Building an Electric Race Car from the Ground Up with UC Santa Barbara’s Gaucho Racing Team

At UC Santa Barbara, a dedicated group of students spent countless hours of their free time over the past year designing, researching, and building a single-seat electric race car to test their own skills and compete against hundreds of schools from all around the world at Michigan International Speedway. 

Just hours before the group was set to depart on the long trek to Michigan, the students packed into UCSB’s machine shop, minds and bodies exhausted from trying to get the car ready for competition. Some of the students had Sharpie marks on their arms, each mark tallying how many energy drinks they had chugged during their late-night build. According to the team president, rising senior Nick Rivelle, some of the students were at least six energy drinks deep.

But it’s that type of dedication that had gotten them up to this point — taking a car from the CAD drafting and design stage to a real-life rolling machine with over 500 volts of Lithium Ion power — and in the early hours of the morning, in the moonlight of the lagoon right behind the shop, the car finally got rolling all on its own.

“The first time it rolled,” Rivelle said, “just to see it all finally come together was worth it.”

The team took a second to celebrate their build, but the work was far from over. While most of the team was set to fly to Michigan, Rivelle and few others had to pack the freshly finished race car into their homemade trailer — which is just a flat-bed bought off Craigslist that the team retrofitted with a metal enclosure that they welded themselves — and make the 36-hour drive across the country.

To make things even more interesting, one of the team leaders who had stayed late to put the finishing touches on the car, mechanical engineering student Jason Wei, missed his flight to Michigan. Wei scrambled to book another flight at the last minute and showed up to the airport with over 50 pounds of custom-machined parts stuffed into his suitcase — much to the surprise of the TSA agents who looked through his bag.

It was a testament to their dedication to the project, which was the brainchild of the Gaucho Racing Team President Rivelle, a former English major-turned engineering student who wanted to resurrect an older student-run program which had students building a fuel-efficient car from scratch.

Rivelle started with a small group, but through word of mouth, the Gaucho Racing team soon began to take form. Though the program is entirely student run, it does have a few faculty advisors, like UCSB Research and Development Engineer Kirk Fields, who helped students get hands-on experience with the school’s recently restocked machine shop.

The actual machining of the custom parts was done under the supervision of the UCSB’s College of Engineering Machine Shop, specifically with the help of shop superintendent Marty Ramirez, staff members Andy Weinberg and Josh Bowie, and teaching assistants Joe Sandoval and Braden Beitel.

“We truly could not have completed the project without them,” Rivelle said.

“It couldn’t have been done without the new shop,” Fields said, describing the new machinery like CNC lathes that the students employed to build parts.

Fields also credited Rivelle for acting as “pied piper” for the racing team. Wherever he went with the project, Fields said, the rest of the team followed.

Fields said he was proud to see the group work together, and he was glad that there was a group of students looking to restore the school’s racing program, which hadn’t been active since 2009. “We haven’t had students that were interested [before],” Fields said. “Now they have to keep the momentum going.”

The project took over a year of research and development, with much of the early work going into the design and the mechanics of the car. The group broke up into four specific groups that would focus on specific aspects of the car — chassis, suspension, aerodynamics, and powertrain — along with other members tackling the business, fundraising, and social media aspects of the operation.

Many of the students had previous experience with robotics, or electrical engineering, but Rivelle said that the project pushed them to learn new skills and forced them to become flexible problem solvers.

“It’s not engineering, it’s problem management,” he said. “You need more patience than anything.”

The chassis alone, which is hand-welded by students, took about 13 revisions before the group landed on the final version. Almost all of the car’s body and main components, from the suspension to the carbon fiber aero and foam-molded seat, were handmade by the students. 

All told, the students were able to raise over $30,000 from fundraisers and sponsorships — including support from Tesla and Anguiano Racing — to complete the car just in time for the Formula SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) competition at Michigan International Speedway.

Ultimately, the competition didn’t pan out as the team had hoped. Although they arrived in time, with the car ready to go, they were unable to make it through the competition’s strict guidelines in time to run the car on the course.

Despite the letdown of not getting to officially compete, the Gaucho Racing Team calls the experience a win. They proved that they could build a working car — one that they estimated would have gone about 60 mph had it competed — and they restored a long dormant program at the university. They also got to learn a lot from the other programs and the competition staff, who were happy to share their knowledge with the up-and-coming UCSB team. “The judges recognized it was our first ever car,” Rivelle joked.

But the future is bright for the Gaucho Racing Team. Most of the team, including Rivelle and Wei, will be returning next year, determined to have a better car and a stronger team.

“Our goal is to make the foundation last,” Wei said.

The team is also hoping to earn wider support from the university and local community. While they were given free access to the machine shop and engineering labs during the school year, the racing team was not permitted to keep their car at the school over the summer. Instead, Rivelle drove the trailer on the back of his Chevy Colorado to his family home in Pasadena, where it will stay until next year.

For more information on UCSB Gaucho Racing, visit ucsbgauchoracing.com.