AMZ Racing – A team outdoes itself
Built to Break Records: AMZ Racing
ETH Zurich students are building electric and autonomous race cars in Dübendorf — and they’ve broken the world acceleration record.
When accelerating from zero to one hundred kilometers per hour in under a second, the human senses can’t keep up. “Neither body nor mind can really process it,” says Lucien Fanton. “It’s those first few meters that hit the hardest,” adds the mechanical engineering student, who has test-driven the car known as mythen. “You can't really experience it — that probably sums it up best.”
Fanton is in his third year at ETH Zurich and is currently building a successor to the world record-breaking car “mythen” with the Academic Motorsports Association of Zurich, or AMZ for short, at Innovation Park Zurich. The AMZ team competed in international student competitions with the mythen in 2019, later modifying it and fully focusing on its acceleration, for instance, by equipping it with a square floor plate that creates a vacuum between the tarmac and the car thanks to two fans. This assembly hugs the vehicle to the tarmac with an additional 200 kilograms, increases traction and turns the car into an acceleration monster.
The Mythen is no beauty; it’s too box-like for that. It looks too much like a prototype – too raw, too functional, too small and not particularly elegant. Of course, when going from zero to one hundred in 0.956 seconds, or within just 12.24 metres, aesthetics take a back seat. The eye can’t keep up with that kind of acceleration anyway.
0.956 s
137 kg
12.24 m
155.4 kW
The mythen was the AMZ team’s 13th car. Every year, a new car is designed within ten months. The third-year bachelor’s students work in teams to analyse the various components – suspension, chassis, drive, batteries – and decide where they want to take it. They then build all the components themselves. Right now, they are laminating the race car’ chassis in the ETH hangar before entering it into competitions against other universities in various Formula Student races this summer. “Stuttgart is good, Aachen too, and Trondheim is always at the front”, says Jonas Hauser, 21, CEO of this year’s campaign. It is mainly the European universities that dispute the victory amongst themselves. ETH Zurich is actually always among the front runners and has won several times. AMZ is a reflection of the university’s self-image: international excellence.
ETH Zurich has several teams at Innovation Park Zurich working on their projects in the ETH hangars. The university also runs an office here, run by Cyril Kubr, who is pursuing what he refers to as “the first sequence”: ETH Zurich will grow in Dübendorf along with the Innovation Park. In addition to mechanical engineering, other departments will station teams and branches here, increasing the importance of the transfer of knowledge between the various departments, but above all, between the university and industry. Kubr describes his work as follows: bringing the right people and companies together in the right formats and enabling innovation. What is being created in Dübendorf is leading to a completely new form of collaboration. Further opening ETH Zurich towards industry is a very concrete approach. “Doing so will promote innovation per se”, says Kubr, who rates the national and international potential for the park and ETH Zurich accordingly highly.
Out of this world is probably the best way to describe it.
»Lucien Fanton
AMZ is located in the ETH hangar between the ARIS space project and the Swissloop hyperloop team. At the other end of Hangar 2, Cellsius is working on turning its electric aircraft into a hydrogen-powered craft. AMZ’s development is visible in the high-bay storage facility, which is where the race cars from recent years are stored.
The team is currently working on the chassis for its new model, “dufour”, named after a Swiss mountain peak like all AMZ’s cars. It will be slightly longer and narrower than last year’s model. That is the aim, says CEO Hauser: a new design concept every year, a better car every year. What do they learn here? How to assume responsibility, develop systems, and manage the interactions with the other teams. That requires a lot of work alongside their studies; Hauser says, “it can add up to seventy, eighty hours a week”.
They also have to sit their bachelor’s exams, and some are already taking their first exams for their master’s degree. Listening to Hauser might lead one to conclude that the AMZ team members moonlight as students and that working on the future of the automobile in the ETH hangar is their primary occupation.
A rather wild mix of music – opulent rock, followed by techno, and then some pop –blares out of a large flashing loudspeaker, for which nobody here wants to take responsibility. The students crowd around an elongated shape in front of a huge tube with many hoses, applying layer after layer of the black carbon mats that will later be baked in the tube for 20 hours at 50 degrees.
This huge tube is actually a high-end autoclave ETH Zurich installed here. It is a gas-tight, sealable, pressurised container in which carbon parts are cured under pressure and with the help of heat. The outstanding features offered by the Innovation Park Zurich and ETH Zurich here in Dübendorf: infrastructure and space for building and test-driving the race cars.
The AMZ team members – around 80 students in total – take full advantage of this offer. The hangar is their second home for ten months. Developing, testing, building, refining and adapting. Everyone knows exactly what their remit is. Only the music that accompanies them throughout this intensive period seems to lack any clear mandate. But perhaps that is only logical: the fastest car in the world can only be built by those who ignore everything of secondary importance.
