September 25, 2025
By Mikey Fuller

HyTech Racing, Georgia Tech’s student-led electric vehicle racing team, finished third overall at the Formula SAE-EV competition, held in Brooklyn, Michigan, earlier this year. The result tied their best finish in team history, set in 2022.

HyTech Racing, led by George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering students Elizabeth Baker, team president, and Luke Chen, chief engineer, uses a hands-on approach to designing and developing all components of vehicle production through research, mechanical and electrical design, machining, component sourcing, project management, manufacturing, and testing.

Formula SAE is an annual engineering education competition where students build vehicles to compete in a series of events. The competition challenges undergraduate and graduate student teams to conceive, design, fabricate, develop, and compete with all formula-style vehicles. Each student team design is judged and evaluated in a series of static and dynamic events to determine which vehicle best meets the design goals and is profitably built and marketed.

In the dynamic events portion of the competition, the team’s car, the HT09, helped them achieve first-place in the Acceleration, fifth in Skidpad and Endurance, and sixth in Autocross. They also placed second in the design event, which is the highest HyTech Racing has ever achieved in that category.

Justin Hwang, team president for this academic year and student in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, hopes to continue the progress built by previous team members. He says the new team leads are working on hundreds of pages of design documents and training materials to get ready for the next competition.

“Our goal is for every single member of the team to be exceptionally skilled so the team can continue performing at a high level for years to come,” Hwang said.