Formula Electric Belgium – Titan

At Formula Electric Belgium, we do everything from designing to building our race car.

The 2022 season was very eventful but challenging, especially for our electronics department. The design goal we aimed for was building a reliable but simple foundation for the following years.

Challenges

With the COVID-19 pandemic right behind us, the PCBs designed by our former team members were out of date due to the worldwide chip shortage; most components were no longer in stock or even being manufactured.

Instead of only making minor changes to the design of our PCBs, we had to completely redesign almost every PCB, even switching to a different microcontroller manufacturer. With a team of 3, this was a big challenge, going against our initial design goals for this year. Instead, we looked at the future and decided to upgrade all our major components to be future-proof and never have to worry again about a performance bottleneck. We were also forced to redesign and upgrade the battery pack.

Results

Looking back, we had a mountain of work to accomplish for such a small team, but it ultimately paid off during the summer when we went to the competitions.

For the first time in years, we passed electrical scrutineering with only minor issues, mainly grounding-related. Our mechanical colleagues were less lucky during the first competition, where we did not drive dynamic events because of a series of unforeseen problems.

As a reminder, our design goal was reliability. That is also why we did not push the car to its limit on the track. Even though we didn’t push the car, we took 7th place on acceleration, 5th place on autocross, 5th place on endurance, and 2nd place on efficiency, out of the 30+ teams participating. This is a good result, comparing to the years before and keeping our design goals in mind.

Right now, we can only imagine our results when we optimise our car and try to push it to its limit …

Our new reliable car got us 2nd place in the category ‘efficiency’ at FSAA.