This year's brand new formula car has been introduced today by students of BUT. For the third year already, they have been developing electrically powered formulas, but this year they have added another novelty: with Dragon e3, as they called the car, they are going to participate in racing disciplines in autonomous driving in Germany, i.e. in races without a pilot. Young designers from TU Brno Racing is to compete in a total of three races of the global Formula Student series in August.

The biggest novelty of this year's formula is the capability of autonomous driving. Students started working on it last year, this year they are going to participate in two driverless racing disciplines in Germany for the first time. "We have prepared the car in a way that allows us to use a single car only, the Dragon e3, which we are going to equip with the sensors necessary for autonomous driving. Other teams choose using two different cars, for example, converting one older one into an autonomous one. It would be difficult for us to keep two cars capable of driving at races, but we use last year's single-seater to test the autonomous elements," explains Patrik Tiszai, this year's TU Brno Racing team leader.

For driving without a pilot, it is necessary to equip the formula with cameras and lidar technology, which uses lasers to read an accurate 3D image of the car's surroundings in real time. Thanks to this feature, the single-seater navigates in space and algorithms take care of calculating the optimal route. "We use some of the available algorithms, but mostly we have to adapt them to our needs. To a large extent, it is a system designed by us," adds Tiszai, who himself studies at the Faculty of Information Technology at BUT.

Making the car lightweight was also a great challenge for the students. While in autonomous driving the monopost is in principle lighter by about seventy kilos, which represents the average weight of the pilot, for piloted disciplines the students are looking for ways to save every single gram. "Last year's Dragon e2 weighed 184 kilograms without a pilot. Our target this year was to get to 170 kilograms, which should help us achieve more speed and improve acceleration. The lighter the car, the faster it should be," explains Jiří Janečka, Technical Mechanical Leader, a student of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. He adds that since the first electric Dragon e1 three years ago, they have managed to "lose" about 40 kilograms of weight. The largest part, about a third of the weight of the car, is still made up of the battery that powers the electric single-seater.

Dragon e3 Weight: 170 kg Power output: 2 x 35 kW Battery capacity: 7.5 kWh Powerplant: 2 x Fischer electric motor – driven rear axle, drive both wheels independently of each other Top speed: 120 km/h Acceleration from 0 to 100 km/h: 3.0 s Chassis: 10" composite wheels of custom design

This year, the section dedicated to electrical engineering within the team focused, among other things, on the development of its own inverter. "We decided to make even the last units, that we used to purchase in the past, on our own. In particular, it concerns the inverter and the motor control unit. Mainly because if we construct the part ourselves, we understand it in detail then. The purchased parts are a kind of black box for us. The components of our own design represent a huge advantage for the team in the future, and as students, we have the opportunity to try something that is not commonly taught at school," explains Matúš Kavec, a student of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Communication.

The own production has another, very pragmatic reason. Supplies of components on global markets have continued to shrink since the pandemic. Students would wait for weeks or months to get some of the components and sometimes they would not get them at all. "The problem is with everything from the processing of raw materials like aluminum to the supply of microchips and cables. Our biggest champion is the brakes: last year we waited so long for them and in the end, they were delivered after the end of the season. So this year, our formula uses the brakes originally designed for last year's single-seater," adds Kavec.

The student formula is a project stretching over the generations, students of BUT have been involved in it for thirteen years. Therefore, the team is trying to ensure its successors have something to build on. This year, the students have equipped the single-seater with a number of new sensors that will collect data from which they can benefit in future seasons and keep improving the car. Thirty students participated in the construction of this year's car, and in total they worked about 50,000 hours.

Now the team will test the new car and select and train its drivers. In August, they will compete in three races of the Formula Student World Series in three weeks. "We are going to start in Hungary at the Formula 1 Hungaroring circuit, then we go to the Czech Republic to Autodrom Most and finish the season in Germany. Of course, we hope that the Dragon e3 will be the most successful car we have ever produced," concludes Tiszai.

Formula Student is a competition for young engineers from all over the world. The task of the teams is to design, manufacture and test the formula car at the Formula Student series races within one year. The competition evaluates the engineering approach, thinking about the cost of production, business capabilities, reliability, handling, performance, safety of the car. In addition, the design of the car or the team's business plan are also evaluated. The student team of TU Brno Racing was established at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of BUT in 2010. In 2021, students phased out the production of single-seaters with an internal combustion engine when they produced the jubilee 10th Dragon X model and at the same time introduced the first model of the Dragon e1 electric formula. TU Brno Racing is the largest student team at BUT, 50 students participated in the development, production and operation of the team this year. In the 2021/2022 racing season, the Dragon e2 team took 30th place in the electric formula category in the world ranking of three hundred teams. More about the team on www.tubrnoracing.cz.