Auburn Off-Road's performance in Baja SAE Ohio brings positive vibes
Published: Nov 9, 2026 2:00 PM
By Phillip Tutor
The Auburn Off-Road team posted several notable results at the Baja SAE Ohio competition.
Whether embarking on a new era or reclaiming its competitive past, the student-led Auburn Off-Road team returned this fall from the Baja SAE Ohio competition with two things of note: encouraging results and optimism for the future.
But don’t overlook the bigger picture.
“I'm celebrating what they learned,” said Jordan Roberts, the team’s faculty advisor.
Baja SAE, a program of SAE International (formerly the Society of Automotive Engineers) that celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2026, stages three annual competitions at different locations in the United States. At each site, student engineers compete in static and dynamic events with a single-seat, gasoline-powered, off-road vehicle they have designed, fabricated, tested and refined.
Roberts, a mechanical engineering senior lecturer, appreciates September’s season-ending results in Nashport, Ohio. The only entry from Alabama, Auburn Off-Road finished 57th overall in the 83-team field that included two fellow Southeastern Conference members — Tennessee (UT Baja Racing, 47th) and Texas (Longhorn Baja, 67th) — and international entries from universities in Canada, China, Mexico and Turkey.
Directed by team captain Jacob Zinn, Auburn placed in the top half of three events: maneuverability (21), design (37) and Passport pull (41), a unique competition in which teams were judged by how far their vehicles could pull a 2026 Honda Passport fitted with an overlanding rig for extra weight. Without that addition, Passports can weigh more than 4,500 pounds, while all Baja SAE vehicles are powered by unmodified, 14-horsepower, four-cycle, air-cooled engines fitted with governors that reduce top output to roughly 9.5 horsepower.
Other judging categories included business presentation, cost event, acceleration, suspension and endurance — a grueling four-hour race that tests vehicle reliability, driver strategy and a host of other abilities.
Auburn’s best Passport pull distance was 23.05 meters, equivalent to pulling an SUV from Jordan-Hare Stadium’s goal line to the 25-yard line.
“They put in the work over the last year to get those results. I'm super happy for them,” said Roberts, who shares advising duties with Garon Griffiths, research engineer and manager of Auburn Engineering’s Design and Innovation Center. “We all recognize that those are building blocks for the next level, the next step in their engineering education.
“The performance of the team is great. But ultimately, this series is about making the best engineers we can.”
Seventeen Auburn Off-Road team members traveled to Ohio. Two alumni members, Darrell Krueger and Marc Jarmulowicz, were also there as Baja SAE national tech inspectors. Other alumni members, including Mike Zieman, Jeremy Belcher, Zack Cable and Robert Bahr, have also supported Baja SAE in that capacity.
“It was probably the best we've done in the past eight years,” said lead manufacturer Alexander McClory, a junior industrial engineering major from Nashville. “There are a few things that we were kicking ourselves over at the time and saying, ‘We should have done this, we should have done that.’
“But we felt really good about Ohio.”
Said Zinn, “We expected to do a little bit better, but we had some mechanical failures. One of our spindles broke, which set us back about an hour and a half. But we got back on the track and completed a lot more laps, which is good.”
The influence of off-road alumni
It wasn’t lost on Jarmulowicz, a two-time graduate of Auburn Engineering (2005, 2007), that Auburn Off-Road shared a deep connection with Baja SAE and its 50th anniversary season.
Before heading to Ohio, Jarmulowicz refurbished Auburn Off-Road’s 2004 and 2005 Baja cars in hopes of taking them to the season’s final race. The former was in “pretty good condition,” he said, but the latter needed extensive work that current team members helped repair. In Ohio, the pair of two-decades-old Auburn Baja vehicles paraded the field before the start of the competition’s endurance race.
That link, between the team’s successful past and its new generation of students, was important to many of the Auburn Engineering alumni who designed, built and drove for Auburn Off-Road back in the day.
Shortly after Baja SAE Ohio, several Auburn Off-Road alumni held a video call with the current team — not to bemoan, but to mentor.
“They showed us their design, and we gave them a bunch of critiques because we want to bolster them,” Jarmulowicz said. “We want to give them that alumni connection and the resources they need to catapult them back up.”
As for McClory, he already was tapping into that expertise.
“I think I text our alumni once a week asking them questions about why they did something to their cars,” he said.
A ‘fantastic’ voyage for AU students
As admitted gearheads, McClory and Zinn exemplify the commitment and skill sets you’d expect for off-road team leadership.
Zinn, a junior mechanical engineering major from Chesapeake, Virginia, is the son of a U.S. Navy Seabee who repaired diesel engines during multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. When he was 16, Zinn completed one of the toughest repair jobs for any car mechanic — replacing the head gasket, the seal between the engine block and the cylinder head.
It took the Navy Seabee and the teenage engineer-in-training about 18 hours to change the head gasket in a 2005 Honda Civic.
“We took the whole engine out and the timing chain. I had to retime it up — the whole nine yards,” Zinn said. “That's kind of what made me fall in love with automotive work, which is cool. He taught me everything.”
Like Zinn, McClory’s interest developed at home. In high school, McClory built an overlanding rig for his hand-me-down 1997 Toyota 4Runner that he drove on camping trips and across rocky, hilly trails. That highly modified SUV ignited a spark that led him to Auburn Off-Road. “I was always improving it,” McClory said, even though his British-born dad didn’t immediately understand the motivation. Eventually, he caught on.
“My dad worked on cars when he was a kid, and when I got that car, he said to do what you want to it,” McClory said. “I started thinking that this is cool and I want to do this, too. I just love doing it.”
As an educator and faculty advisor, Roberts considers improving students’ technical and soft skills one of Auburn Off-Road’s appealing features. That it’s available to all students, regardless of major, doubles down on that appeal.
Though five of the current team leads are mechanical engineering majors — Breckin King (operations), Austin Diaz (frame), Kate Franklin (drive train), Eden Nickolson (suspension) and Zinn — sophomore Winston Lindley is a finance major tasked with leading Auburn Off-Road’s business operations. In 2007, one of the team’s drivers was a geology major, Roberts recalled. Jarmulowicz, the team alum and Baja SAE tech inspector, was an aerospace major.
“It does not matter — if you're an Auburn student, you can be a part of it,” he said. “We want the best experience for our students, and this is a high-impact experience regardless of what niche area of the subsystem you might be on.”
Said Zinn, “It's fantastic, truthfully. It's a good environment, a good community and a lot of fun.”
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