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In May 2024, Citrus Racing competed in Michigan with its CR4 car. Now, with a larger team and a rebrand, they’re working on a CR5 car to go back to competing next year.

“Getting that car (CR5) to competition, that’s really the spark for this new team,” Ryan Brennan, a Syracuse University senior, said.

Citrus Racing is SU’s Formula SAE — Society of Automotive Engineers — team. Their cars are named CR, followed by the model version number. Since the 1980s, the team has undergone many changes, with fluctuations in team numbers, branding and more.

Today, they stand at around 120 members, with over 50 actively involved. It’s a huge increase from previous years, President and SU senior Dorian Baker-Santoro said.

The team is divided into sub-teams, all in charge of a different aspect of the car. They’ve also expanded with a media team and business operations team. They race under FSAE, an international convention that supports student engineers and hosts competitions throughout the year.

While Citrus Racing mainly attracts engineering and computer science students, the team maintains that anybody can get involved.

“It doesn’t matter your major, doesn’t matter where you come from,” Baker-Santoro said. “You could know nothing and come in here, learn and be useful to us.”

Media Lead Katelyn Longo and Treasurer Rachel Ward are proof of that. Longo is a public relations major and Ward studies finance and business, but the two joined due to their personal interests. Ward has been a Formula One fan her whole life, and being part of the team gave her relevant experience while being something she enjoys.

The team’s ideology of supporting new members is something they’ve tried to emphasize in recent years. Senior Joseph Lodato, one of the two chief engineers, recalls joining the team his freshman year and feeling that it wasn’t focused on educating new members.

“It was very much, ‘We have a car to build. If you want to be involved, you’ll figure it out on the fly,’” Lodato said.

Brennan, the electrical and embedded systems team lead, shared similar sentiments. He joined in 2022 and wasn’t invested at first due to the lack of structure he saw on the team. After gaining more technical experience from his SU classes, he rejoined to give new members the experience he originally wanted, he said.

A flawed structure led to a smaller team, and it showed when they went to competition in 2024, Baker-Santoro said. With fewer resources and manpower, it was challenging to balance other responsibilities and also be successful in the team, he said.

Now, he and the team are focused on instilling the knowledge they have. Rather than only having team leads do hands-on work, it’s important to retain interested members by passing down information and making them feel included, Lodato said.

“As a lead, I’d probably say 70% of my time is for other people,” Brennan said. “That’s what it’s about, setting up the blocks so they can just run.”

The team has implemented an onboarding program to do just that. New members can come in and do projects that prepare them to work on the car, learning everything from microcontroller basics to signal analysis, Brennan said. It gives engineering freshmen a chance to get real experience they wouldn’t usually get until their junior year, he said.

All the learning and hard work throughout the year pays off in competition, Baker-Santoro said. For members who haven’t previously gone to FSAE Michigan, it’s hard to visualize the end goal, Lodato said. But the opportunities that come from participating put everything in perspective, Baker-Santoro said.

Not only is it rewarding to see the car they’ve worked on in action, the competition is also a way to connect with and learn from other teams across the country.

“It’s a very good community to be a part of, because while we are competing against each other, everyone wants the same thing,” Baker-Santoro said. “We all want to see each other succeed.”

For many engineering students, competing is a milestone in their future careers. The competition is sponsored by almost every major car company in the country, so there are endless opportunities for internships and jobs, Baker-Santoro said.

That’s why competing isn’t the only end goal. The lessons that come with it shape the next generation of engineers, Lodato said.

Currently, the team meets multiple times a week to achieve their end goal of finishing CR5 and bringing it to Michigan. Since FSAE’s focus is on innovation and engineering, the team looks for ways to present its ingenuity through the design. CR5 will be made up of completely new parts — nothing they constructed for CR4 can be reused.

This makes the process quite a challenge, and it involves a lot of collaboration, Brennan said. Making sure every step of their progress is documented through notes and drawings is essential to their success, he said. The problems that arise are unavoidable hurdles, and they’re ways for his members to learn.

“For most people, until they’ve come into this room, every problem they’ve solved has been solved by thousands of students before them,” Brennan said. “Whereas here you run into a new problem, and there’s no answer key for you.”

Since Citrus Racing is a registered student organization, it receives funding from the school through the Student Government Association. Their allocation is $25,000 a semester, but due to the expensive nature of the work, this often doesn’t cover everything, Ward said.

Ward focuses on sourcing materials and balancing prices with the business operations team. To receive extra funding, she reaches out to potential sponsors and hosts fundraising events, like a Formula One watch party with a racing simulator people could pay to try. These events not only help the team financially, but also garner support from the SU community, Ward said.

As part of their team’s rebrand mission, Longo has been focused on improving their digital presence. By posting on social media, revising their website and advertising the team’s work, she hopes the team will get more attention.

“It gets us so much more recognition, so that maybe one day I email a company and they can Google ‘Citrus Racing’ and see that the Instagram is so good, that they’ll think
‘Oh, maybe we’ll help them out,’” Ward said.

Citrus Racing’s recent rebrand is both a visual change as well as a mental change in leadership, Lodato said. The ultimate goal is to make the team more accessible and continue growing in membership.

Baker-Santoro said he realizes how stressful making a car from scratch can be. Being in the president position now, it’s easy to see why previous teams were so closed off, he said. But it’s important to balance the stress and ensure the process is exciting.

“This should be fun,” Baker-Santoro said. “There’s not a lot of places that you can take what you’re learning in your engineering classes and apply it to something like this.”

As May 2026 grows closer, the team is hyper-focused on completing CR5, Brennan said. Lodato recalled the months leading up to competition as being the most fun and is excited to see members have a final “all hands on deck” moment. While being on the team is a valuable learning experience itself, nothing compares to actual competition, Baker-Santoro said.

“It’s been great that we’ve been able to adopt this new ideology and implement it, but it means nothing if we can’t actually take people there,” Baker-Santoro said.

Published on November 19, 2025 at 8:38 pm