Third round of the season for the University of Bologna motorsport team, which set off for the Hungaroring near Budapest for Formula Student East after having already competed in Formula Sae Italy and Formula Student Czech Republic. After Varano for the Electric Team this was the second trip with Elettra GN after the efforts of the Italian leg.
In Hungary, some of the best teams in the world for ranking in the electric category as well as for the other divisions in the competition, Combustion and Driverless, showed up. On the first days of the competition, static tests were held with the presentations of the Business Plan, a presentation in which the economic idea behind a fictitious project to promote the team’s image is presented, and the Cost and Manufacturing Event, in which the judges analyse the costs incurred during the year to bring the vehicle to life. The guys in the team juggled well, trying to bring home as many points as possible. On the second day of the competition, the Engineering Design Event took place, where the concept behind the design brought to life was presented to some of the competition judges.
During the remaining days of competition, the team from Bologna University concentrated on technical inspections, which in the first year of an electric project is never easy to pass, especially in one of Europe’s most important and rigorous competitions such as Formula Student East. With the hard work of the week, the team from Bologna managed to bring home all the technical inspections concerning the battery pack and the electrical part of the vehicle, so EV 1, EV 2 and scrutineering on the battery pack. Then came the mechanical inspections, the Egress, a test in which the driver must exit the cockpit in a maximum of five seconds, with the drivers all completing it successfully. To top it off, Elettra GN also managed to bring home the tilt and rain test.
Unfortunately, due to a lack of time, the team was not able to hit the track for the dynamic tests, but the intentions with which the students set off for the Magyar country were to compete at the highest level of Formula Student against the elite teams in order to gain the necessary experience for future years, so that future electric projects will be born on a solid base and knowledge that will allow the UniBo Motorsport Electric Team to compete at the top levels of student competitions. The road ahead is long, but with the quality of the students involved in the project and the work over the next few years, the Bolognese team will be able to climb step by step up the ranks to the top.
This appointment represented the last official one for Elettra GN and the students of the project who, after Varano and Budapest, will be able to go on holiday with the satisfaction of having managed to finish the dynamic tests and having achieved good results in the static tests in Italy, and with the awareness of having competed against the top ten teams of the Formula Student world ranking and not having disfigured themselves at all in Hungary.
The next appointments for the electric vehicle will be the end-of-year tests in which we will try to train next year’s team to the best of our ability and try to provide them with the indications and experience gathered this year through work, tests and races, as well as extracting all the potential possible from the Elettra GN project and increasing their knowledge of the electrics, which are anything but easy to acquire and learn even in the most complicated matters to deal with.
