In their future careers as automotive engineers, car-repair technicians — or veterinarians — they will probably never be called on to take a high-performance engine totally apart and put it back together again in less than a half hour. But their ability to do that has won five students from South Elgin High School a trip to Las Vegas this week, as they compete in the Hot Rodders of Tomorrow Engine Challenge Monday through Friday at the hot rod association’s national convention.
Their teacher, Steve Schertz, said that during the contest, teams of five high-schoolers have to take apart an engine and put it back together while judges time them. The fastest team wins, though each team is penalized certain numbers of seconds if members drop a part on the floor, start tightening something with a wrench before starting it by hand (which can cause engine damage) or commits other mistakes.
Moving with the carefully defined responsibilities and fast, frantic-looking precision of a racing-car pit crew, the team practiced assembling and disassembling a small-block 350 General Motors engine after classes got out on Thursday. Schertz and three South Elgin High alumni timed them and offered advice.
The four male members of the team — Dan Perritt, Sam Marsala, Dean Attieri and Ryan Rampel — screwed and unscrewed items on their assigned sections of the red engine, setting parts from each of the eight cylinders onto a rack marked with the numbers 1 through 8 to keep track of which came from which. Behind them, the team’s only girl, Lee Anne Driscoll, manned a work bench and kept track of what tools and parts each of her male counterparts would need next.
“Lee Anne doesn’t touch the engine. But her role is key,” Schertz said as the team worked feverishly. “She has to stay a step ahead of everybody else so she has what they need as soon as they need it.”
“If the work bench person stops, the whole team stops.”
“If we want to be competitive in Las Vegas, we need to get it down to 20 minutes or less, with no drops or mistakes,” Schertz said as 2014 graduates Max Aldred and Jason Hite watched for errors and kept one eye on the seconds racing by on a smartphone’s stopwatch app. When the skirmish was over, the time said “23 minutes 50 Seconds.” It was worse than the team has been doing in its other recent dress rehearsals, which Aldred said usually came in at about 22 minutes.
Schertz gathered the troupe around him to talk about what they could do better, how they might have cut off a second here or five seconds there. Then they stared again.
When things didn’t go well, some team members let go with a few four-letter words. “Swearing!” Schertz reminded them. The competition is sponsored by large auto-parts companies, he noted, and “they don’t like you talking that way while you’re wearing a shirt with the company name on it.”
This time the stopwatch said 23 minutes even. Better, but still too slow.
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Three of the team members said they want to become automotive engineers or something related to auto repair after they graduate from high school.
“I’d like to work at a manufacturing plant and design engines,” Attieri said. “I could be part of a team that would say, ‘We just put out the 2014 Ford Focus. Now how can we address this problem and that problem?'”
“I’ve been doing this since I was a kid,” Marsala said. “I started by watching my dad and we’ve been rebuilding cars since then. We have a ’68 Camaro, a ’54 Belair and an ’87 TransAm.”
“We were the first team to go to national competition in Illinois and then the next year in Vegas,” 2014 grad Aldred said. “Because of doing this, I know now what I want to do in my life.”
Aldred said he is studying automotive tech at a community college in Champaign, and when he finishes that, he’ll move to the South — “because with the weather down there you can build race cars all year round.”
But Rampel said he plans to become a tool and dye maker and soup up cars as a hobby.
The most unusual career plan on the team is that of its only female member. Driscoll said that in college next year she will pursue a double major of preveterinary medicine and automotive engineering technology.
Driscoll said she’ll probably become a veterinarian. “But I know I’m good with autos and that gives me something to fall back on” if the animal doctoring doesn’t work out. “I’d like to build my own car someday.”