Ever since Formula 1 chief Bernie Ecclestone said New Delhi was capable of hosting a grand prix, diehard Kimi Raikkonen and Fernando Alonso fans have been wondering when they would feel the streets of India’s capital vibrating with the rattling power of the mean machines. Perhaps caught up in the excitement, a crop of youngsters have now come up with their own formula machine—not an F1 but a formula-style racer.A team from IIT, Delhi, which calls itself AXLR8R (accelerator, in SMS lingo), has designed the racing car for the Formula SAE West competition in the US. The brain child of Nikhil Gupta, the project coordinator, the car hit the design board in December 2005. In June this year, the flashy red and black car will scorch the tarmac in Fontana, California.The annual competition in California provides an opportunity to university students around the world to design, fabricate and compete with their original formula racing cars. Around 80 universities will compete worldwide this year and there will be only four teams from Asia. AXLR8R will be the sole Indian participant in the event.For their project codenamed “Formula SAE”, the 10 students, including a girl, have come up with a racer equipped with a Yamaha R6 600 CC engine. The engine, bought second-hand from abroad, churns out 120 bhp at 19,000 rpm. That’s a lot of power for an auto put together by greenhorns. “To know how fast that is, just compare a Maruti 800’s output: 37 bhp at 5,000 rpm,” says Anurag Sarawagi, technical coordinator of the team. The youngsters, however, plan to rev up only to 11,000 rpm.The amateurs carmakers have opted for a liquid cooling system for the engine to help the vehicle meet the strict emissions standards at the competition. It also has a fuel-injected engine that does away with the choke-and-carburettor system. The six-speed gearbox gives the driver plenty of opportunity to press the accelerator. The car also has a wet multi-plate clutch, designed to provide a very smooth performance. The body is made up of polyfibre material and is currently being molded to specifications by the team’s main sponsor, Maurti Udyog Ltd. The car is yet to be test-driven but the students are confident that with their limited resources and the facilities at their command, they have conjured up a vehicle to race against the best in the world. For this they depended mostly on their own genius and a little bit of help from an auto major. “The credit goes to the students for putting their all into this project,” says project advisor Dr Sudipto Mukherjee. “The institute encourages students to be innovative and take up more practical work.” For Maruti too it was a synergy of sorts. “We always wanted to be involved in building a formula car and this was a great opportunity for us to help the students achieve their goal,” said Shailendra Singh, manager, Production Division, Maruti. He was a fond assistant to the students in their venture. “At the moment the car is just a concept but in the future, if racing is taken up as a serious sport in India then we might think of mass production of the Formula SAE,” he added. That should make the students smile.
