F24+

I worked on a Greenpower F24+ student electric racing car between September 2024 and September 2025. My contribution centred on cooling vent design, CAD, 3D printing, airflow reasoning and some physical development. I also drove the car in its first race.

Working within the platform

Most of the vehicle used the standard Greenpower kit; I did not design the chassis, drivetrain, motor, steering or complete car. The team created the bodywork.

Development took place with limited workshop access and a small tooling base. Changes needed to be simple to manufacture and easy to integrate with the existing platform.

Identifying the cooling problem

The motor became noticeably hot during operation and testing. I designed external vents attached to the sides of the bodywork to capture air moving over the car and direct it toward the motor and battery region.

I modelled the vents in Fusion 360 and printed them on my Bambu Lab A1 Mini. The external form used a streamlined, teardrop-inspired shape intended to avoid unnecessary disturbance.

Designing a complete cooling path

The inlet capture area was larger than the internal duct outlet. The duct narrowed toward that outlet, using a converging section intended to increase local air velocity while directing captured flow into the cooling region. I did not measure that velocity or establish a numerical increase.

An exhaust vent provided a deliberate route out of the enclosed region. Bringing air in was only one part of the problem; it also needed somewhere to leave.

What testing showed

I did not have instrumentation available to log motor temperature, so the result remained qualitative. During comparable running, the motor was noticeably cooler to the touch with the cooling path installed than it had been in earlier testing without the vents.

This was useful observational evidence, not a temperature measurement or proof of a specific thermal improvement. There were no logged temperature deltas, airflow measurements or CFD results behind the design.

Limitation: A plausible flow path and a cooler-feeling motor were not enough to validate the design properly. Temperature logging and more controlled comparisons would be needed to separate the effect of the vents from other running conditions.

Competition experience

The team raced at Lotus Hethel twice, and I drove in the first race. The car later qualified for the national finals, although the team could not attend because the short-notice logistics could not be supported.

The most useful outcome was not a numerical race result. It was learning to identify a real thermal problem, make a small manufacturable change, integrate it with team-built bodywork and assess it on a working vehicle.

What I took forward

The project made the limits of qualitative validation clear. It also strengthened my interest in examining airflow physically—a direction I later explored through the Wind Tunnel project.