Press release – February 21, 2024

Three more Formula Student teams join CONTACT’s University program

CONTACT Software welcomes three new racing teams from Germany and India to its University program. From now on, the students will use CIM Database PLM to develop their vehicles more efficiently. 

In Formula Student, teams from around the world compete against each other with self-developed race cars. Three of these teams are already part of CONTACT University. Now, three more are joining: the German teams DART Racing from the Technical University (TU) of Darmstadt and CURE Mannheim from the Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University (DHBW) as well as Pravega Racing from the Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) in India. The aspiring engineers use CIM Database to develop their vehicles more efficiently and facilitate knowledge transfer from one generation of students to the next.

The Formula Student teams launch a new car each season. A powerful document management system is essential to support the development process, for example, to access design and test data of previous vehicles. Due to the high personnel turnover, it is also important to centrally document and archive existing knowledge. In the past, the teams have primarily used cloud drives for this purpose and exchanged files via email, leading to occasional data loss.

CIM Database now provides the students access to a Single Source of Truth which significantly simplifies document management, retrieval, and sharing. CONTACT assists them with the installation, provides technical support, and has put together a customized “Formula Student Package”. It includes predefined rights and roles as well as simplified context menus, relieving administrators and ensuring users can quickly start working with the system. Additionally, the teams have access to CONTACT's e-learning resources.

“It is impressive what the students accomplish here alongside their university studies. We are proud to support them in their efforts with our software,” says Nam Nguyen, Program Manager of CONTACT University. With its university program, CONTACT aims to enhance the quality of education in engineering and computer science while fostering closer ties between academia and industry. Formula Student is an ideal platform in this regard: in addition to conventional disciplines such as acceleration races, the competitions also evaluate cost management and manufacturing. The teams even tackle future technologies such as autonomous driving.