BELOIT, Wis. — A group of students at Beloit College had a plan. They wanted to create the college’s first F1 SIM racing club.

So they did.  

They built the first-ever SIM racing rig at Beloit College from scratch with no manual.

“We had to go on YouTube and figure it out,” Faiq Ahmad said. “It says on the box there are no instructions because this is an actual professional thing.”

Ahmad and his classmate, Tanzil Idrisi, took more than a month to build the machine at the college’s makers’ lab. It exists within Beloit College’s Center for Entrepreneurship (CELEB) downtown.

Alumni donors provided $2,000 for the simulator. After ordering the parts from Europe, Ahmad said the rig cost about $4,000 in total. That doesn’t include the three new monitors and additional computers they just ordered.

“If you look at it as a toy, it’s an extremely expensive toy,” Ahmad said. “If you look at it as a professional tool, which it is, it’s relatively inexpensive.”

Ahmad and Idrisi are studying computer science and physics, respectively. They said assembling the SIM machine and using it has taught them much more than what they learn inside a classroom.

“Everything about this is about physics,” Idrisi said as he drove. “How it’s acting and behaving is all about physics because it’s not like a normal car.”

“You can set the torque, the dampening and you can set everything,” Ahmad said. “It’s not like a game you buy off a shelf.”

The college’s first SIM racing club has garnered nearly five times as many students as when it first began. It has grown from four students to about 22.  

The long-term goal is to enter this rig into collegiate competitions across the country, starting next semester.

“Colleges from all over the U.S. participate and there are money prizes for it,” Ahmad said. “It’s a professional thing so, we will make our own Beloit College F1 SIM racing team.”