Saturday, August 4 was an exciting day. It was the day it became clear that ETH Zurich was once again our biggest competitor and the cars appeared to be quite evenly matched. A report of the day follows below:

The acceleration event opened at 9 am. At acceleration the goals is to travel 75 meters as fast as possible. We started with our first driver Rick, he set a first time of 3.52 seconds, this was the quickest acceleration run ever driven at a formula student event! After the tires were warm, Rick went for his second attempt directly and set an even better time of 3.45 seconds with a top speed of 126 kilometers per hour!

When we were absolutely confident that nobody could beat us anymore we decided to spare the car and not let our second driver Marinus drive. We had some tense moments when we were not sure if we had used too much power, but we soon heard we didn’t use too much power and we even had a large margin.

Then it was time for the autocross. We had seen that ETH Zurich set a good time of 78.37 seconds. Tim was the first driver and he immediately set a time of 79 seconds. He went for his second attempt soon and improved his time to 78.20 seconds!

We were faster than Zurich, but we knew we had to obtain as many points as possible to have confidence for tomorrow. We decided to let  our second driver Erik drive. In his first run he set a time of 78.13 but he sadly hit several cones so he didn’t improve on Tim’s time. When Erik drove his second run he drove incredible and the whole grand stand could not believe their eyes, a time of 76.37 seconds! The fastest time of both the electrical and combustion cars.

We left the entire competition two seconds behind us and we thought we would win, but ETH Zurich was even quicker, they managed to set a time of 75.93 seconds. Congratulations ETH!

We are currently first in the ranking, but with 3 unknown results, everything can happen. Tomorrow It will be Delft versus Zurich and we certainly look forward to it!

Still unknown:

Design judging (both we and Zurich were in the finals)

Endurance (to be driven tomorrow between 12:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. hours)

Efficiency (determined on the basis of the amount of energy consumed during the Endurance)

These are our results so far:

First place Acceleration

First place Cost event

Second place Autocross

Third place skidpad

Fourth place Business presentation