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These students make & drive Formula race cars all by themselves? 🤯 | BP2B: Student Edition! Ep.01

Welcome to The Best Place to Build: Student Edition! A podcast about the students, brought to you by the students of IIT Madras. This series captures stories of curiosity, creativity, and courage from the campus that’s home to India’s brightest minds. Here, every idea has a place to grow from dorm-room discussions to prototypes that take on the world. In this first episode, join Vidhi as she takes you on a tour of Team Raftar Formula Racing, IIT Madras’ Formula Student team that has been designing, building, and racing high-performance electric vehicles (EVs) for over a decade. These students are not just car enthusiasts. They are engineers, designers, and innovators working together to redefine automotive engineering and sustainable mobility. From battery systems and motor design to aerodynamics and performance testing, every aspect of the electric race car is built on campus. A true testament to what student-led innovation can achieve. You’ll hear what it takes to be part of a Formula Student competition, the challenges of building a prototype car, and how a shared passion for engineering turns into national and global recognition. ✨ Topics Covered: * How students build electric cars from scratch * Inside IIT Madras’ Formula Racing garage * Engineering design and team dynamics * Challenges of building a Formula Student car in India * The making of Raftar’s electric vehicle prototype * Student-led innovation at IIT Madras Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 00:17 Welcome to the Best Place to Build: Student Edition 01:15 Introducing Team Raftar, IIT Madras 03:33 Testing for Formula racing competitions 05:20 Team Raftar’s driverless ambition 06:45 The people behind the best student formula team 07:54 Team Raftar’s guiding principles 10:10 Raftar car tour 20:30 Interview with the racer behind the steering wheel 23:35 Best student formula race car demonstration!

Vidhihost
Oct 23, 202524mWatch on YouTube ↗

At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

IIT Madras students build electric Formula car, test, and go autonomous

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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 ideas

Testing 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 quotes

Our 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)

Late-night testing and rollout workflowCombustion-to-electric transition strategyFormula Bharat vs Formula Student Germany rules evolutionDriverless roadmap using a scaled prototypeGuiding principles: weight, strength, reliabilityKey subsystems: suspension, aero, battery, powertrain, HV safetyCompetition culture: technical inspection pressure and collaboration

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