Setting their sights on Silverstone

Students in ELiTH Racing are fully occupied with building a speed demon. This summer, they’ll test its mettle at Silverstone’s racetrack.

7:00 AM on Christmas Eve, Anton Jonzén got out of bed to change a detail in a CAD blueprint on his computer. However he didn’t get there first, one of his friends at the ELiTH Racing Club beat him to it and the file was locked.

For over six months, between 25 and 30 students have been heavily involved in building a fully-fledged race car: an elegant, streamlined creation with a carbon fibre body; a speed demon that is to compete against a number of other student-constructed race cars at the Silverstone track in England this July. The competition is called “Formula Student”; year after year it gathers competing teams from across the globe.

The workshops still sit empty, but the ERIC-01 car is in the computers’ CAD files, ready to be brought out, slowly but surely, into the light of day. The renderings are finished and numerous calculations completed; the first parts have been ordered.

It was last spring when a number of racing enthusiasts decided to start the ELiTH Student Racing Club with the goal of getting to Silverstone. At Chalmers, for example, cars are built as part of a project course in the programme, but here it’s involvement and intent that count.

“We’re doing this in our free time, but this is a dead serious effort not simply built as a hobby. We’re going to produce a fully-fledged racer. We’ll show the world what we can do,” says Teodor Johnsson, president of the club.

The members of ELiTH Racing study mechanical engineering or design and product development, as well as mathematics, technical biology or industrial economy; what they have in common is the burning interest that puts life into even the dullest Christmas morning.

“But we need to bring more skills into the group, for example in electronics construction and automatic control engineering,” says Jonzén, the club’s vice president.

“In the beginning, we didn’t know what skills we needed, but there’s a place for everyone here – we also need people who work in marketing, PR, and the media,” he says.

This isn’t a one-time project; the club is building for the future and hopes that some of the enthusiasts will stay on next year so they don’t need to start over from nothing.

What has been the most difficult?

“Coordination and communication, we all have different intentions and different schedules,” Johnsson says after a moment’s reflection.

“We’re not used to managing projects where so many people are involved. I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into.”

In April, we’ll get to see the first glimpses of a completed car out in the parking lot, and in July we’ll keep our fingers crossed; it’s very likely we’ll get to see them at Silverstone.

Who’ll be driving during the competition?

“Someone on the team who’s light enough and brave enough,” Jonzén laughs.

Useful to the programme

The ELiTH student’s great involvement will also be of use in their programme. A new course in advanced CAD, TMKT74, has been developed that deals with gaining insight into existing methods and tools that support the development of advanced products in which many people are involved like cars, aircraft, or mobile phones.

Computer-aided design in 3D, or 3D-CAD, is that kind of tool, as well as a web-based product life-cycle management system that keeps track of all the data and files in a project, from idea to finished product.

Data and files from ELiTH’s almost fully developed car are included in the course. Heading the course is Peter Hallberg, Department of Machine Design, and also the Faculty Advisor for the ELiTH project.

Monica Westman Svenselius 1 Mar 2012

Photo: Göran Billeson.  Teodor on the left; Anton on the right. The picture of the car is a CAD rendering.

Related Links

• ELiTH Racing homepage (in Swedish) 
• Silverstone 
• Formula Student  
• Chalmers University of Technology  
• CAD, TMKT74 Programme (in Swedish) 
• Peter Hallberg  
• Division of Machine Design at LiU