“Our student team is confused with Solar Team Eindhoven all too often,” says Jilez Aelbers, who has taken on the role of CFO in his third year as a URE member. “It’s time to show what we do and how much effort it takes to build a racing car within a year.”

To create the series, a team and a script were put together, and a video production company (Sommedia) was hired. Every episode has its own story, detailing what kind of problems a student team may encounter and how these can be solved. The first video was published last Friday, while the final one won’t be out for a while. The videos are available on YouTube.

“In the introductory episode, we take the viewer along for a journey through the team’s history and we hear from an alumnus who’s currently at Toyota Gazoo Racing, building a racing car that competes for the podium in endurance races such as the 24 Hours of Le Mans. He got that job thanks to his experience in our team,” Aelbers says. In this case, it’s team manager Fieke Wijnen doing the narrating. Each of the other episodes focus on different phases of the year and have different narrators, all of them URE board members.

Design

Part two is about the design phase. “We’ll tell you about our product management, with a focus on mechanical propulsion and engine control. The main story here is about working with a huge deadline. We call it the ‘design freeze’, which takes place every 1 December.” This is directly followed by the production phase, the theme of the third video.

This is the phase when construction starts, in Momentum, at EPC or at one of the partners. “We do a lot of the production ourselves. This year, when we were building URE 17, things got tense when our carbon fiber sponsors unexpectedly backed out. The companies that had promised us roles of material were confronted with financial problems because of COVID and had to use it themselves, understandably so. And we didn’t have any reserves from last year.” Watch the video to see how the team got out of this pickle.

Competition

The car is finished, and is faster and lighter than ever. With it, URE will try to win the international Formula Student competition to be held on the TT circuit in Assen in July. The final episode of the series, themed around competition, can only be created after that. The preceding episode will show how a student team sets up an event in which its product is revealed. The presentations of the racing cars have often been captured in pictures and videos over the years, allowing us to relive some key moments. The episode is narrated by the CFO himself.

It’s the first time URE is making a video series about its methods. “We are hoping to increase our name awareness, as this would have many positive effects: more appreciation of the large amount of work we put in and possibly more attention from companies, which in turn would lead to more sponsoring and more brand recognition for partners and even for TU/e as a whole.”