Abstract Unlike most seniors who graduate from MTSU we wanted to challenge ourselves so we decided to take on the mini BAJA project. The overall design of the car and the drivetrain were our main focus. Mini “ Baja is an SAE sanctioned completion that brings together engineering students from all over the world to test their knowledge and products in the foci of electrical and mechanical engineering. Although we didn't place as highly as would have been expected we did learn a lot and from what we learn the team will be that more prepared for next year. INTRODUCTION MTSU has been competing in Baja SAE ® on and off for about 6 years now. We have had some cars perform adequately, as well as a few that did less so. With the design of this year's car, we took a different approach compared to previous years where light and nimble were our performance goals. We decided to trade in our light methods and adopted a new tank style philosophy. Going with inch and a quarter tubing rather than just basic inch tubing and also adding outboard planetary for traction and better gear ratio. The ergonomics of this year's car was simply based off of tool turning space and riders comfort in areas that were previously ignored. Fig.1: Design Frame Project Management To explain the poor placing of the team in the competition I would like to make notice that this is my first active project that would be showcasing my skills as a future project manager. The tools and strategies used to manage the team were status reports, project time line, and action item list. Since, this wasn't my first time dealing with the competition the focus was to try and relate to the team as the project being more of an extracurricular event than a graded side of this project. Knowing the stress that the project can bring to everyday life of a student who I would be managing. With that being said I thought it would be best that this year's team learn from previous year's mistakes in order to improve the quality for a future program. At the begging of the project things began as expected. Slow since the majority of my team was enrolled in classes. The biggest problem at the begging was a lack of work being done but I would have to contribute that to poor time management on every team member's side, including mine. Still I felt with communication things could at least move in the right direction. Since I really had no clue where to begin I figured I would start by finding out where previous cars went wrong. So the fall semester focus was to get the 2009 and 2013 cars back up and running. I figured what the team would learn from these two cars would help make a new car at that would be able to compete at a high level. I later realized with just trying to stay on top of the Baja schedule that managing the team and others c