The photo below shows the University of Bayreuth’s student racing team "Elefant Racing" (ER) in more carefree times: 2019... Social distancing during the lockdown in March 2020 also had consequences for ER. Emilia Ullmer, chairwoman of Elefant Racing e.V., reports:
However, we also saw the opportunity to think about new ways of working as a team in times of crisis. New tools were tested and integrated, and restructuring measures were implemented. A crisis is also always an opportunity to question old processes and realign them. And behold: Home office also works for “Elefant Racing”.
In addition to creating new internal structures, we also pushed forward diligently with the development of our vehicle. In particular, the team involved in the “Driverless” group made enormous progress over the past several months. With the goal of driving completely autonomously on unknown tracks in 2022, the team has continued to tinker with the basic concept and the driverless testing platform. We have been driving on the campus with this one for the past few weeks and have been busy collecting training data for the artificial intelligence of our new system.
In mid-June, after a long break, we were able to return to the university campus and to our workshop to continue production work. Since then, the “Mechanics” group has completed the monocoque so that the individual sub-teams “Vehicle Dynamics”, “Electrics”, and “Driverless” could install their parts on the vehicle themselves. Our goal is to go out on the test track with the FR20 at the end of October so that we can put our racing car into operation before the end of this year.
Normally, we would have presented the “FR20 Ragnarök” to the public for the first time at the end of June at a major event at the Malibu Restaurant together with our sponsors, supporters, friends, and families.
But not much is “normal” in these times
Despite everything, we wanted to publicly share the progress we made over the past several months and decided to carry out the rollout as an online event on the topic of driverless / electronic systems. One of the highlights was guest speaker Jan Becker, who joined us live from the USA to talk about the early days of autonomous driving. All in all, the event was a success. Nevertheless, personal contact with our partners is essential, especially for exchanging technical ideas.
After not being able to race our car in the 2019/20 season due to event cancellations, we decided to perfect the FR20 Ragnarök this season and then compete at Hockenheim and other race tracks in Europe next summer.
This decision gives us the time we wouldn’t otherwise have to invest energy in in-house development, better thought-out systems, and more elaborate solutions. We would like to continue the development of ceramic brakes, motor inverters (also called DCAC), sintered wheel carriers, and torque vectoring. This should help our team in the coming seasons to further optimize the vehicles in terms of weight, performance, and individual adaptability in order to remain competitive in the future.
We would like to thank our sponsors and the University of Bayreuth for their generous support!
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