Lions Racing Team ‘s Journey with LR23

Lions Racing Team e.V.

We are the Lions Racing Team – a student association at the Technical University of Braunschweig with around 50 members. Together, we work on developing, building, and competing with autonomous electric racing cars within the regulations of Formula Student. Founded in 2000, we are one of the oldest German teams.

Evolution instead of Revolution

The team’s goal for the 2022/23 season was to further develop from the promising foundation of the previous year’s race car – the LR22. Its successor, the LR23, was intended to significantly improve in the areas of maintenance and user-friendliness. This primarily meant optimizing the packaging – the positioning of components in the car. To achieve this more effectively, we refocused on shrinking our circuit boards.

Inspection of Power Distribution Unit

Furthermore, we have further developed the concept of our 24V electrical system: it is now operated by a new control unit, the Power Distribution Unit. It combines filtering, distribution, and monitoring of the 24V network, protection against short circuits, and the generation of the high-performance 12V line for the autonomous system. Overall, this circuit board can handle more than 100A of current flow, and special attention was paid to temperature management in the design. Through the CAN connection, individual outputs can be controlled, which has saved a lot of time during commissioning (e.g., when testing individual lights) by avoiding “power cycles.”

New HV interface for the battery management system

We always strive to keep the performance of our systems as high as possible. This requires, among other things, low tolerances, which are only found in high-quality manufacturers. Therefore, several innovations in the LR23 would not have been possible without the highly professional support of Eurocircuits. We would like to sincerely thank them for their support!