At the end of April, we packed FEST12 into a box and sent it off to the United States, following it ourselves about a week later. The competitions in North America were amazing. It was quite a culture shock for many of us as it was our first visit to the States, but even greater was our success. In fierce competition, we managed to secure 2nd place out of more than a hundred teams. Only the Stuttgart team from Germany was ahead of us.

A little over a week later, our journey took us north to Canada. The Formula North competitions were also equally successful – as they say: “forever second”. There were fewer competitors, only 26, but the competition was certainly just as intense. According to the pilots, our success was largely due to the endurance race. Endurance has usually been our specialty, but this time the track didn’t favor our large and relatively heavy car.

Anyway, the North American competition trip was successfully completed and the development of FEST13 continued on home soil. FEST13 needed to be ready for the Baltic Open in early August. Unfortunately, the completion of the electric formula car turned out to be more difficult than expected, and so it happened that FEST13 had to stay behind. Fortunately, FEST12 was as good as expected, and our veterans were up to the task. In a fun atmosphere, we managed to bring home the overall victory with FEST12.

And now the most important part. Very, very… and I would even say VERY narrowly, our first electric formula car FEST13 was ready for the Hungarian competition. The joy was truly indescribable. On August 20th, we did the final test (probably the third one with FEST13) and went straight to Hungary from there.

The main goal was honestly just to test ourselves, we didn’t expect good results. Since the car was completed so late, there was no time for testing, and all the scarce time was spent on getting the car ready, so this time there wasn’t much preparation for static competitions either. We just had to do our best and we did. We surprised our competitors and ourselves and successfully completed all the competition areas except for the last and most important one, the endurance race. Two and a half laps before the end of the 36-lap distance, the accumulator was destroyed due to overheating and we had to park FEST13 on the edge of the track. Too bad! And so we don’t really know what place we finally got in Hungary. It just wasn’t important.

Despite the accumulator failure and the fact that FEST13 never made it to the Finnish race, we still learned a lot. It turned out that our electric formula car is super fast, even without proper tuning. This means that we will dedicate the entire next (2013/2014) season to ensuring that our electric formula car can cover enough test kilometers, is fully tuned and ready to show competitors who’s boss. Next summer, we will definitely go for the win!