PROVIDENCE — Several dozen students gathered at the snack bar of the engineering building at Brown University on Friday afternoon. They wanted food, of course. And when someone on a bullhorn said they could help themselves, they did.

The people pounced. The feeding frenzy began. Ravenous students, hungry for car parts, lunged at acorn squash, fettuccine and bagels. They grabbed anything edible that could be fashioned into a chassis, axles and wheels.

The second annual Edible Car Challenge was under way. Twenty teams of three to five people had one hour to design and construct a car constructed from food, then run it down a ramp.

This isn’t college kids having fun. It’s physics with food.

“There are engineering principles involved,” said Rod Clifton, the interim dean of engineering. “They may not be deep, but it’s still a good project.”

However, it’s not a project Clifton has ever done: “I never play with my food.”

This is play with a purpose: a challenge.

“It’s easy to walk into an engineering lab and see an aluminum rod and say, ‘That will be an axle,’ ” said Holly Lauridsen, a junior at Brown, and coordinator of the event. “But people don’t think that about a carrot or dried fettuccine.”

Improvisation and teamwork are vital in engineering. This project was flavored with food.

“It tastes good,” said Julie Sygiel, the event founder who graduated last year. “Plus being an engineer in the 21st century, we place importance on renewable materials.”

Design. Build. But first adapt to your disappointment.

“I prefer zucchini over eggplant,” said Bill Curtin, professor of engineering, who teamed up with his son Peter, 7. “It’s a tradeoff. Eggplant is drier so the pretzel axles won’t get soggy. But it’s not as much weight.”

Weight, density and drag were on everyone’s lips. And knives and power drills were in everyone’s hands. And on several occasions, car parts were in people’s mouths.

“We’re not using the orange,” said a chewing Pam Zhang, a junior and an English major. “We decided not to waste it.”

Some groups made preparations and prototypes. And some groups, such as Squash the Competition, did not, though they tried to plan the night before.

“We were tired and drunk,” said Jesse Hertz, a freshman. “So it didn’t work out that well.”

The teams that succeeded worked out all the details. The team of Ben Howard, a junior, forgot lug nuts. The pumpkin wheels, he said, would stay wedged on their carrot axles.

“We believe in the power of prayer,” he said. “We’re a faith-based group.”

Faith had no place in this fun-with-food science project.

Most cars disintegrated at the bottom of a 4-foot ramp outside the Barus and Holley Building. Several went a modest number of feet beyond the ramp. But one car nearly required directions around the city.

Team Pumpkin Express left the competition in its dust, or, maybe, bread crumbs.

“I think our weight distribution made a lot of sense,” said Julie Goldner, a junior.

The car of Team Pumpkin Express, which includes members Margaret Merritt and Brendan Checkett, both juniors, traveled a stunning 174 feet, down a bumpy brick walkway and finally stopping two feet short of becoming roadkill on Brook Street.

The vehicle had front wheels of pumpkin-caps cut from a template for uniformity and rear wheels of rice cakes.

“By the time I realized there were cookies, they were all gone,” said Jerry Daniels, an engineering professor and member of Team Pumpkin Express. “I would have liked one.”

The chassis was French bread, the rear axle a pretzel and the front axle fettuccine.

“We’re lucky the fettuccine didn’t break at the bottom of the ramp,” Daniels said.

The key to the team’s success was the tightness of its car, which it achieved by using caramel candy that the team melted with a heat gun and used as welding solder. But their success was also due to Goldner’s performance after the race. When organizers credited Team Pumpkin Express with a run of just a few feet, the spot at which the car’s celery stick driver fell out, Goldner read the race regulations and brought attention to rule number 5: that a measurement requires only the car’s “body and all wheels still attached.”

“It’s not that I really want to win,” Goldner said. “I just want to follow the rules.”

brourke@projo.com