The IIT Bombay Racing Experience

 

Hello There. Let me guess what you are expecting from this article? Another 4-6 months project that an undergraduate student does in IIT. I bet not, cause this is a story, a long story of how I grew into the person I am today. This is a story, albeit an experience, awesome one, at IIT Bombay Racing. Take a cup of coffee and hop on the train as it's going to be a wild and interesting ride.

About IIT Bombay Racing

The Team at Formula Student UK

I bet you don’t know much about IIT Bombay Racing. So, let me start by introducing IIT Bombay Racing. It’s 2018. IIT Bombay Racing is one of the finest formula student teams in India building formula-style electric race cars to compete against the best at Formula Student UK, an international student race car design competition organised by IMechE annually at Silverstone, UK. The team was established back in 2008 and started out with IC cars, shifting to off-roaders and then to electric back in 2012. As of 2021, it’s currently building its 8th electric racecar. There are above 70 members across three tiers working together in cross-functional divisions of mechanical, electrical and organizational.

The Start

Launch of EvoX

So a little bit about myself. I was born and brought up in the coastal city of Visakhapatnam. With a North Indian family background. Hobbies are cooking, sketching, reading books. A big-time F1 fan, can’t miss a single race. I joined IIT Bombay as a mechanical engineering undergraduate in 2017. Throughout my first semester, I was majorly involved in hockey. The only way I considered I could get fit 😅. It was in the second semester that the recruitment for the Racing team started. I was sceptical about whether to join the team or not as I may have to forgo hockey and stay fit. It may seem obvious to you guys that I shouldn’t have thought about it at all and joined straight away, but that was me. Anyways, as you know by now, I did join the team and continued playing hockey as much as I can. The first couple of months were interesting. There were training sessions followed by monthly rotation in exploring different divisions for 3 months. The main thing that made me stick to it was the first time seeing the car EvoX run on the launch day. I was fascinated by the fact that a team, comprising majorly of UG students , independently design and manufacture a fully functioning EV Racecar. It was at that moment I decided, that no matter what happens, I would stick to the team. Who wouldn’t want to make a new electric race car every year? Slowly my interest in the team increased and I started giving more and more time to it. I tried continuing hockey, but it would mean sacrificing academics or racing to play Inter-IIT. I decided to forgo the sport as the other two were more important. The final days were awesome though. We went and played against other colleges in turf stadiums and had a lot of fun.

The JDE Year

Sophomores are given the title of junior design engineers(JDEs) with responsibilities including assisting design engineers(DEs) in designing, manufacturing and testing components of their respective subsystems and assisting anywhere else required in the team. I joined the vehicle dynamics modelling subsystem, not because I was interested in VD as such, but more so because I wanted to be the driver of the team and had high chances because I was the lightest member of the team. Guess my weight? Now, the driver of the team needs to know about vehicle dynamics so that he can push the car to the limits. So, noob me thought, why not join the VD Modelling subsystem as that would further increase my chances of being a driver. Ohh how wrong was I as you’ll see later on 😂

A Yaw Moment Diagram

So I started with the basics and other stuff slowly getting involved in the VD Modelling subsystem. It was interesting to see that VD affected the whole racecars targets and design. Slowly building from the bottom up, I was able to reach the very first milestone of making a yaw moment diagram back in Dec. 2018. It’s okay if you don’t know about these technical terms. In my batch of JDEs, I was the only one to know in detail about it as well 😂. My teammates too rarely understood what I used to do in the team or what those highly technical terms like LTS, GGV Diagram, YMD meant when I used to bring them up in daily stand up meets. The only thing that they liked to see was the colourful plots I used to make in MATLAB like the one you can see above. (P.S. If you want to know more about the plot, we can discuss it over a cup of coffee or lunch possibly 😛)

Well MATLAB was not all I did in my sophomore year. I was also involved with other stuff related to the car, like designing some components, seeing over and manufacturing a couple of stuff. JDE phase is the apt time where you not only get a chance to know more about the car but also about the team and get a chance at various other stuff. I was involved in managing the recruitment drive of freshers, right from the orientation to the final paper correction before shortlisting people for interviews taken by seniors. These opportunities provided by the team polished my communication skills. 

