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Formula Hybrid Competition

From early design to the finish line

By John McCluskey

March 29^th, 2014

Initial Design

These photos document a project I worked on and eventually led: the formula hybrid competition at IIT. Our team of 20 labored on this project for over four years, completely outside of our studies at IIT. The journey was arduous, but incredibly rewarding as we would discover by the end.

By September of 2008, we were waist deep in design drawings. It was clear that the work ahead of us would be the most challenging project we would ever work on.

Building it

Not surprisingly, building the dream was a big challenge. But it was also a lot of fun.
We learned a lot about how designs can, and will, change once steel hits steel and the designs must leave the page
and enter the real world.

We had 12 months to build a completely original formula hybrid race car, on a budget of $120,000. The SAE university racing circuit was a game dominated by much larger universities with immense budgets. We aimed to upset the establishment by building a better, smarter vehicle, at a fraction of the cost.

Testing it

It was a long journey getting this thing road worthy, safe to drive, fuel efficient, and bloody fast. Careful testing offered many insights along the way. Nothing quite tests your patience as much as trying to troubleshoot a custom diagnostics system for technology that had never been produced…until now.

Once we realized that our regen system wasn’t dumping power into our ultracapacitors, we knew we had a problem. The clock was ticking, and we had to act fast. Luckily, our answer came in a moment of divine inspiration: by remapping our onboard power control computer, we were able to channel the energy to the right storage system.We now had a way forward.

The Trials

When the rubber hit the road, our team was thrilled beyond words, but there were some last minute issues which would test our mettle yet again. The main drive sprocket on our massive three phase motor was spinning on the shaft. We hadn‘t anticipated the immense level of torque it was putting out. For a moment, we thought we were out of the running. It was back to the drawing board, with less than 1 hour to go before race time. We quickly got to work, cross drilling the sprocket and shaft and inserting a hardened pin to permanently link the two, as the rest of the team worked to stabilize the car on stands. Our quick action had solved the problem, and we were off. It was a short race, at only 2 minutes to complete the circuit, but 2 minutes is all it took to show competition from Dartmouth, Embry-Riddle, Texas A&M, and Cal Poly, that IIT was pushing the limits of hybrid technology. In the end, we won the General Motors Hybrid Design Award, the highest honor in cutting edge vehicle technology. Our immense efforts had finally paid off.

By the time Car 31 was wheeled out of the garage on the day of the trial, there was an electric air of excitement moving about the entire team. Now was our time.

The team

Our team took first place amongst a crowd of tier-1 rival universities.
We like to remind them of this from time to time.

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