Mud, Sweat, & Gears

The afternoon sun hung low over Baltimore’s Inner Harbor as the crowd outside the American Visionary Art Museum erupted into cheers. Legs burning and hearts pounding, Nick Shaw ’25, Hudson Reese ’25, Gus Lynott ’25, and Liam Smith ’26 sprinted toward the finish line. Their 950-pound, human-powered kinetic sculpture tore through the banner in first place. 

Nick and Hudson leaned back in their bicycle seats, breathless, caked in mud, and drenched in sweat. They looked at each other in equal parts disbelief and elation as they soaked in the moment–one that was three years in the making. 

The summer before their sophomore year, Nick and Hudson came across a video of the Baltimore Kinetic Sculpture Race, an annual contest of unmotorized, amphibious, all-terrain works of art. The very next day, they attended Mount Saint Joseph’s Xaverian Leadership Camp, where they were asked to pitch a project or club they could start at MSJ. Their idea–to build a vehicle for the wacky, whimsical event they saw on social media–was just the catalyst Mr. Jason Ader ’03 was looking for to kickstart an Engineering Club on campus. 

Over the next three years, the two friends worked steadily to bring their vision to life. They met every Wednesday in the Build Lab with a rotating cast of club members and some dedicated regulars like Gus and Liam, Noah Witmer ’25, Lucas Bonner ’26, and Maki Kougianos ’25. With two tandem bikes as the base, they began by building a chassis. To ensure the chassis would be strong enough to support the load, they calculated the force that would be exerted on the structure as it accelerated through turns. 

They learned to weld, with help from Dave and Matt Adams ’01 in the Facilities Department. “We couldn’t thank them enough,” says Nick. “They helped us so much, but they also let us go through the building process and try to find the solution ourselves rather than just giving it to us. I think that’s what made this so successful.” 

Flotation proved to be the greatest challenge. The rules of the race require the flotation system to be part of the land design. After lots of research and several iterations, they settled on one of Nick’s ideas. They attached two dock floats that could be stored vertically while on land and repositioned to the sides of each bike when approaching the water, sliding into the chassis at the strongest point. 

By senior year, they had built a fully functional vehicle. All of Nick and Hudson’s work over the prior two years culminated in their Senior Project this spring: they would put their engineering to the test and finally enter the race. With the structural design complete, it was time for finishing touches. Their interpretation of the 2025 event theme–“play”–was a nod to Mount Saint Joseph’s sports teams. They painted the bikes purple and affixed basketball hoops to the dock floats overhead, adding a “Hall of Fame” banner to recognize the project’s key contributors. 

Race day came and it was a parade of ingenuity and absurdity. From the sock creature ride-along requirement to the preliminary foot blessing, it was “a little strange” from the start, says Nick. There were judges in ceremonial court dress complete with white wigs and Kinetic Kops prepared to barter time penalties for bribes. The race began with a Le Mans standing start at the top of Federal Hill Park. Nick, Hudson, and their team ran down the hill and slid into their saddles, trying their best to get an early lead. 

For 15 miles, they pedaled, paddled, and pushed their way across pavement, water, grass, sand, and mud. Flanking them as they traversed the course was their pit crew, Lucas, Maki, Nolan Hershfield ’25, and Luke McCaffery ’25, who, without hesitation, hopped off their bikes and trudged through ankle-deep mud when the sculpture came to a squelching stop. 

“Our pit crew was incredible,” says Hudson. “We had an entire basketball hoop fall off the bike. I have no idea how they were able to do it, but they put the hoop back on and taped it up without us ever stopping. They put loose chains back on the bike while we were moving. Swapping from our land design to our water design–the fastest I’d ever seen them do it was on race day.” 

With five miles left to go, there was only one vehicle ahead of them–the perennial winner, an entrance from Jemicy School piloted by their fastest rider. But Nick, Hudson, and their crew are all members of MSJ’s varsity mountain bike team, and they wanted to win. A few wrong turns led to an epic game of cat and mouse, trading the first-place position five times in the final mile. 

“We’ve been doing intervals and training together for four years with the mountain bike team, so it was a nice moment to pull us all together,” says Hudson. “Nick was a great motivator–his dad [Dan Shaw ’93] is our mountain biking coach, so he was channeling his dad, making sure we were all working as hard as we could.” 

They sprinted past the Jemicy student a final time, securing the Speed Award, which was presented to them in a ceremony equally as eccentric as the race itself. However, their trophy–an abstract composition of wires, cotton, and gemstones, complete with a neon orange hare–was not the only thing they took away from their experience. 

“I learned that it’s okay to fail,” says Nick. “If our project had just gone perfectly over the past three years, we wouldn’t have made it past the start line. We would have never faced adversity, and we needed that adversity to improve our project.” 

“What really came out of it for me was how to organize a project with so many moving parts,” says Hudson. “Managing schedules, facilitating discussions, keeping people motivated to work, raising money for the project by reaching out to the organization Walking Softer–those things were the greatest lifelong lessons for me.” 

Hudson is headed to the University of Colorado Boulder to study mechanical engineering this fall, and Nick will attend Clemson University, pursuing a degree in biochemistry and genetics. But their legacy at The Mount will live on, as Liam Smith plans to take the reins and improve upon the project for next year’s entry.