We are delighted to announce that another of our sponsored student racing car teams has had a very successful year. This time the competition was in the United States. Our team – HyTech Racing – is a student-run organisation at the Georgia Institute of Technology (better known as Georgia Tech) and entered the Formula Hybrid challenge as defending champions. Once again, they were placed first in the Electric Only class.
Formula Hybrid is an annual student engineering competition consisting of both static (Design and Project Management) as well as dynamic (Acceleration, Autocross, and Endurance) events. According to the organiser, it represents a holistic engineering challenge across multiple disciplines with the goal of designing and building the best hybrid or electric racing car.
HyTech Racing designed and built a fully-electric racing car and won the class with an outstanding 899.2 points out of a possible 1000. The nearest challenger was Princeton University with 636.58!!
On the Endurance Course
This meant the team beat its previous record, finishing first in the Autocross event with a 44.092 second heat. They were also the only team this year to finish the 44km Endurance course – something only one other electric team has ever done. First place in the Design Presentation and second place in the Project Management Presentation proved the team’s design methodologies stood up to rigid scrutiny.
Tilt Test
The car (pictured) also weighed in as the lightest vehicle at the competition at 368 lbs. That is a 45 lb reduction from last year’s vehicle. The HyTech electric car uses a number of Souriau 8STA motorsport connector systems, accessories and tooling all designed for applications right across motorsport from exciting projects like HyTech Racing to the demanding environment that is Formula One. According to HyTech’s Team President Nathan Cheek, incorporating the Souriau 8STA connector system brought many benefits over the previous connector types. These include a five-fold increase in pin density, a five-fold reduction in terminal installation time and a five-fold increase in mating cycles from 100 to 500.
HT04 / Souriau 8STA Accumulator connector (left) compared with HT03 Accumulator connector (right)
Lane Motorsport is an assembling distributor for Souriau.
