After celebrating SpaceX’s initial public offering, top engineering executive Bill Riley plans to pack his bags for a trip to Brooklyn, Mich., to serve as chief design judge for a college race at Michigan International Speedway, according to Chris Ciuca, a vice president at the nonprofit that organizes the event. The competition doesn’t involve professional drivers speeding around the track — it will feature college students racing Formula One-style cars they designed and built over months.
Riley’s ties to the competition run deep. He was a member of Cornell University’s Formula SAE racing team in the late 1990s — a club focused on hands-on engineering of student-designed race cars. Riley, now 49, is not the only SpaceX executive from Cornell’s team. Mark Juncosa, 44, and Mike Nicolls, 45, both participated in the same club in the early 2000s, according to former teammates and a faculty adviser.
“Race cars and rockets are not that dissimilar,” Riley once told an interviewer for the Ivy League school’s magazine.
The Cornell connection at SpaceX reflects the company’s longstanding emphasis on practical skills, not just academic credentials. HR executives at SpaceX have said successful job candidates typically have experience on extracurricular engineering or personal projects. Musk has cited winning competitions like Formula SAE as evidence of exceptional engineering ability. SpaceX didn’t respond to a request for comment.
John Callister, the current faculty adviser for Cornell’s team and a former General Motors engineer, said the group tries to foster independent thinking. “We don’t have classes in all the things that you have to know,” he said.
That approach matches Juncosa’s experience. The Southern California native studied economics as an undergrad at Cornell. But Timothy Reissman, who overlapped with him on the racing club, recalled Juncosa as someone willing to put in the time to figure out practical engineering skills for himself. “He was the guy who would grind through that work, to get to that ability to improve something or learn something,” said Reissman, now an associate professor at the University of Dayton.
Former employees said Juncosa is known as someone Musk dispatches to solve tough technical problems. Reissman said Juncosa once relayed a story about how SpaceX had hired a welder who didn’t think it was possible to set up an automated welding process involving thin aluminum panels. Juncosa, who knew how to weld from his Cornell racing team days, jumped in to help solve the problem.
“That is just an example of what Mark does,” Reissman said.
Charlotte Kiang, a former SpaceX employee who earned a master’s in engineering from Cornell, said the racing team’s reputation had seeped into the company. “There was a mystique around it — the Cornell SAE people, that was a demographic within SpaceX,” she said. She recalled that racing team participants from Cornell formed their own social group among interns at one point.
Michael Jones, a teammate on the club with Nicolls and Juncosa who is now a professor in Canada, recalled Nicolls as a quieter presence with unique skills. He worked on electronics, helping the group develop its own engine-control unit. Nicolls, 45, is now a senior vice president at SpaceX and has spent years working in the company’s Starlink satellite-internet business.
Jones said a SpaceX without Riley, Juncosa and Nicolls might be a very different place. “If you took them all out and they went somewhere else, what would have happened?” said Jones. “I think there was a fine storm of people who came in at the right time and set the standard.”