Why does Cornell use a Penske truck?

[Daves]

Does Cornell own or rent the truck?
Is it safer than a ball-hitch trailer?
Why Penske?

I've found Penske to be expensive for personal use.

[Daves]

Does Cornell own or rent the truck?
Is it safer than a ball-hitch trailer?
Why Penske?

I've found Penske to be expensive for personal use.

[Daves]

I just searched the forum and obtained some of the answers:

...yes, we wish for things. In no particular order...7) Pimpy race trailer - We're jealous of a few people. We've got a sketchy trailer and rent a Penske truck.

We get a 25' Penske rental truck that's big enough for a mobile lab space but not really much else - all work on the car is done outside. Whiteboards for organization aren't necessary since the walls of the truck work great on that front.

Are trucks safer than ball-hitch trailers, though? Don't many people with trailers use fifth wheels instead of ball hitches for safety?

[Michael Jones]

Enclosed ball-hitch trailers of sufficient size are outside of our budget, simple as that.

And the local Penske dealer gives us a good deal on a 20-25ft. truck for a week (about $500, including mileage and all...)

They're good people, so we've had no reason of yet to seriously consider a change for competition travel. And the space in one of those trucks is more that sufficient (we ended up getting a 20ft. truck this year, and it was still OK...)

We could seriously use a new trailer for taking the car out though. The one we've been using is kind of embarassing and generally not used for anything other than very local transport for good reason.

Between it being a relatively low priority and us having only enough money to do what we do, well, it'll be a while until we get one.

As I've noted elsewhere a few times, while we're not insanely hard up, rumours of $250k budgets are way the hell out. Think 1/6 of that on average. More than about half I'd guess, but also not enough to take care of trailer/huge mobile lab space requirements ourselves (which we'd have to do, since the school's pretty skinflint when it comes to supporting us outside of space at least...)

[Derek Carboni]

Haha, good question.

I never questioned it...maybe because Ithaca is really small and there's no Uhaul. We've had penske trucks forever, they work, so why change? I don't know how much it costs us, maybe we get a university discount. I'm not the one to ask. We've never gotten around to putting a trailer in the budget so we never bought one.

Cornell Racing
2003-2004

[Michael Jones]

Ah, Carboni's short and to the point as always. That's why he's an engineer and I just play one on TV.

[NoH]

Just a note on this.

Ithaca isn't that small, there's U-Haul, Penske, and Budget (used to be Ryder). And they're in multiple locations.

It's all about the greenbacks.

[Daves]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Ithaca isn't that small, there's U-Haul, Penske, and Budget (used to be Ryder). And their in multiple locations. </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

It appears that he's right.

Typically U-Haul has a loading ramp instead of a lift gate. Does Penske have a lift gate, and does Cornell use it when [un]loading their car? If so, does the whole car fit on the lift gate?

[adrial]

I think I've got it....those penske trucks are yellow arent they? Hmmm yellow sure is a fast color...and their racecar is red...also a fast color...could it be...the deadly fast red and yellow color combination makes for a rocket of a racecar???

Thats gotta be it...I just figured out cornell's success...HAH!!!

[CMURacing - Prometheus]

we all know that yellow paint adds 15 mph to your top speed. red paint just adds 15 hp. its a tradeoff you have to make.