m track.

Testament to the improvement of the buggies since last year is the fact that, the average lap time was down from 28 minutes to 23, despite the 400-meter addition to the length of the track. More importantly the best recorded lap time was in the region of 7 minutes, while the maximum number of laps run was 10 by Team Forza racing Pune.

Top Ten Colleges Results

Car No. 2 – D.Y. Patil College of Engineering, Akurdi, Pune
Car No. 4 – Rashtreeya Vidyalaya College of Engineering (RVCE), Bangalore
Car No. 13 – All India Shri Shivaji Memorial Society’s College of Engineering, Pune – Resonance Racing
Car No. 32 – DIT University, Dehradun
Car No. 35 – Dr. B.R. Ambedkar National Institute of Technology, Jalandhar – Team Avishkar
Car No. 54 – Indus Institute Of Technology and Engineering, Ahmedabad
Car No. 78 – Mangalore Institute of Technology & Engineering, Mangalore
Car No. 102 – Pandit Deendayal Petroleum University, Gandhinagar
Car No. 127 – Sinhgad Academy Of Engineering, Pune – Forza Racing
Car No. 146 – Vishwakarma Institute of Technology, Pune