Tec Racing

August 2017 - June 2021

Monterrey, México

Tec Racing is a project I've been working on for most part of my studies. Here I’ve had the opportunity to apply the knowledge I’ve acquired in class and meet extraordinary people with the same passion of changing the world through engineering.

History

2 minute read

Tec Racing didn’t exist when I started studying, there was only an old aluminum chassis stored in my campus made many years ago to compete in the Formula Electratón national competition. However, the project was never picked up again.

The Formula Electratón is an electric single-seater endurance competition held at a national level, where university and private teams develop their own single-seaters and compete through a series of races to win a championship title. There are two categories in this competition. The first category is for single seaters with full suspension, while the second for single seaters with rigid suspension.

In the autumn of 2017 we formed a group of students interested in reviving this project and started working on it, however with very little experience as we were mostly students on our first year, no capital whatsoever, and a lack of an organizational structure. During this time, I interested myself in the steering and suspension part of the project and started working in this area.

At the same time another group of students picked up the gravity race car project, which was also forgotten through the years.

This competition is a gravity car single event competition also held at a national level, where university and private teams develop their own gravity powered single seaters

This group of students were able to develop, compete, and win this event on their first year in the summer of 2018. Seeing the success of the gravity team, we asked for help and ended up joining teams to focus on making the Electratón project a reality.

To achieve this, we came up with a strategy for the 2019 season. It consisted in developing two gravity race cars. One would employ a front suspension to start gaining experience with suspension design, while the other would employ a rigid suspension set-up to later adapt it into an electric single-seater and compete with it in the second category of the Formula Electratón championship.

I was appointed as head of the steering and suspension team. We designed, developed, and fabricated the suspension for both cars and were able to compete in both competitions of the 2019 season.

Seeing the success, we had as a joint team in the 2019 season we got in touch with other student projects of the university involved in racing competitions to form Tec Racing. This new organization would serve as a collaborative development hub to develop the next generation of student competition cars for the various student competitions, where everyone can help each other, and no other student competition project gets left behind.

2020 would see us consolidate all of the knowledge we gained throughout time, since most of the founding members of the team would be on their last semester of studies, but the pandemic forced us to a halt on the fabrication of the single seaters, and maintained us home. However, we used this time to continue to further develop the EGS20A car and participate in Conexión Tec, a research festival held yearly by our university for student projects, with our design report, which can be found at the end of the page.

Involvement

Since I started with the project I’ve been involved in the Steering and Suspension module. I was appointed as the Steering and Suspension Leader for the first cars we developed for the gravity race car competition and have remained in that position since then.

My tasks included planning and organizing the team to develop and fabricate the suspension and steering components of the cars, as well as the concept design of the suspension geometry and analysis of this designs.