Imperial Racing Green

Imperial Racing Green is a flagship interdisciplinary teaching project at Imperial College London. It involves undergraduate students in designing, making, testing and racing, zero emission vehicles. In doing this, undergraduate engineers get involved in developing vehicles based around hydrogen fuel cell, battery electric, and various hybrid technologies.

It has three aims:

  1. Deliver vehicles with competition and event winning potential
  2. Develop cutting edge technology of an international standard with far reaching impact
  3. Inspire and train the next generation of engineers to be leaders and innovators in the technologies that are relevant for our future

The team is made up of both project students and volunteers from different departments, making this a truly interdisciplinary effort involving students from across the College.

The teams

There are two teams working under the Imperial Racing Green banner. They are:

  1. The Formula student team
    Building cars for entry into the Formula Student competition
  2. The Shell Eco-marathon team
    Building a car for entry into the Shell Eco-Marathon competition


Achievements

The team have entered multiple vehicles in Formula Student, the flagship international race series organised by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, with over 100 vehicles entered each year. The team also raced in Formula Zero, the world's first H2 fuel cell race series, in Rotterdam in 2008 with a fuel cell supercapacitor hybrid go-kart.

In 2010 Racing Green Endurance, a one project formed under the Imperial Racing Green banner built an all-electric supercar and drove it 26,000km from Alaska to Argentina on the Pan-American Highway. There journey was made into a six-part BBC documentary series to help demonstrate the viability of electric vehicles.

The IC+ team have built electric motorbikes to take part in the Isle of Man TT Zero race finishing 7th in their final year 2013.

Alongside building and racing the various vehicles Imperial Racing Green has contributed to 3 peer-reviewed journal papers, indirectly led to novel IP, with 2 patents filed on technologies that would not have happened without the project.

The fuel cell system developed by the team for future vehicles was recently showcased on the BBC in the summer of 2013, appearing on primetime breakfast television and Blue Peter.