September - A new beginning
As the new school year has started, we have also been busy at URE. We have started with an entire new team, and with that comes a new board. This year we have 7 board members who will work full-time to achieve the goal of building the URE17. First of all, we have Fieke Wijnen, our team manager for upcoming year. Jilez Aelbers will be working on finance and aerodynamics. Then, Pim van Riel will be our overall tech and chassis manager. Laurens Vousten is responsible for vehicle dynamics. Julian Dietrich is the powertrain and drivetrain manager. Roy van Doorn is the control and accumulator manager. Last but not least, we have Erik van Horen who will be the electronics and software and driverless manager. For the coming year we all have our work cut out for us and we are looking forward to achieving the best results possible. Next to this, we are also excited to learn a lot this year and gain new skills.
 

The URE17 concept
For the URE17, we will focus on validating and testing the car. We want to ensure that our expectations match the reality of the car we built. Next to this, one of our main goals is weight saving. By analyzing current designs, knowledge is found of where weight can be saved. We first do this for the entire car and then zoom in more and assign weight limits to the designs of the smaller parts. Additionally, we will be implementing our own inverter which we have been designing with Prodrive for a while now. This will also be in line with our weight saving goal since it will be lighter than our current solution. Finally, we are also redesigning our accumulator. This year, we will design the accumulator using cells from our newest sponsor, Tesla!

The team 
Next to a new board and concept, we of course also have a new team. This year we will have 72 part timers who will each contribute such that we can reach our goals! We have students from many different courses distributed over 16 departments. Within these departments, students design parts of the car, of course while keeping our goals in mind.

Team progress
Right now the team is busy with the concepting phase where each part-timer is looking at its own part of the car. Here they start with looking at the rules and interactions with other parts. Additionally, they look at previous designs for their own part since we do not have to invent the wheel. With this information they start creating some concepts of how they think they can improve the design. This is then also reviewed by the more experienced members of the team. From this, useful feedback on the concepts is gained and like this we hope to finish all of the designs in time and have the best car possible.  

Board progress
The board has had a different schedule the past month. Since we do not design parts but keep the overview, we have not been as busy with concepting. Instead, we have had multiple workshops about management or acquisition. Next to this, we have been busy with partner contact. This has mainly consisted of contacting our current partners and seeing how we can continue the partnership or what possibilities there are to improve the partnership. Additionally, we have also been busy recruiting for new partners, which has already resulted in some new partnerships for the coming year!