This quarter, the lagoon road became a racetrack as Gaucho Racing tested their GR26 racecar in preparation for this year’s competition season.
Gaucho Racing races against around 100 other universities, judged on both engineering and car performance. Courtesy of Gaucho Racing
Gaucho Racing is a student organization that designs, builds, manufactures and tests their very own Formula Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) electric vehicle. Formula SAE is an intercollegiate competition run by the Society of Automotive Engineers International. According to the SAE International website, it “tasks university teams with developing open-wheel, formula-style race cars that balance speed, safety, and efficiency.”
This year, Gaucho Racing is preparing to bring the car to the Formula SAE Electric competition in Brooklyn, Michigan from June 16-20.
The president of Gaucho Racing, third-year mechanical engineering major Alex Fu, explains they will “race against about 100 other universities, judged on both [their] engineering prowess and [their] car’s performance.”
According to Fu, the team will restart the design cycle in the months after the competition.
Fu said Gaucho Racing’s participants include “a lot of mechanical engineering students, but also physics, math, computer science” majors and other students who are interested.
These members make up nine different sub teams that all work on different aspects of the car. The teams include a mechanical side with chassis, suspension and drivetrain teams, an electrical side with an electronics team, promo team, data team and a business team that works on outreach and sponsorships.
Moreover, the drivers of the racecar must be UC Santa Barbara students and are typically selected for having past experience with driving or kart racing, but they do more than just drive.
According to Fu, the drivers also contribute to the engineering and business aspects of the organization.
The group completes a series of tests, driving the car at speeds varying from five to 25 miles per hour. Courtesy of Gaucho Racing
Forrest Drury, a second-year physics major, is one of the two aerodynamics team leads and is responsible for the aerodynamic components of the vehicle — including the wings and body panels — enabling the car to “turn faster, accelerate faster and break harder, decreasing lap times.”
According to Drury, everything is made in-house “using carbon fiber and fiberglass layups, combined with epoxy and a vinyl called mylar to achieve a super glossy finish.”
Fu’s favorite memory with Gaucho Racing was seeing the GR24 car drive for the first time in 2024.
“They were trying to figure out how to debug everything and then, eventually in the last minute, they were able to get it to work,” Fu said. “I remember seeing it drive down the lagoon road and we were all cheering and happy. I really hope that moment gets topped in the next week or so when we test our new car.”
On May 20, the team conducted the first full dynamic test of the GR26 car, and it was a success. This included a static motor test to confirm functionality of the motor.
“The goal is, by the end of today, to have a car that can run under its own power. The last time we were able to achieve this was with our 2024 car. We were never able to do it in 2025,” Deury said.
Once that was finished, the team rolled the car down to the campus lagoon. They completed a series of tests, driving the car at speeds varying from five to 25 miles per hour and verified that it worked at each step along the way. Drury explained the speeds that the car is able to reach.
“[The] car is limited in terms of gears to about 65-70 miles per hour. It’s mostly tuned for acceleration. It can achieve a zero to 60 in about 2.5 seconds,” Drury said.
Drury said he joined Gaucho Racing because of his lifelong love for racing, and that he enjoys seeing the applicability of the concepts he studies in class as a physics major.
“It’s really cool to see the applications [of physics] happen in the real world. It’s not just something I do on a piece of paper from the textbook,” Drury said.
For Fu, it began in high school: “I really started liking Formula 1 and racing in the automotive world in general.”
Fu explained that Gaucho Racing was the reason he chose to enroll at UCSB. He said that the brand new startup team allowed him to “learn a lot of new processes and experience things he would not have with some of those more established teams.”
Membership is open to students of all majors and there are no applications or barriers to entry. Courtesy of Gaucho Racing
Many members of Gaucho Racing have gone on to have lucrative careers in the automotive industry, including at companies like Tesla and Rivian.
“We have one engineer [now] at Honda Racing, working on IndyCar and F1,” Fu said. “This is what the employers are looking for: this real-world experience you get in college.”
Fu emphasized that he believes the organization is not only a “really fun opportunity for all students to get involved with,” but also allows students to learn.
“It not only offers a learning aspect to it but we’re one of the clubs that are really doing hands-on learning where you’re messing with the things you design and learning from your mistakes,” Fu said.
For those interested in becoming involved with Gaucho Racing, Fu mentioned that membership is open to UCSB students of all majors and there are no applications or barriers to entry so that any student has the opportunity to join and learn.
A version of this article appeared on p. 5 of the May 28 print edition of the Daily Nexus.
