Breaking Ground: LiU Formula Student ‘s Electric Adventure

Season summary

The 2023/24 season has concluded for LiU Formula Student and its ER24 race car. For the very first time, the team developed a fully working and drivable electric vehicle, achieving our primary goal of the season. During the summer the team participated in Formula student competitions in both the Netherlands and Hungary. Additionally, the team participated in a pre-season testing event in southern Sweden, alongside other Swedish and Norwegian universities.

The team is incredibly proud of this year’s accomplishments, as the hard work since 2021, when we began building electric vehicles, is finally starting to pay off. It’s a huge step in the right direction and for next year’s race cars there is now a baseline that can be further developed.

The first competition in the Netherlands went quite smoothly where the team managed to pass mechanical and electrical scrutineering fairly quickly. The team started all the dynamic events which is a great achievement but unfortunately the car retired during the endurance race due to a water leak. Given that this was the team’s first competition with a functioning electric vehicle, our primary focus was not on race results. However, the ER24 car got a nice 10th position in the autocross event despite some compromising circumstances.

The second competition in Hungary was the complete opposite. No matter what we did there was always something working against us. A few larger hiccups during the scrutineering heavily compromised our schedule and on top of this we had unexpected problems in both the rain test and brake test which eventually unfortunately lead to no participation in the dynamic events.

The two competitions gave us a lot of experience of how to participate in Formula student dynamic events which was something new to all of us. We will learn from our setbacks and come back even stronger for next year. However, we take pride in the fact that we together successfully built our very first drivable electric vehicle.

Our partnership with Eurocircuits was crucial this year, enabling us to quickly iterate on our PCB designs with high-quality manufacturing and rapid delivery. Eurocircuits has been an important part of the successful year that the team have had and we are looking forward to continuing with the partnership in years to come. Below are some of the finished circuit boards that were manufactured by Eurocircuits and assembled by the electronics team in LiU Formula Student themselves.