Wayland Additive/ USC Racing - Formula SAE Team
University of Southern California (USC) Racing – Formula SAE Team has partnered with Wayland Additive to additively manufacture the exhaust collector of its 2025 car.
Formula SAE is an annual engineering education competition that sees teams compete in a series of off track and on track events against the clock.
Each team designs, builds and races an internal combustion engine car with limited resources within the school year.
This year, USC Racing – Formula SAE Team linked up with Wayland to harness NeuBeam 3D printing technology to produce a complex titanium part that has been difficult to manufacture with traditional methods, as well as other 3D printing processes. The exhaust collector joins each of the cylinder exhausts into one stream and directly affects the efficiency and performance of the engine. Made up of a series of connected tubes, the system requires optimised angles where the exhaust flow meets.
Traditionally, to manufacture the exhaust collector would require welding and manually cutting nine 1mm titanium tubes. Five of the nine also need to be stretched to size, so getting all nine to fit together with minimal gaps is a lengthy and highly skilled process.
“Because traditionally manufactured collectors are welded and made from tubes which must be cut very precisely at difficult angles it compounds available space problems: the tighter the packaging requirement the more difficult it is to make,” said Samuel McCarthy, a student at the USC and Suspension Lead for USC Racing – Formula SAE Team. “The Wayland produced part reduced the length of our exhaust collector by 50%. And this is a really big deal.”
Wayland Additive/ USC Racing - Formula SAE Team
The two parties came together at last year’s RAPID + TCT event in Los Angeles, with members of both teams quickly collaborating around the design and testing of 3D printed parts. After multiple design iterations and an extensive testing campaign once parts were delivered to USC Racing, the exhaust collector was deemed ready to race between May 14-17, 2025. USC Racing achieved its best results of 3rd in autocross, an event which challenges the car for the utmost pace and achieved a team internal goal of completing an endurance event which only 49 of the 120 teams finished in 2024.
Keegan Duarte, Commercial Applications Engineer at Wayland Additive, commented: “Wayland’s Commercial Team worked closely with Sam and the USC Racing team to fully understand their technical and performance requirements. We collaborated through multiple design iterations to balance manufacturability with optimal part performance. NeuBeam’s low residual stress and minimal post-processing were key advantages for this demanding application. Being able to quickly turn around parts on the Calibur3 made a real difference under tight timelines. The collaboration demonstrated how Wayland’s technology can directly address and overcome practical manufacturing constraints. We hope to keep working with the USC team — wishing them the best of luck in their future races.”
