By MOJO REPORTERS

Monash Motorsport has just completed its most successful ever European campaign, the group’s CEO says.

Competing in Formula Student 2018, the group of Monash Uni students won the UK competition and placed highly in both the German and Austrian competitions held this month.

CEO Vincent Chu said it was the world’s largest student engineering competition with more than 600 universities participating overall, and more than 100 in the European competitions.

And the group’s next big project is already being planned.

“The next big step is aiming to have our driverless car finished by open day next year,” he said.

Students design, build, manufacture and compete in the cars, with 2017 being the first time they produced an electric car. There are more than 100 Monash students involved.

The team’s combustion chief engineer Liam Roche is leading Monash’s push to compete in all three classes – combustion, electric and autonomous (driverless).

“Driverless cars are very new,” Mr Roche said. “We’re the first Australian team to produce cars of all three classes.”

Mr Roche said speed wasn’t the major issue when designing the cars – they were looking for “maximum corner potential, exactly like Formula 1 cars are designed”.

He said many people helped to create the cars, and support came from sponsors and the university.

“The cars were mostly made out of steel, aluminium and carbon fibre, materials which were sourced by sponsors.”

He said he was proud of how the team worked together in a different and prestigious environment. 

“The highlight of the competition was just how well the team worked together,” Mr Roche said. “The team normally operates as one unit, but for this competition we had to split into two.”

The combustion car was driven by engineering student Andrew McCarthy, who had a successful campaign across the autocross and endurance events at the competitions. 

Mr Chu said the team worked hard to make sure the cars were not only fast, but did not break down.

“The strong point of our cars and team over the last two years has been making sure we have done enough testing – also honing out all the reliability issues that crop up,” Mr Chu said.