A group of students from Instituto Superior Técnico represented the school in the latest edition of the ‘Race Party’, a competition organised by the University of Minho, in which participants are challenged to design and build a customised minicar. This year, for the first time, the event welcomed other universities and brought together hundreds of participants, including five Técnico students (Mechanical Engineering undergraduate programme) – Catarina Maia, Diogo Borges, Duarte Silva, Nádia Gonçalves and Rita Barco.

The team representative Rita Barco gives positive feedback. “We managed to turn our theoretical knowledge into something practical – seeing something we designed and idealised based on our engineering knowledge become real was quite special”.

The student also points out that, to the team’s great surprise, it wasn’t the technical aspect of assembling the minicar that was the most difficult, but rather the time management – “Getting everyone available for the meetings was always a challenge: it was often necessary to divide tasks remotely by whoever was available at the time.”

The students also say that this was an important experience in their academic training, encouraging their peers to take part in this type of initiative and thanking the Department of Mechanical Engineering (DEM) at Técnico for its collaboration in the manufacture and construction of the minicar, which was “essential for participation” in the activity.

The event organisers created a YouTube channel that includes a video about the experience and performance of the Técnico team.