Historic hybrid electric formula
Twenty years ago, students at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering in Hanover, New Hampshire, wanted to introduce a hybrid car at an internal combustion festival organized by the FSAE (Formula SAE, a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers). Unfortunately, his car was not allowed to perform because the festival regulations at the time did not include hybrids.
Since Dartmouth academics were Dartmouth academics, they were to design their own festival rather than redesign their car. Thus was born the Formula Hybrid festival, first held in 2006, which challenged university academics to design and build their own hybrid race car. Fast forward to 2012 and all-electric elegance was added, turning the festival call to Formula Hybrid Electric in 2019.
Currently, between 20 and 30 groups from the U. S. , Canada and around the world build open-wheeled cars and bring them to the festival at New Hampshire Motor Speedway (NHMS) in the first week of May. Cars and groups are judged on their design, task management, acceleration, autocross and power racing while examining mechanical and electrical safety. Normally, around 350 students and 150 volunteers participate in the four-day festival.
COVID and the Virtual Racing Challenge in iRacing
As of March 2020, the track portion of the FH E festival was canceled due to the imminent risk of COVID. Teams planning to come from as far away as India were able to ship their cars and equipment on time. The 2020 festival was held only as static occasions (design and management of assignments, no occasions on track), but they lacked the same old excitement of a “real” festival. In one of our many Zoom calls to determine our next steps, two of our volunteers from SCCA New Region of England (Wiley Cox and Andrew Benagh) commented that they had just participated in a “simulation race” occasion on the iRacing platform. Everything was going virtual, so the FH E team had to check it out!
We went to the iRacing online page to watch demo races, check out available cars and see the tracks on offer. One of the tracks, the NHMS Road Course with South Oval, we would have held our true staying power event on the road. Of course, if it hadn’t been for COVID. Although wheel-to-wheel racing seemed fun, our challenge was to design an engineering competition based on iRacing’s simulation racing platform and NHMS Road virtual circuit. Our friends at NER SCCA led us to Angela Tagariello, sales and marketing manager at iRacing headquarters in Chelmsford, MA. She was able to give us a clever concept of how the system, cars, and lanes worked.
The main points of HRV.
The team will base the Formula Hybrid Electric Virtual Racing Challenge on a driver/engineer car setup challenge concept. iRacing provided team members with licenses for the iR-04 Formula car and NHMS track. Telemetry was provided via McLaren Applied embedded Atlas System.
For 2023, the final standings (trophies awarded from 1st to 3rd place):
Lessons learned through students:
Lessons learned through RDOs:
Keeping in touch