Building a Hydrogen Formula Student Race Car

How We Built a Hydrogen Formula Student Race Car

What happens when students combine hydrogen technology, high-voltage systems, and Formula Student racing into one vehicle?

That question drives everything we build.

Every year, our multidisciplinary student team designs and manufactures a completely new Formula Student race car powered by both a high-voltage battery and a hydrogen fuel cell system. What started years ago as a sustainability-focused student initiative has evolved into one of the few teams in Formula Student actively developing hydrogen-electric racing technology.

This season, our focus shifted from simply making systems work to making them reliable, testable, and competition-ready.

Building Around Hydrogen

Unlike conventional electric Formula Student cars, our vehicle combines multiple complex systems into one compact platform:

• A hydrogen fuel cell system
• A high-voltage battery pack
• Custom electronics and safety systems
• Advanced cooling systems
• Lightweight drivetrain integration

Integrating all of these systems into a race car creates engineering challenges far beyond simply making the car fast.

Hydrogen introduces entirely new considerations. Our vehicle stores hydrogen at 350 bar before regulating it down to low-pressure lines feeding the fuel cell system. Every part of this process must be monitored continuously and operate safely under all conditions.

That is where one of our most important electronics systems comes in: the Hydrogen Safety Circuit (HSC).

Designing a Fully Analog Hydrogen Safety System

The Hydrogen Safety Circuit is responsible for monitoring:

• Tank pressure
• Low-pressure hydrogen lines
• Tank temperature

If any measured value exceeds its allowed operating range, the circuit immediately shuts down the hydrogen system and transitions the car into a safe state.

One of the most interesting engineering decisions was making the HSC fully analog.

Modern vehicles rely heavily on software and embedded systems, but safety-critical systems can never depend entirely on code. Software bugs, communication failures, or timing issues should never be able to bypass hydrogen safety functions.

To avoid this, the HSC operates independently from the vehicle software stack. Using comparator-based threshold detection and dedicated analogue circuitry, the system continuously validates sensor signals without requiring a microcontroller decision loop.

This means:

• Immediate response times
• Predictable fail-safe behavior
• No software dependency in the safety chain

For a hydrogen-powered race car, that level of reliability is essential.

From CAD to Real Hardware

Designing electronics is one thing. Making them survive a racing environment is something completely different.

Throughout the season, the team worked on:

• PCB development and assembly
• Wiring harness integration
• Cooling optimization
• Hydrogen system packaging
• Sensor validation
• Chassis integration

One of the biggest challenges was ensuring stable sensor readings under real-world conditions. During early testing, vibration near parts of the hydrogen system occasionally introduced unstable measurements. Solving this required both mechanical improvements and refinements in the filtering and routing on the PCB itself.

Moments like these are where Formula Student becomes much more than theoretical engineering. Small design decisions quickly become visible once systems are exposed to heat, vibration, electrical noise, and repeated testing cycles.

Testing Under Real Conditions

Before any Formula Student car is allowed to compete, it must survive strict technical inspections and extensive validation.

For our hydrogen systems, this process is especially important.

Testing the hydrogen system

Throughout development, we continuously tested:

• Hydrogen pressure regulation
• Safety shutdown behaviour
• Sensor reliability
• Cooling performance
• Electrical robustness
• System integration

One major lesson we learned from previous seasons was the importance of testing earlier. In student projects, integration problems often appear late in the build season, when time pressure is already high. This year, we therefore focused on validating subsystems much earlier to reduce unexpected issues later in the project.

That approach significantly improved both reliability and development speed.

The Team Behind the Car

HyDriven is made up of students from multiple disciplines, including:

• Mechanical Engineering
• Electrical Engineering
• Mechatronics
• Embedded Systems
• Industrial Design

Team members working on the car

Every year, an entirely new generation of students continues developing the car. That means knowledge transfer is one of the most important parts of the project.

Technical performance matters, but so do documentation, communication, and the design of systems that future team members can understand and improve.

Working on a hydrogen Formula Student car also means balancing ambition with reality. Limited time, manufacturing constraints, and tight deadlines force constant engineering trade-offs. Often, the best solution is not the most complicated one, but the most robust and maintainable one.

Lessons Learned

This season reinforced several important engineering lessons:

• Simplicity improves reliability
• Safety-critical systems should remain predictable
• Testing early saves enormous amounts of time later
• Packaging and maintainability matter just as much as performance
• Real-world conditions always expose weaknesses that simulations miss

Perhaps the biggest lesson is that building a competitive race car is not just about designing individual parts. It is about integrating hundreds of systems into one vehicle that performs reliably under pressure.

Looking Ahead

As hydrogen technology continues to develop, we believe projects like ours can help demonstrate its potential in high-performance applications.

Formula Student offers an environment where students can rapidly prototype, test, and improve advanced technologies under real engineering constraints. For us, that makes it the perfect platform to advance hydrogen innovation.

This season brought us one step closer to a more reliable, more competitive hydrogen race car, and we are excited to continue developing it further.

Thanks again to RS Components and the RS Build Fund for supporting our development journey this season!