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Best Place To BuildThese students make & drive Formula race cars all by themselves? 🤯 | BP2B: Student Edition! Ep.01
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
IIT Madras students build electric Formula car, test, and go autonomous
- Team Raftar at IIT Madras runs an intensive late-night build-and-test cycle to move from merely “running the car” to systematically optimizing performance for competition.
- The team transitioned from combustion to electric after 2020, achieving strong results (e.g., Formula Bharat podium and design awards) and aiming to win with their newest car, RFR 26.
- They describe the technical trade-offs and guiding principles behind the car—minimizing weight, ensuring strength, and maximizing reliability—supported by aggressive redesigns like a battery pack weight cut from ~75 kg to ~40 kg.
- Raftar is actively pursuing driverless racing via a one-third scale autonomous test platform to validate perception, SLAM, mapping, and planning before scaling to a full car.
- The episode highlights student-built engineering depth across subsystems—patented decoupled suspension, aero with in-house carbon fiber, high-voltage safety redundancies, and competition-driven learning through open collaboration with top global teams.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasTesting time turns a student build into a real motorsports program.
Raftar emphasizes that getting the car ready early enables repeated tune-test-iterate loops (e.g., controls, launch control, regen), rather than spending the season simply trying to make the car run.
Clear principles simplify hard engineering trade-offs.
They use weight, strength, and reliability as decision filters, keeping designs aligned across subteams and preventing performance gains that compromise safety or endurance.
Battery design is a major performance lever—especially via weight reduction.
Seeing global benchmarks pushed them from a 75 kg first-gen pack to ~40 kg, illustrating how competition exposure can directly translate into step-change redesign targets.
Modern Formula Student is converging on electric and driverless.
They note Europe has removed combustion categories, so their long-term competitiveness depends on building autonomy capabilities—not just improving the electric powertrain.
A scaled autonomous platform reduces risk and accelerates learning.
By validating perception, SLAM, mapping, and path planning on a one-third scale “garage-built” car, they can iterate cheaply and then scale the stack to the full-size vehicle.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesOur zero to 100 acceleration time is under four seconds… comparable to a Porsche 911.
— Aditya (Team Captain)
In 2020… we decided that now is the time, let’s shift to electric.
— Aditya (Team Captain)
In the competition… the driver should get out of the car within five seconds from a fully harnessed position.
— Aditya (Team Captain)
You have checks, you have checks to check those checks.
— Aditya (Team Captain)
I kind of trust the team… I was more scared about crashing it.
— DJ (Driver)
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
