Formula Student France
About
Formula Student France is an international student engineering competition where university teams design, build, and develop their own formula-style race cars and compete in a combination of engineering, business, and on-track performance challenges. Teams are evaluated not only on how fast their car is, but also on its design, cost, reliability, and the team's ability to present and justify their engineering decisions to industry professionals.
We at the Centrale Nantes Formula Student (CNFS) racing team are a group of talented, incredibly passionate individuals who recognise that engineering goes beyond the classroom, and we desire to put our knowledge to the test by building something real.
The team
We are a first-year team, and as such, we are still in the design phase and have not yet built a working car. We aim to have a complete car by the 2027 competition. It’s quite an ambitious goal, but we have the confidence and grit to match.
The team is divided into several sub-teams. As part of the electrical/electronics team, I handle the design and fabrication of both high-voltage and low-voltage systems. This includes the powertrain (we are manufacturing our own accumulator), all safety electronic systems, and the wiring of the vehicle’s electrical and communication networks.
The 2026 competition
In August 2026, CNFS made its debut at the Formula Student France competition. We participated only in the concept class contest, which brings experts from the electric vehicle industry to judge the engineering design of the teams. We presented a year’s worth of work in engineering design, cost and manufacturing, and the team business plan and received very useful feedback from the judges. In all, it was a tremendous opportunity to learn from the expertise of the judges and the experience of more advanced teams. To cap off the event, CNFS won third place in the concept class contest which is pretty impressive for a first-year team.
What’s next?
As we set our sights on the 2027 tournament, we’re going all in. We’re pulling together all resources available to us, doubling our efforts in our search for funding and talent, and, above all, working harder than ever to bring this dream of a working car to reality. We're already aiming for a complete and final design freeze by the end of October and to begin battery manufacturing by October. Stay tuned for updates on this page as I share the team’s progress.
