The Spark: A 2002 Galant VR-4 and a Bold Promise
Growing up, car enthusiasm was just part of our family's DNA. My dad was obsessed with off-roaders and my brother was a die-hard BMW guy. But for me, the real obsession was old-school Japanese Domestic Market (JDM) icons. Give me a Nissan Silvia S15, an R33 or R34 GTR, or a 2006 "Hawk Eye" Subaru WRX STI over a modern European supercar any day. There's just a raw beauty in them. The turning point was my first car: a 2002 Mitsubishi Galant VR-4. It was born the exact same year I was, and it became my ultimate practical classroom. I loved every single second I drove that car. But more than that, I loved tearing it apart.
When the turbos blew up, I got under the hood with the mechanic to change them. When the transmission line literally exploded, I was there fixing it. I even completely stripped the interior dashboard just to rip off the fake carbon fiber stickers and replace them with real carbon fiber. That car sparked something inside me. I didn't want to be the typical enthusiast who just orders parts online and waits for delivery. I wanted to know how to make things myself.
So, when I started my mechanical engineering degree at Universitas Indonesia, my goal was absolute. During orientation, when the seniors asked which division of the regular Student Association I wanted to join, I told them flat out: "I'm not joining. I'm here to build things, not organize events. I'm joining the UI Racing Team."
First Year: Confusion and Starting Point
Honestly, when registration day came, I didn't even know which division to pick. I just signed up for Engine and Aerodynamics. Why? Simple. I wanted to learn how to fix my own car's engine, and I was fascinated by why Formula 1 cars had such insanely complicated shapes.
I ended up in Aerodynamics, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. My first year as a junior staff member was a crash course in racing reality. I spent my time teaching myself everything I could about Formula Student aerodynamics, running carbon fiber layups for the UIRT-01 diffuser, and patching up a front wing that had been completely obliterated when our driver went off-track and slammed into a curb during testing.
I was so hooked that I pushed myself way ahead of my classes. By my first semester, while my peers were learning the basics, I was already teaching myself CAD in Autodesk Inventor and running CFD simulations in ANSYS Fluent, figuring out how to design a wing from scratch.
Second Year: 3 AM Nights, Drowning in Journals, and Countless Headaches
Then came the second year, the start of a massive chain of fun, stress, and sleepless nights. The seniors were graduating, and suddenly, I was appointed Aerodynamics Division Head. I was only in my third semester and hadn't even taken the university's formal Fluid Mechanics course yet! My team was just three guys. We spent the first few months doing nothing but devouring engineering journals and watching endless YouTube tutorials on CFD. During this grind, we made a major decision: we ditched ANSYS Fluent and switched to Siemens STAR-CCM+. The honest reason? We loved the Formula Student car from Paderborn University in Germany, and we thought their aero visualizations looked incredibly cool on Instagram. We wanted our data to look like theirs. It turned out to be a massive technical win, STAR-CCM+ made our simulation process way simpler, gave us cleaner data, and made our visuals look stunning for sponsor presentations.
The Front Wing Challenge & The Exploding Wing
I took charge of the front wing and nosecone because the front wing dictates how the airflow behaves for the entire rest of the car. Plus, I wanted the nosecone to look beautiful, and be way easier to detach than the previous year's setup.
But design is a brutal process. I faced countless rejections, failed iterations, and stayed at the workshop until 3 AM troubleshooting. My team and seniors rejected my early designs for being way too complicated and impossible to manufacture on our tight budget. I learned a huge lesson there: any improvement, no matter how small, is still an improvement. You don't always have to reinvent the wheel.
I focused on smart optimization:
- The Airfoil: The previous car used a highly curved Eppler 423 profile, which made it a nightmare to balance downforce with ground clearance rules. I tested dozens of profiles and switched to the SG6042. It generated much better downforce but kept the underside flatter, allowing us to exploit ground effect beautifully.
- The Manufacturing: Our standard method of hand-laying carbon fiber over laser-cut styrofoam left us with round, blunt trailing edges on the smaller wing elements. To fix this, I 3D-printed the precise wing profiles to act as the mounting interface, attached them to the ends of the styrofoam core, and then wrapped the whole assembly in carbon fiber. The result? A rigid, lightweight wing with a razor-sharp trailing edge.
We thought we had it all figured out until track testing day. We put a professional driver behind the wheel to push the UIRT-02 to its absolute limit. Under the massive aerodynamic load, the rear wing completely exploded. The endplates sheared off, and pieces of airfoil went flying in every direction.
The brass inserts we had put inside the 3D-printed mounts just couldn't handle the force. We didn't panic, we just laughed at how funny it was that the wing exploded. But after that we went straight back to the workshop. We threw out the inserts, grabbed a heavy-duty structural epoxy, and permanently bonded the airfoils and endplates together. It wasn't fancy, but it worked perfectly. That wing is still holding strong today, two years later.
The Payoff
Seeing the finished UIRT-02 car load up and head to the Czech Republic to compete against the best teams in Europe was unforgettable. By my third year, I stepped back into an Advisor role to focus on my final academics, passing down everything I knew: our failures, our fixes, and how to design within the strict regulations, to the next generation.
Looking back at three generations of race cars, I wouldn't trade the headaches or the late nights for anything. This obsession gave me the skills to build my own DIY wind tunnel, inspired my thesis topic on aerodynamic sidewings, and allowed me to reverse-engineer complex aircraft ground support equipment during my internship without breaking a sweat.
At the end of the day, I think what drove me was not the tight deadlines, not the bantering from my seniors, and definitely not the thought of "this would be good to put on my CV." It was an obsession, an obsession to make this car as perfect as possible within our constraints on budget, time, and tools. It was an absolute need to be proud of what I made, to the point where I was completely willing to put my name on it. Missing chances to go out with my friends, missing out on having fun, and skipping several university events was all worth it. Because at the end of the day, this was the first thing I ever made from scratch with my bare hands that competed internationally against European teams. It taught me exactly what raw work ethic and true obsession can produce.
Thank you, UI Racing Team 2024, for an unforgettable journey that made my university years complete.