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I sent you a PM with my email and answers to some questions. I fully understand your advisers frustrations having to build most of parts the students didn't or couldn't get done.
Again many, many 1st time teams around the world woefully underestimate the difficulty of this event and time required. I walk around the pits and see teams still building their cars on the 1st day of the competition and you'll see many still struggling on the last day.
If you make it to the event you'll be much wiser once you see the other cars and see how the event is run.
Your strategy to collect existing parts and put them together may sound like the easy and cheap route but it's frequently not. The team that I got snared to mentoring had thought it would be easy to just get a recumbent bike and throw a motor on it and go to the races. That turned out to be a bad idea for a number of reasons. Steering geometry was inefficient and wasted power on turns, Bicycle parts weren't up to the torque and abuse of start stop cycles, drive chain kept tossing, break and fix, on and on it went.
By the time the car was completed there was little left of the original. The parts that worked the best were the bespoke parts designed specifically for the event.
Car needs to be able to complete all the laps without breaking. Design for robustness and serviceability. You only get a few chances to run and if you break something on your first run you may only have a few hours to fix it before your next or last chance.
Car needs to be able to coast a long way engine off with little energy loss. Good wheel bearings are critical. Chassis design is important to fuel efficiency. A flexible chassis eats energy as it twists back and forth. The students designed and built a super light aluminum frame but didn't follow my advice on triangulation and torsional rigidity. First time on the floor it was so flexy it clearly wasn't viable. Required additional bracing which made it heavier than if it was designed correctly in the first place.
Tires are the easy part. Just get the blue Michelins. Everybody uses them because they are the best and specifically designed for this event.
good luck
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