Electric and autonomous: Young engineers battle for open-wheeled race car honours

For many former engineering students, one of the highlights of their time at university was the opportunity to join their university’s Formula SAE team to design, build and race an open-wheeled race car, according to the strict Formula SAE design criteria.

In fact, for many the FSAE competition has been the launch pad of their automotive engineering career. SAE stands for Society of Automotive Engineers.

Begun in the USA in the 1980s based around the internal combustion engine, the event has morphed away from its roots to feature full electric vehicles and this year even sees the introduction of an autonomous class.

Looking for all the world like a mini F1 car (or a go-cart on steroids), the teams participate in a series of static and dynamic events over four days (including going before a design judging panel), which includes two final days of on-track events.

Points are allocated to each event as well as for submitted design and system analyses, with the winner being the team collecting the most points by the end of the event.

Here in Australia, FSAE started in 2000 and the annual judging and race event is held at the start of each December. Sadly, as a result of the pandemic – both the 2020 and 2021 Australasian events were cancelled.

This meant that although many teams around Australia competed their race cars – they never got to attend the annual event to showcase their cars, meet like-minded students … or meet with the future employers that regularly attend the event.

Worse still, for the heavily locked-down Victorian teams it was effectively impossible to build anything in 2020, and for some, 2021 saw an incomplete car at best.

Thankfully, it is now ‘all systems go’ for the 2022 event being held once more at Winton Motor Raceway (near Benalla in Victoria’s north), starting on December 8.

This year’s event is slightly down on numbers compared to previous years, but there are still several overseas entries, including from Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Taiwan and of course New Zealand.

All-up, this year will see twenty-seven universities bringing between them thirty-two different vehicles. Interestingly, of those thirty-two cars – only seven entries are petrol powered. The remainder are electric: twenty with human drivers and for the first time an additional five entered in the new autonomous class.

It seems the future is already here for graduating automotive engineers when it comes to electric builds – with the not-so-distant future beginning to take shape in the development of the new autonomous class.

A full list of this year’s entrants is below. Entry to the event is free and the public is welcome to attend. Best days to attend are Saturday December 10th and Sunday 11th when the main on-track events happen. (Acceleration, skid and braking trials are Saturday 10th and the autocross plus 22km endurance race Sunday 11th).

For further details and program see: https://www.saea.com.au/2022-event-schedule