BYU engineering students are using their language skills to lead an international team of students building a Formula One race car. The newest version of the car ships to General Motors next week.

"Right now it's a bunch of pieces," said BYU Alumnus Jordan Ryskamp, who's been working on the car since October.

BYU mechanical engineering professor Greg Jensen has been leading the students. He said they plan to have the car finished and shipped by Tuesday. After their project is placed on display at GM headquarters, it will be shipped to South Korea, where it will be tested to see if it can race.

BYU sophomore Jesse Davis said the car should go fast -- he built the engine. What started as a motor from a Chevrolet HHR now wields at least 500 horsepower. Davis and his team replaced a lot of the motor and turbocharged it.

"This engine will be more powerful than a brand new Corvette," Davis said.

Next school year, a smaller group of schools, including BYU, will test and perfect the car to make it race-worthy.

Jensen said BYU was selected to lead the project two years ago because he volunteered for the job, and students at BYU can speak everyone else's language.

"I literally hand-picked students that could speak all of the languages," Jensen said.

At BYU, where more than three-fourths of the students speak languages other than their native tongue, the environment for global collaboration was ripe.

"There's probably no other school that has the language capability, the understanding of culture - that has the resources that we have to try and pull off the leadership of this type of project," Jensen said.

Jensen's eight students, who together speak seven languages including English, all learned their foreign language skills serving missions for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The church owns BYU and sends missionaries to more than 100 countries and territories worldwide.

One of the 22 students who brought car parts to Utah is Jose Miguel Olvera, a student at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City.

"My trip to BYU was a great experience and I liked working with students from around the world," Miguel said in a news release from BYU. "We had a great time all working on a project we wanted to finish well."

Two students from Sweden have enrolled at BYU for the summer term.

The project, which is sponsored by General Motors and others, aims to teach students the skills needed to become engineers in a global economy.

"There's virtually no complex mechanical system that's just built in one location," Jensen said.

The real-world experiment has helped the students in more than one class.

Ryskamp took a global engineering class with another teammate.

"Our professor would be describing certain problems. Me and Kenny would just look at each other and say, 'Man, we've lived that one,' " he said.

Though there are BYU students who speak each of the other teammates' languages, there have been problems. Ryskamp said that miscommunication is a real problem after scheduling a meeting several weeks in a row and not having people show up. The problem: the non-native English speakers had confused Tuesday with Thursday, then the time got mixed up.

• Brittani Lusk can be reached at 344-2549 or at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it