April 29, 2009

Contact: Amy Hewes
College of Engineering
805-756-6402
ahewes@calpoly.edu

Cal Poly Receives $15,000 Grant for Hybrid Racecar

Next week, a team of 20 Cal Poly students will compete in the Formula Hybrid competition. With support from Plug In America and ZERO Motorcycles the team has designed and built a high performance vehicle which they say is like no other. The Formula Hybrid International Competition takes place May 4-6 in Loudon, New Hampshire.

Cal Poly and three other universities received $15,000 each towards their 2009 Formula Hybrid race vehicle programs. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) funded the grants.

"We are trying to keep information about the car secret for as long as possible so that we can completely surprise our opponents," said Justin Jang, member of the Cal Poly team. "However, we can say that it will be the lightest and most radical car at the competition."

Undergraduate and graduate students compete in Formula Hybrid by designing, building and racing an open-wheel, single-seat car that demonstrates innovation and fuel efficiency. Formula Hybrid teams must use 15% less gasoline than a comparable standard Formula SAE racecar. They are also encouraged to recycle by incorporating used racecar parts rather than building everything from scratch.

Before May 4 the Cal Poly team will clean up the car, go through driver training, and calculate exactly how much energy they will be using on the track. On Sunday morning they will go through a full competition simulation by running all of the events.

"We were particularly impressed with the rigor and ingenuity of this year's projects and gratified to see the growing interest in electricity use for transportation," said Jay Friedland, Legislative Director of Plug In America.

Formula Hybrid is an offshoot of the Formula SAE program sponsored by the Society of Automotive Engineers. Formula SAE teams design, build and compete with formula racecars but rules disallow hybrids. In 2003 Dartmouth students discovered these rules while researching a hybrid car for the competition and decided to develop a hybrid program.

The event is organized by the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College.

Sponsors include SAE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Plug In America, Toyota, DaimlerChrysler and General Motors.

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