Dear Eurocircuits,

We want to inform you about our participation in this year’s Formula Student competitions.

Starting with the IMechE Formula Student competition, which was held in Silverstone, UK. After being the first electric team in the competition that successfully passed the mechanical and electrical inspection, disaster struck and our PCBs started detecting electrical insulation failures after a really rainy day in one of our accumulator packs. That forced us to withdraw from the Skidpad, Accelaration and Autocross events which were taking place in the same day.

Our engineers worked day and night and managed to fix the insulating problems, re-pass the Scrutineering and get the car running for the last dynamic event one day after the other three, Endurance.

We managed to complete the Endurance event, while being the only electric car that did so. That performance got us the Efficiency trophy, the 1st place among the electric vehicles and the 10th place among the 73 combustion and the electric vehicles combined.

Finishing Endurance made us really excited for our comeback but the thought that we got 10th place overall without racing in three of the four dynamic events got us wondering what if … we had participated in those events.

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Getting to Formula Student Germany, taking place in the Hockenheimring, Germany, resulted in a disappointing 28th place out of 35 teams in the electric vehicles class, as we didn’t get to race in any of the dynamic events. The problem was in the structural design of our accumulator packs that prevented us from passing Scrutineering altogether.

We were forced to rip everything apart, fix the structural part to be cleared by the officials and get everything assembled again. We made a huge effort but we didn’t get the job done in time in order to race. We are certainly very frustrated about not racing in Germany and we do apologise for the poor performance.

Overall, these competitions made us stronger and even more determined to prove our team’s quality. This year we will go again out on the track with our new vehicle, which will be lighter and even more powerful. We are really happy for you sponsoring UoP Racing and hopefully we will be companions for the 2017-2018 season too.

Next to this are some photos from this summers’ adventures.

Best regards,

Fourtakas Nick

UoP Racing Team, University of Patras, Patras 26504, Greece, email: nfourtakas@gmail.com, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram