What did Joanneum Racing Graz achieve in 2022?

2022 was a very challenging season for Joanneum Racing so far. With the change to an electric vehicle, a brand-new car, including many new components within the electric LV and HV system had to be developed. Luckily, we had good partners from the electronic industry on our side, also including Eurocircuits. Eurocircuits manufactured all our self-developed PCBs we needed not only to have our car driving but also to have it rules compliant.

The biggest development for the Formula Student season 2022 was our inverter, where we developed all the hardware ourselves to have the possibility of a tight and lightweight packaging, but also to learn and invest for future race cars of Joanneum Racing Graz. As Eurocircuits is one of the world’s leading PCB manufacturers, who also have a very wide variety of available copper thicknesses and layer stackups they were the ideal partner for Joanneum Racing Graz.

Until Formula Student Austria, we barely managed any testing but were finally able to run the car on power just on the day before the competition started. The dynamic events couldn’t have gone much better for Joanneum Racing Graz. We saw a bad performance at acceleration, but a really good performance in the skidpad. In the rain-wet autocross we managed to have the 5^th fastest electric car, which was a big surprise, not only for us but also for all the other teams who went there. Unfortunately, we had a massive leakage in our cooling system at the endurance and were disqualified just after our 2^nd driver started his stint.

For our last competition at Formula Student Alpe Adria we managed to get some testing in and were able to also prepare the car for the dynamic events. After a decent run-in acceleration, we managed to set fastest times in Skidpad and Autocross and were able to finish the Endurance with the 2^nd fastest time. With these dynamic results and well executed statics we managed the unbelievable and achieved our first overall win in the electric class – a result we are really proud of.

Winning 11 trophies in our first electric season is an unbelievable achievement. To have an overview this are the trophies we won:

• Formula Student Netherlands: 6th Place EV Overall, 1st Place EV Engineering Design, 2nd Place EV Business Plan
• Formula Student Austria: 6th Place EV Overall, 2nd Place EV Engineering Design, 1st Place EV Business Plan
• Formula Student Alpe Adria (Croatia): 1st Place EV Overall, 3rd Place EV Engineering Design, 1st Place EV Business Plan, 1st Place EV Skid Pad, 1st Place EV Autocross, 2nd Place EV Endurance, 1st Place EV Efficiency