Denmark’s Vermilion Racing Team on How to Prepare for a Formula Student Competition with Onshape

Vermilion Racing is a student competition team based out of the Technical University of Denmark, or more simply known as DTU, one of Europe’s leading engineering institutions. The team, formed in 2018, has 35 members and has participated in Formula Student competitions since 2021. 

They have been an Onshape-sponsored team since 2023, leveraging Onshape’s Collegiate Teams Sponsorship Program. They boast highly Onshape-proficient members who spend thousands of hours in the software designing their car’s chassis and wheel assembly.  

As the Onshape Education team is proud to sponsor and support teams by providing access to software and resources, it’s rewarding to see the Vermilion team’s Onshape skills put to use in the Formula Student competition. For the foreseeable future, the team is competing in the UK event, as it is, in their words, “the most established and largest out of all Formula Student events.” 

They believe this larger pool of competitors available at the Formula Student UK event brings only benefits. As the Vermilion team eloquently puts it, “You can channel the knowledge gathered from all the participating teams into a better future product for yourself.” 

This year, the Vermilion team won first place in the business plan presentation event and are looking forward to next year’s competition, as they are eyeing the No. 1 spot for the full event.

Formula Student Competition: Onshape for the Win

When asked about their first encounter with Onshape, Gustav Jespersen, the mechanical leader of Vermilion, shared how he brought PTC’s Onshape to the team after having used it in a professional environment during his employment at a local start-up. Accustomed to traditional installed CAD software, the team found Onshape to be easier to work with, in part because of the integrated PDM feature in Onshape. 

“We had problems with older revisions of files, but then I saw how easy it is for multiple people to work together on the same Part Studios,” Gustav says, also adding that “having all parts, drawings, and assemblies in one place made our lives easier,” especially when it came to sharing their models with third-party manufacturers. 

They were proud to share a model of their built chassis (pictured above), which they described as one of their most difficult challenges modelling-wise. For this, they leveraged Onshape’s global variables to create a “3D space frame with plenty of functions and parameters.”

When asked what advice they’d give other teams using Onshape for their student racing projects, the Vermilion team recommends the Onshape Learning Center as a valuable resource, whether you are a beginner or an advanced user. 

“The beginner guides [CAD Basics & Onshape Fundamentals] are very nice, and going through all of the tutorials helped us understand how Onshape worked,” the team says, emphasizing the importance of “managing your files…as it saves a lot of time.”

Preparing for a Premier Engineering Competition

The team is currently building the third version of their electric Formula Student car. This year, the focus has been on finalizing their battery, while simultaneously their entire mechanical system has been newly designed and manufactured. As preparation for successfully competing as a beginner team, the team champions the idea of participating in Formula Student events as just visitors, even if your team can’t yet compete. 

“In 2021, we brought a half-finished car to the competition, knowing that our only goal is to learn,” they share, advising that teams building new or unfinished cars needn’t rush and should instead focus on the importance of immersing themselves in the Formula Racing experience, recognizing that while the final product is important, so is understanding everything about the competition. 

They continued, “You need to thoroughly understand everything that you need to prepare for a static event, everything that is necessary for scrutineering, all that you need to go through to pass to the dynamic events. For teams living outside the country of competition, the logistics of travel are a very important aspect of having a successful event.” 

They ended by saying that although traveling to events and talking to other competing teams is the best way to learn, beginner teams that can’t travel without competing should still reach out to other teams and try to learn from a distance. Onshape makes learning from a distance easy, as it is entirely in the cloud and enables live collaboration, with capabilities like Follow Mode that allow new users to view another’s modeling steps in real-time. 

“Keeping things really simple” was their goal as a fresh team before their first competition, and since then, the Vermilion team has stuck to this straightforward mantra. They believe that no matter how experienced you are as a team, design problems will follow you over time, and the best is to stay focused on clarity and simplicity from the start. Small problems and inconsistencies, in the beginning, tend to become large issues later on if ignored. 

As they put it, “When you’re organized starting out, you help yourself in the end.”

The Vermilion team is more than happy to help any budding student racing team by answering questions and sharing advice. You can visit their website or their LinkedIn page. 

If you are representing a student team and wish to be sponsored by Onshape, check out our Collegiate Teams Sponsorship Program.