Formula Electric Belgium

Amira Tamam

From Flanders, Belgium, Formula Electric Belgium are looking forward to joining other teams at the FSN2019 competition, the perfect place for the next generation of racing engineers and supporters to show the potential future of racing with their innovations. Willem T’Hooft, their team manager, and Joppe Weustenraad, head of Marketing, participated for their team in our Q&A section for the 2019 team interviews.

Formula Electric Belgium Team Photo

  • Introduce your team briefly.

Formula Electric Belgium is a team consisting of 21 engineering students from different campuses of KU Leuven University and Thomas More University College in Flanders, Belgium. Formula Electric Belgium strives to create entrepreneurial engineers by developing innovative technologies with a focus on the future of electrical mobility. During all of these steps, our motto remains the same: “Green Innovation meets performance”. After being formed in 2015 by the merge of the two teams “Thomas More Innovation” and “Formula GroupT”, Formula Electric Belgium now has the knowledge of 10 electric race cars, every year built to weight less, be safer and go faster.

  • Tell us about your team’s history with Formula Student.

After last season, Formula Electric Belgium has now the experience of 15 official Formula Student Competitions. We’ve always put our focus on the main competitions of Europe, trying to compete with teams we could learn a lot from. This leads to the fact that there are only a few competitions left in Europe we haven’t competed in, yet!

  • What does joining Formula Student Netherlands mean to you?

FSN will be our first Formula Student competition of 2019. For the first competition, it is always a little bit more stressful to get your car ready and safe for scrutineering. Nevertheless we expect nothing less from FSN than being firm but fair, while giving great feedback. Last year we didn’t drive because we couldn’t pass the brake test, but this year we will be back and we will be noticed!

  • What are your main goals for this year?

After the great improvements made last year, we had a very good foundation to start from. We are optimising a lot of the production of our parts, further developing our cooling design with the aid of artificial intelligence and the electronics department is really finalising the battery packet, saving every gram possible, while still being compliant with the rules. While doing all this, we try to make everything modular, creating the possibilities to start testing driver-less technologies in the next years.

  • What made you think of/choose FSN?

When FSN started in 2017, we were immediately thrilled and joined the competition! After seeing this beautiful location as also the professionalism of FSN last year, knowing it was only their second competition, we knew this would become a competition of great value. FSN gives us the chance to compete against our neighbouring as also many other great teams.

  • What makes you different than the other teams?

As a Formula Student team from a non technical university, it is not always easy to find all necessary knowledge and feedback, but thanks to all our partners each year, we were still able to pull it off. But there is more. We even push ourselves, together with all these partners to strive for the most innovative theories. It takes some nerves to take these risks, working with the newest technologies where nobody in the world has any experience with, but this lead for example to our cooling system, designed with the aid of artificial intelligence, which became a world premiere and helped us winning the first price for our design of Umicore Pulse in 2018. Besides this we organise STEM sessions to inspire youth and hope to make interesting connections with the industry.

  • What is your biggest achievement in Formula Student so far?

In 2017, we got the 4th place for the design of our car at the FS Czech and a overall 3rd place at the dynamic events of FS Hungary, we’ve had the taste of some good achievements and we knew we had a good design to built upon. This lead to Umicore Pulse, our car of 2018, and the fastest car we’ve built up till then, rewarding us with the 1st place on the design event of FS Czech 2018 as well as some places on the stage for the dynamic events.

  • Describe your car in three words.

Green innovative performance.