Field notes from building and racing a student-built electric formula car.
Seven laps into the endurance semifinal, our car was half a corner from taking the lead. Then the dash went dark and it rolled to a stop. The part that killed it was a relay the size of a matchbox. If you want the fastest possible summary of relay failure symptoms: everything upstream was healthy, … Read more
At 4:30 p.m. on the second day of the competition, everyone else went to the hotel for dinner. I stayed in the paddock with a motor controller I couldn’t keep my hand on. Our two endurance heats were done, our lap times had gotten worse all afternoon, and the water pump that was supposed to … Read more
Day one of the competition went well. That is the part that still bothers me. We passed scrutineering. We ran the slalom. We ran the acceleration event. Nothing broke, nothing caught fire, and the car we had spent a year fighting with did exactly what it was supposed to do. Then the results table went … Read more