Me in the driver seat during our rolling car

Now getting back to why I joined the VD team? Remember the motive to become a racecar driver? Yeah. It was closer. It was the time when all the mechanical components are assembled in the car and the car is rolled on the ground for the first time. A major milestone for the team. I was chosen as the driver for the rolling car. The main task is brake and steer when told by the seniors. Nothing else that I could do. No fancy talking with the wind as I imagined, but yeah, closer to the goal. Little did I know that this would be the only time I would be wearing a driver’s suit. You may be thinking why so? Well, hang on.

The Good Ol Testing Days

Post the rolling car, the electrical team started working to get the car up and running. They used to work all night to debug the issues and get through different test cases to pass many mini-milestones while I used to work in the lab. As expected, while working, I was intrigued at what the elec team did all night and kept asking questions to satisfy my curiosity. It was how I got to know more about the electrical aspects like BMS, Precharge sequence etc. of the racecar. With my long overnight presence in the lab, I also sometimes got called in to put on HV gloves and help the seniors debug issues. March 30^th was the day when our car finally for the first time hit the road. Post which started the testing days where we would assemble the car numerous times a week and test it. As you would say by now, I had a good amount of experience in the team and the senior team could see my dedication towards the team.

The driver selection started in April with shortlisting based on physical attributes and enthusiasm. I was sure about my shortlisting from the physical side because of my lightweight body for acceleration events. It was the enthusiasm part that I expressed. I bet the shortlisting team had trouble going through those long answers I wrote 😂. I hope you aren’t troubled reading this long story. If you are, I doubt what would interest you more 😢. Anyways, do hang on, as we are only halfway there. Get another cup of coffee if one’s done. Back to the driver selection. I was shortlisted and we went ahead with go-kart racing for finding who drives best. It was a memorable experience driving those go-karts. Coming to the positions, I was not making the cut. Other drivers were just better than me. I still hoped that I could drive the acceleration event. That hope was shattered too, because of my low arm strength which was required to control the car in case it went berserk. Anyways, later on, I did realise that the car is just too powerful when being pushed to limits and all my interest to drive it was gone.

EvoK at TATA Motors Test Facility

The summer testing was an interesting period where one team would work night long to get the car up and the other team would take it to test in the morning. This cycle continued for a long time where we as a team got to know a lot about the car. We also went to the TATA Motors testing facility in Pune to test our car and take some great pics of our beauty EvoK. I was all the while involved with assembly, building scripts and analysing test data of our racecar.

 

 

 

The Competition

EvoK at Bruntingthorpe Proving Grounds

The format is set up in this way for the team. Batch 1 leaves for the UK to assemble the car in the host university, batch 2 arrives to assist with testing of the car and Batch 3 arrives directly to the competition. I was amongst the 4 JDEs chosen to go with the core team in Batch 1. It was the first time I was going abroad. Our destination, Coventry University chose to host us and provide us space to assemble and test our racecar in the UK. We stayed at an Airbnb. Our daily schedule was like get up early morning, have breakfast, take a 30min walk to the university, work till 5pm, walk back to our home, sometimes taking long roads exploring the town and its culture, have dinner, post-dinner sunset walk (Yes. The sun used to set at 9:45pm) and back to sleep. It was a great experience working with an international formula student team, getting to know their ideologies and mindsets. We were not just working but also had a lot of fun during the weekends, exploring Birmingham, visiting Cadbury World. We even planned to watch India vs England ICC World Cup match but too costly tickets 😂 We took our car for testing to Bruntingthorpe Proving Grounds, tested a couple of kilometres broke a part or two, replaced it and were all ready for the competition at Silverstone.

