Building an Electric Race Car from the Ground Up with UC Santa Barbara’s Gaucho Racing Team

At UC Santa Barbara, a dedicated group of students spent countless hours of their free time over the past year designing, researching, and building a single-seat electric race car to test their own skills and compete against hundreds of schools from all around the world at Michigan International Speedway. 

Just hours before the group was set to depart on the long trek to Michigan, the students packed into UCSB’s machine shop, minds and bodies exhausted from trying to get the car ready for competition. Some of the students had Sharpie marks on their arms, each mark tallying how many energy drinks they had chugged during their late-night build. According to the team president, rising senior Nick Rivelle, some of the students were at least six energy drinks deep.

But it’s that type of dedication that had gotten them up to this point — taking a car from the CAD drafting and design stage to a real-life rolling machine with over 500 volts of Lithium Ion power — and in the early hours of the morning, in the moonlight of the lagoon right behind the shop, the car finally got rolling all on its own.