Author: Alexandra Stoppler, Rennteam Universität Stuttgart

Having completed a very successful season with three overall wins and one almost-win in fife competitions the question we hear a lot is: How did you do that. To make one thing clear from the very beginning: There are many ways to approach this complex task of building a racecar with limited resources such as time, money and workforce. Here is our way:

We believe that not only our engineering skills made us designing a great racecar, moreover the project management is one of the very important key factors to manage this project.

First of all it is important to decide how the team should be organised in general. We preferred being organised as a non-profit organisation, so we are independent from the university. Being active in motorsport makes it often necessary to decide things very quickly. If you have to go the university’s administrative channel it might take a very long time to set up a decision and it can be too late for it.We have the advantage to make a decision very fast.

As a non-profit organisation we support “the advancement of science, research and the education of students” and for that we have the possibility to certificate contribution receipts and we have advantages as regards taxes. We do not only support engineering students, but in having an independent administration we also encourage students of every other course type.

The organisation itself gives every team the goals to base all decisions on. This year we had three goals.

Lions Racing has been active as a Formula Student Team since 2002. It has been an early goal for the team to not only be successful on but also off the racetrack.

A lot of our alumni are now themselves judges and organizers for the international engineering competitions of the Formula Student. It speaks for itself, that we as the following generation want to represent ourself as best as possible.

Experience has taught us that the decisions made during the competitions are often very subjective. For a team to stand out to the judges between all the strong competitors it is not just about showing them a great car but to present yourself as a professional and confident team.

The team leaders in the past took that to heart and it was discussed how to make that impression. Fine feathers make fine birds but what else is there?

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