Supporting our Community: UTS Motorsports

At Edcon, we love supporting the next generation of engineers and innovators, so we are proud to sponsor UTS Motorsports. This team consists of passionate university students who design, manufacture, test, and race cars in an annual competition.

We talked with Jia, the Business Director of UTS Motorsports, about the group’s latest projects and their partnership with Edcon Steel.

UTS Motorsports

Each year, thousands of university students, volunteers, and spectators come together to watch the Formula SAE-A, a competition in which university students design, build, and compete in their very own Formula-style open-wheeled racing car. The competition, established in 2000, provides an avenue for students to develop their skills in engineering, management, leadership, teamwork, and more.

The UTS Motorsports team has been in operation since 1999, and they are gearing up for a huge Formula SAE-A 2025. The group of 60-70 university students are working together to design and build electric and autonomous vehicles to race in this year’s competition.

While the team has academic advisors who share their technical knowledge, the students must independently design, build, test, and race the cars, which requires several skills and a lot of collaboration.

The projects require extensive skills in mechanical, electrical, and software engineering, as well as business and communication. They are expensive and time-consuming projects, which require extensive networking for support and resources.

“There’s a lot of technical knowledge and hard work going into designing, building, and manufacturing this car and then racing it at the end of the year against other universities,” Jia explains.

“We have our team principal and a board of directors, including mechanical, electrical, software, business, safety, and learning and development directors. Each director oversees a specialised team that collaborates on the projects.”

While the majority of the team members are mechanical, electrical and software engineers, there are also a number of business and communications students who share a passion for motorsports.

The cars

“Back in 1999 the Motorsports team had what’s known as ICE, an internal combustion engine. But around 2015, they changed over to electric cars, and as of 2017, we added autonomous vehicles to our projects.” Jia explains

This year, the team will be racing an electric vehicle, as well as building an autonomous vehicle.

The first stage of the project is the design phase, where each of the sections comes together to work on each component.

“There’s a lot of CAD design on a tool called SolidWorks, and from there we go through technical designs. Often, we have alumni of the teams sit in on meetings and advise us if needed.

Once the designs are completed. We go through a thorough technical design review, where the teams sit down and go through all the aspects of the vehicles.

Once the design phase is completed, the manufacturing phase begins. The students have access to the university labs and machinery to build and manufacture each component of the vehicles completely independently.

“We also then have to make sure that the vehicles look good. So our chassis will be covered in aluminium, and we’ll send it off to get spray painted. We also then do a car reveal,” Jia explains.

Once the vehicles have been manufactured, they undergo rigorous safety checks.

“We do a series of track days, or track testing, where we go to Sydney Motorsport Park and put the vehicles through a range of different tests. We do tyre tests to make sure the brakes lock up and a rain test to make sure that the car is safe to drive when wet, in amongst a range of different tests” Jia says.

Then, it’s competition time!

Edcon Steel - UTS Motorsports competition

The team drives the car down to Melbourne, where the Formula SAE-E takes place at Calder Park each year. But the competition isn’t like a normal Formula 1 race.

“We have to sit through a range of scrutineering processes’, where judges go through the car and make sure that every aspect is safe first and that it’s going to work and not harm anyone,” Jia explains.

Only once the cars have passed the scrutineering process, as well as a rain test, tilt test, an egress test for the driver, brake test, and more, are they allowed to race. There are a number of races, including of endurance, auto-cross, acceleration and skidpan.

“However, race day isn’t just about the races. Each team must compete through a business case. We are given a hypothetical business scenario about 2-3 months out from the competition and need to deliver a business presentation based on that scenario,” Jia explains.

“We present that to those judges, and we’ve done quite well in the past. Additionally, there is more static engineering events – which consists of a cost event, and a design event, that the engineers participate in”.

Edcon Steel - UTS Motorsports partnership

Partnership with Edcon Steel

Manufacturing vehicles is no easy feat…and it’s not cheap either! The team works hard to network with companies and organisations who may be interested in sponsoring them.

“We get some support from the university, which is great, but we also have to source a lot of things ourselves,” Jia explains.

Our team principal had been scouring the internet for steel tubes and found Edcon. We contacted them because we thought they would be the perfect fit.

They are supplying all the steel tubing for the chassis for this year’s project and they supplied lots of aluminium for last year’s project! They have been so great and super supportive of us!

Here at Edcon Steel, we are proud to support this group of industrious, skilled and passionate students. We wish the team the best of luck for this year’s competition. We can’t wait to hear how it goes!

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