These last several weeks have been everything but normal for Hayley, as she prepares for the biggest day of her short life.

The Sooner Racing Team’s 2010 car, affectionately known as “Hayley,” started and ran with no problems Saturday afternoon in the team’s shop in the new ExxonMobil Lawrence G. Rawl Engineering Practice Facility.

The race car, which the team of about 15 students has been building since September, will compete in Fontana, Calif., in June, and in Hockenheim, Germany, in August.

The team, which has placed in the top five in all their competitions during the last three years, is currently the No. 1 Formula Society of Automotive Engineers racing team in the U.S. and No. 8 in the world, having placed second in Virginia and fifth in California in 2009 with the race car “Karen.”

Team Captain David Collins Jr., who designed the car’s frame, said he was happy with the results of Saturday’s test run.

“[The car] sounds great, it starts good, the engine revs well,” said Collins, mechanical engineering senior. “You want your car to look good and look professional. If we show up and we do everything that we’re capable of doing, there’s no reason not to win the event.”

“[The Germany race] the most prestigious competition at this point,” said Nic Evans, mechanical engineering junior and one of the team’s system leaders for body and aerodynamics. “[The car] is pretty fast. We drive it on a slower track — it can go zero to 60 mph in 3.3 seconds.”

Collins said they break the car down into systems to make the building more manageable, one group working on the power train (the engine-related work) and the other focusing on chassis (the body work).

“One person can’t design a full car; it can’t be done, especially in a one-year time line,” he said. “The way it normally works out is that there’s enough people that we can get one person on most of the systems and each person usually has to double up and take an extra system.”

He said each year the team finalizes most design decisions by May, using previous designs including those from other teams and professionals to figure out what works.

“We don’t have to start from scratch every year, and that’s a big help,” Collins said. “We’ve gotten great support from the school.”

The racing team’s adviser, mechanical engineering professor Zahed Siddique, said it’s the team’s effort that has made it the No. 1 team in the country.

“I think especially the students as they’re coming along the way take the responsibility, and I think the team culture has changed so the students who are a little bit senior take the time to train freshman and sophomore students,” said Siddique, who has been adviser since 2003. “So I think the culture and the environment of the team that has helped it out a lot, and the students who have been the leaders have done extremely well managing the team.”

Collins said the racing team gets most of its budget from sponsorships from four sources: OU, private businesses, families and alumni. Private sponsors include Schlumberger Ltd., Lucas Oil Products, Altair Engineering Inc. and Shell Oil Co.

The OU College of Engineering is the team’s biggest sponsor, said Tom Landers, Engineering College dean. The college supports the racing team by providing much of team’s annual budget and use of the practice bays in the Practice Facility, which was dedicated Feb. 15 by OU President David Boren.

“The College of Engineering stresses experiential learning as a core strategy,” Landers said by e-mail. “Competitive groups like the Sooner Racing Team provide the kinds of hands-on teamwork learning experiences that are essential to the engineering profession.”

Landers stated he visits the Sooner Racing Team periodically to see how things are going with the project, and has joined them at competitions in Michigan and California.

The team plans to take Hayley on her first drive Sunday if the sunny weather continues, and the team will hold driver tryouts in the spring for the competition’s four events.

“We try to get everybody some drive time — that’s pretty much the reward for working on the team,” Collins said. “That’s supposed to be the fun part.”