UPBracing Team

In the past season 2020/2021, we, the UPBracing Team of the University of Paderborn, developed our first electric race car in our team history, the PX421E. After previous work on a prototype in the chassis of the 2012 race car, we started the complete new development in summer 2020: New monocoque, chassis, suspension, aerodynamics package, new electronics, many circuit boards and much more.

In parallel, we built our last combustion car, the PX221C, drawing on experience since the team was founded in 2007.

After the development was completed around the beginning of 2021, the extremely labour-intensive phase of production began. Day and night we screwed, soldered, welded, ground and much more.

In mid-June, the time had come for the public presentation of our cars at the so-called rollout. For the first time, due to the Corona pandemic, this did not take place in the university’s auditorium, but in a studio in front of the camera.

Even though the racing cars already looked finished, there were still a few things missing to be ready for the first event, Formula Student Netherlands, at the TT Circuit in Assen. But we made it in time and were also able to present the first electric race car ready to drive. Unfortunately, due to the lack of experience and time, we were not able to compete in any dynamic discipline yet. However, we were able to get our high-voltage battery through the technical scrutineering and learn a lot for the other technical scrutineering.

At Formula Student East at the Hungaroring in Hungary we were well prepared and passed the technical scrutineering in no time. This allowed us to participate in all dynamic disciplines and to finish all of them successfully, including the endurance race over 22 kilometres. With that, we had achieved something we had all dreamed of: our first electric race car went through. Initially, however, we had also held back with the released power.

With more testing time leading up to the next event, Rimac FS Alpe Adria in Croatia, we gained further confidence in our system and unlocked more torque and power. This allowed us to finish in the top 10 in almost all disciplines in Croatia. In the overall standings we made it to an incredible 4th place, very close to the podium.

Our CV race car took part in the same events and brought us some trophies to our workshop at the end of the combustion era. For example, at FS AlpeAdria we took 1st place overall, 1st place in the Endurance race, 3rd place in the Autocross and Engineering Design event.

UPBracing Team is very thankfull for Eurocircuits’ support.

This enabled us to have the circuit boards for our Battery Management System (BMS) and our 4-layer cockpit circuit board manufactured.

The fast delivery times and the online tools for checking before ordering were also particularly practical.

The battery management system constantly monitors the voltage, current and temperature of the cells. The 600V battery is divided into 6 stacks and each of them contains such a BMS board.

The cockpit board contains our safety electronics, which can safely shut down the high-voltage system at any time, and combines this with the driver display. This allows critical information such as the temperatures of the drive components to be displayed.