HKA team wins Formula Student in Hungary

August 15, 2022

After being repeatedly successful in the past years, the Formula Student team of Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences ("Die HKA") had eagerly anticipated this year's season, when they were to take part in the competition. A wait well rewarded: For the first time, the team signed up for the Formula Student East. The students of HKA achieved their highest score ever (more than 900 points), thus taking the first place in the overall standings in the class of internal combustion engines at the Hungaroring, Mogyoród, from August 8-12, 2022. This is the biggest success in the team's history following their victory in Spain in 2019. "We are incredibly proud of our students," says President Prof. Dr.-Ing. Frank Artinger, "who demonstrated, by their achievement, a high level of technical expertise and even more: They worked on their project with perseverance and passion, overcame all adversities such as supply chain problems, and finally showed great resolve during the actual race - on behalf of the entire university, I congratulate Team High Speed Karlsruhe on this extraordinary success!"

The competition is divided into various individual disciplines and the overall position is calculated from the results of the individual disciplines. In the Business Plan discipline, the HKA team took 2nd place in Hungary, in Cost & Manufacturing 1st place, and came third in the Engineering Design event - thus winning the static events in total. As for the Dynamics, the HKA team took 1st place in Skid Pad - a discipline in which the HKA team has traditionally excelled - and also in Efficiency. In Autocross the team took 4th place, 8th place in Acceleration and 1st place in the supreme discipline - the 22 km Endurance race. Thereby ultimately winning the dynamic disciplines as a whole. After a short breather, the team will continue today at the Hockenheimring, where Formula Student Germany will be held until Sunday, August 21, 2022.

The HKA team consists of about 50 students from the degree programs Automotive Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Mechatronics, Electrical Engineering & Information Technology as well as Business Administration & Engineering, Computer Science, and Computer Science & Media. Within nine months, the students have developed, designed and manufactured their racing car, the F-116. The main task of the international design competition is to produce a racing car that would be suitable for small-scale production. However, speed is only one aspect; the overall concept is evaluated, which also includes acceleration and braking performance as well as design, weight and calculated production costs. In order to develop a fast, agile, safe, economical and reliable racing car that is also cost-effective, the students need to plan and coordinate the project in detail, including a marketing strategy, business plan and cost report. This requires many engineering-specific skills, as well as extensive business and marketing skills. The idea behind this competition is to give students an attractive opportunity to put the knowledge they have acquired during their studies into practice.