Joanneum Racing Graz’ cooperation with Eurocircuits

Who are we?

We are Joanneum Racing Graz, a Formula Student Team from the University of Applied Sciences Graz. At the moment, we have around 80 team members, spread across different departments who all face a huge challenge for Formula Student Teams: Changing from a combustion to an electric powertrain, without losing our strong position within the Formula Student Competition. During our last season racing a combustion car, we achieved first position overall at Formula Student Netherlands, third position overall at Formula Student Austria and eighth position overall at Formula Student East in Hungary – after a DNF in the Endurance Event – and first overall at our last competition in Italy. As we want to be as close as possible to those results with our first electric race car, we never stop pushing.

Cooperation with Eurocircuits

As weight – after tires – is the most important performance factor within Formula Student, we try to keep it as low as possible. Every single department tries to minimize its weight. Within the electronic and HV department, following the HV-Battery, the inverter is by far the heaviest and biggest component, which means we will develop it ourselves for our first electric season. Compared to a bought inverter, we expect weight savings within 7 to 10 kg.

As the PCBs within an inverter have to fulfil high standards, we are very happy to have Eurocircuits on our side. Those high standards include, among others:

• Precise hole position and final diameter for Press-Fit Contacts
• Precisely matched trace lengths for high-speed signals
• High quality soldering surface to minimize contact resistance

Additionally, Eurocircuits provides stencils to apply solder paste. As our jr22 will have 4 wheelhub motors and 4 inverters controlling those, assembly of those inverters needs to be as fast as possible. Using stencils saves days of assembling.

In addition to our inverter, many small PCBs will be reworked and designed for our first electric racecar. This includes devices such as the BSPD, TSAL, Steering Wheel Electronics, LV-BMS and safety relevant devices. As those designs are mostly new, the fast manufacturing times at Eurocircuits helps us to keep the overall development and testing time as short as possible.

With the support from Eurocircuits, we are looking forward to an exciting and fast season in 2022!

Never stop pushing!