 

The Team at Silverstone
(P.S. Don’t try to find me, I was behind the camera)

The first two days went ahead with scrutineering (rule compliance checks) and static event presentations. The third day was our sprint run. The fourth day was the 22km endurance event. The car was all ready to go. We started the endurance at 2pm and our driver was chasing after cars. It was awesome to finally see our car running at Silverstone after a year-long hard work. We were cheering for it a lot. But then the dreaded happened. The motors failed. And we were out 😭 A sad moment for the entire team. The competition itself was a great learning experience for the team and personally for me as I got to see a lot of successful teams and how they work. The trip itself was amazing, getting to stay and work in the UK for a month with seniors and grasp as much of their experience I could. I spent the final week post-competition, in Scotland, taking a much-needed break after a year of hard work. Those were memorable 5 days I spent in Scotland. Won’t elaborate on it here. Maybe another time, another experience. A travelogue mostly.

 

The DE Year

The design engineer year was short but revolutionary for me and for the team according to me. It started with focussing back on VD. I crossed many milestones, like the new steering geometry optimisation algorithm, which benefitted me personally and the team too in the aspect of VD Modelling. Not going into detail, but over the next 6 months, we designed a brand new car with a brand new powertrain and were manufacturing it. At the start of 2020, we had our rolling car milestone crossed when covid hit and everything came to a halt. We were sent home. Most of the work in the team was halted. Most. In VD, it continued, in fact at a record pace tbh 😂 as you just need a laptop to continue working. The VD team broke many milestones like building a GGV Diagram, the team’s first lap time simulator and so on. It definitely benefitted the team giving a sense of direction backed by simulation as to what changes finally resulted in a positive result of decreased lap time. 

 

Our Winning Trophy

The rest of the time was focused on giving our best for the static events, design presentations to be specific in my case. It was the first time we had a lot of time to give for these presentations and we did indeed give a lot of time. I got to learn a lot more about how to prepare and deliver a presentation. Having engineering knowledge and ideas is one thing, presenting it to the judges in a structured and concise manner is another ball game. We had many reviews with alumni dating right back to who founded the team. These inputs were valuable not only for the online competition prep but also later on in life whenever we get an opportunity to do so again. Post the QnA with judges, we weren’t expecting to be in the finals given our track record. We were chilling on Saturday when our Project Manager called us and told us we are in finals and we have an hour to prepare for it. We had our finals and were hopeful. It was on the next day we got to know we had one of the design event at Formula Student UK. A first for any Indian team. The event not only gave us an idea of presenting our knowledge but also showed us, how the budget, time and human resources too affect the final design and build of the car. And this is what goes on in the industry too. That’s the motive of the competition, to make us better engineers.

The Final Year

The Winning Post

The final year as a chief mechanical officer in vehicle dynamics was not what I expected to go as. I spent my whole tenure working from home. The experience was different from what other teams had previously. Working from home, managing juniors and ensuring they work as best as they could, gave me a different perspective of the managerial position. There were other positive points too, like having long discussions within the core team to decide what to do next, the best timeline plan for next year, how should we manufacture the vehicle remotely with minimal human resources and so on gave me a taste of this position, the stakes involved in this and further polished my communication skills. I am sure these experiences will be of use later on in my life. At the end of the year was again the final competition. With the second wave raging in India, it was obvious we could not take part live and hence decided to compete online again. The motive this time was to allow the upcoming team to be at the forefront of the competition so that they gain relevant experience for the coming year and are successful. With the same strategy as last year of multiple mocks with alumni and a lot of prep, we took part in the event. The results speak for themselves about the hard work put in by the upcoming team. We are the defending champions of the design event and overall champions of the concept class competition held virtually finally taking the top step of the podium. It is a major morale boost for the coming team to work even harder and continue to succeed.

In retrospection

Looking back, it's been long 3.5 years in the team. Definitely one of the best experiences I have had throughout my undergraduate years at IIT Bombay. I have learnt a lot, both technical and soft skills, from the seniors, juniors and the alumni, from the experiences as a part of the team, thus increasing my interest in the automotive and motorsport world. IIT Bombay Racing was not just any team. It was a platform, where I could express myself and it provided me with an opportunity to grow and excel. The team has come a long way in those 3.5 years and has brought me to where I am today. I look forward to such excitement and great experiences as I begin my new journey and continue to grow. Hope you enjoyed the journey… The End