Fuelling the Future: A Season with a Collegiate Racing Team
How University Teams Are Powering the Future of Racing
It’s 2:00 a.m. Red Bull cans and metal shavings are scattered across the floor. Someone’s playlist is looping for the third time, interrupted by the metallic clang of two students wrestling a piece of sheet metal into place. This isn’t a professional garage in Milton Keynes or Maranello, it’s on a university campus, and the car has to be ready by spring. Across the world, over 400 collegiate racing teams compete in student-run series like Formula Student, F1 in Schools, Formula SAE, Baja, and Solar racing series. These full-blown, professional racing teams are led and staffed by university students who juggle coursework, deadlines, and sleep schedules to build race cars from start to finish. Why take on something so demanding while pursuing a degree? Where does the money come from? Will the car even work? The answer to these frequently asked questions is simple: They believe in their idea and a plan, and are excited to see how it shapes up.
Getting Down to Business
Like any real-world motorsport organisation, every team starts with the essentials: A car and a team, but what about the funding to build it all? Before any part is designed or put into place, each team has to raise enough money to cover their build, event expenses, transportation, and supplies. That’s the job of the business operations team, who manage everything from sponsorships, fundraising, marketing, merchandising, event planning, and logistics. In short, they are the fully functional brain to the equally functional and very busy engineering body.
As a member of business operations for my university’s Formula Hybrid + Electric team, we begin our season by looking for potential sponsors and partnerships. Every contact, from local shops to global engineering firms, gets a tailored proposal explaining our goals for the year and why our team is worth investing in. From there, we continue to raise money through alumni networks, student government, and school grants. Alongside securing funds, we also promote our team culture and projects on campus at university events for both current and new students. To meet our audience online, we also create content to promote our journey and lean into viral trends to match shifts in the professional motorsport world.
Starting the Engine
You can have all the money, connections, and desire to start a racing team, but what about the car and the people who work on it? On the engineering side, the setup continues to mirror professional teams. While access and garage structures can differ depending on available resources and the size of the team, it is guaranteed that each team will have a space to store and complete their work.
Within the space, engineering teams are usually split across different components of the car. In Formula Hybrid, we split our team into mechanical and electrical departments, which then break down into more specialised sub-teams like suspension, aerodynamics, low and high voltage, pedals, and steering. Teams with larger budgets who compete regularly tend to divide their teams into larger departments consisting of 20 to 30 people. The special benefit of student racing is the ability for students to bring their active classroom knowledge into the garage, experimenting with prototypes, running simulations, and refining designs throughout the academic year.
During the semester, it's all about iteration: programming, rewiring, welding, and testing. When the semester comes to an end for winter holidays, students spend that time re-energising and digging into research to prepare for the busiest part of the season: the spring semester.
Lights Out…
Ask anyone on the team where they spend their free time, and you won’t hear “the dorm” or “the library”. By March and April, the garage becomes a 24/7 operation. Between late nights and classes, each department works around the clock to fix last-minute bugs, weld on finished parts, test systems and wiring, and finalise carbon fibre lay-ups for the aero package.
This period is when the nature of engineering for motorsports hits: You never know if something is going to work until you test it. If things go wrong, the team needs to guarantee a fix before facing the scrutiny of the judges and other teams at the competition. While the engineers work, business operations keep team morale high, sponsors happy, and begin to book hotels and transportation for the team’s big day. Throughout this process, weekly meetings coordinate efforts and ensure the car will be ready for race weekend. When competition finally arrives in late April, it's three days of frantic engineering, inspections, and celebration, which ends with the best reward of all: track time.
And Away We Go!
College race teams are more than hands-on learning experiences, they’re direct pipelines into motorsport. These students are training to be pit lane engineers, data analysts, team principals, and media coordinators. They bring bold ideas, curiosity, and the willingness to try things that haven’t been done before. The motorsport industry is opening up, with student teams reflecting the diverse, inclusive, and future-focused shift. Teams are increasingly led by women, including non-engineering majors, and are making motorsport more accessible and well-rounded. Many professional teams have begun to take notice, with plenty of students making the jump into real-world racing, from F1 and Formula E to IndyCar and endurance series. As the industry evolves toward sustainability and new tech, these student teams are leading the charge. For them, the impossible isn’t a limitation, it’s a challenge worth racing toward.
