The Formula Student Spain (FSS) is an international university championship that each year invites more than 600 universities from all over the world to present, design, manufacture, and develop small single-seater racing cars. Organized by the Society of Automotive Technicians (STA), it has the support of various national institutions and companies in the automotive sector.
This competition is an educational project that allows engineering students and other degrees to be part of a real professional experience. Formula Student represents a higher level master's degree in the automotive sector. Thanks to the contest, students manage to learn to apply the knowledge they have acquired in practical situations, learning new skills through their actions.
In addition, the Formula Student brings real experience in the design, construction and negotiations that are common in the automotive industry. Likewise, it also teaches students to work as a team, under pressure and with strict deadlines, but at the same time with freedom and flexibility, with the aim that students can express their creativity and ingenuity.
The TecnoCampus MotorSports (TCM MotorSports) team arose as part of a concern among students to create new things and new horizons. “We came out of almost two years of constant quarantine, with many idle hours at home and lack of objectives, so we set ourselves the task of creating something new”, explains Team-Leader and Sponsor Manager Marc García-Penche Chacón. “There were various ideas that arose those days, proposals related to aerospace engineering dominated the debate at first, but then we discovered the existence of the Formula Student, which was presented as an opportunity to give rise to this creative work, by At the same time that we integrated the TecnoCampus community into it”, he adds.
“Formula Student is the university engineering competition par excellence”, says García-Penche. "Students must design and build a competition car, in our case electric," she specifies.
“Thanks to the number of academic offers offered by the TecnoCampus, we can count on people from many of the grades,” says García-Penche. “Currently we are 65 students from 8 different grades”, she comments. Specifically, the students participating in the project belong to the Degree in Mechanical Engineering, Degree in Industrial Electronics and Automatic Engineering, Degree in Industrial Organization Engineering, Degree in Computer Engineering of Management and Information Systems, Degree in Business Administration and Management of Innovation, Degree in Audiovisual Media, Degree in Marketing and Digital Communities and the Degree in Logistics and Maritime Business. “Each student contributes the knowledge of her degree to the project, making this a singular and multidisciplinary project” she concludes.
"Currently we have short-term objectives such as the search for sponsors or the completion of the design, in order to achieve our main objective, to be able to compete next 2024," explains García-Penche. “We want to be able to compete next year with a functional prototype that, even though it is the first single-seater in the TecnoCampus, can stand out for its quality and design among all the participating teams”, he comments.
"We also seek to be able to lay the foundations of a team in the same way that happens in other universities, in this way the students of the center will be able to improve the design of the car for years and they will be able to win the competition in the future," he reveals.
The Team-Leader and Sponsor Manager also tells us about the difficulties that his team, being new, has faced when it comes to finding sponsors. "Even so, companies such as Indart3D, Cifa, Ambisort Circular, SetItem or Altair, among others, have opted for our project, trusting in the talent of the TecnoCampus students", he details.
The objective of TCM MotorSports is to be able to aspire to compete in the Formula Student Spain 2024. "In addition, if we have a sufficient budget and the car can continue competing, we would like to participate in a foreign competition such as Germany, the United Kingdom or the Czech Republic", explains Garcia-Penche. "Although for this we still have a long way to go," he concludes.
