10/6/2025 - 10/12/2025: Catalyzer Public! / Accumulator Segments Sendout / First Board Purchases / Aerodynamics Lead Highlight

[Anton Walvoord]

Northwestern Formula Racing

@nufsae | northwesternformularacing.com

Fall Newsletter - 10.12.2025

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Catalyzer Public!

Hello Formula! We're happy to announce that we have once again partnered with Northwestern Catalyzer in order to fundraise for NFR26! We are now in our active phase of fundraising so we have a public page where you can support the team.

We have major goals this year to improve our engineering and performance, including implementing hub motors for the first time and incorporating additional custom motor controllers. We are extremely excited about these pursuits, and we need your help to make these designs into reality!

Please help us out by visiting our page at giving.nu/NFR26 and giving if you are able. We are appreciative of any gift no matter the size! We also appreciate it if you are able to help us spread the word that we're fundraising. The broader the reach we're able to have the more support we'll be able to receive in pursuing these major design goals! Please reach out to me if you have any questions or would like to talk!

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Accumulator Segments Sendout

Our Accumulator subteam has officially finalized our segment designs! We will be working with our sponsor [BuildParts] to manufacture the cell holders used to fix our cells in place for gluing and bonding. These parts will be sent out this coming week for manufacturing, marking the beginning of our manufacturing process for our team's Accumulator.

One of 5 custom segments for the NFR26 Accumulator

Our team has once again applied for Tesla's FSAE sponsorship, providing Molicel P50B batteries and AD BMS chips. We will learn this coming week if we've been selected for this opportunity. As soon as we are able to secure cells, we will begin preparing and installing them into these cell holders, along with a custom PCB to route signals to our BMS. Once that is complete it will be time to send them to our cell bonding sponsor [Hesse Mechatronics]!

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First Board Purchases

Today we had design reviews for our first PCB purchases of NFR26. We looked at the dashboard display and controller boards, as well as our VCU. Our board designers will now take the coming week to finalize the boards based on design feedback, and we will order them Oct. 21st.


Dashboard Controller Board Render

Pictured above is our dashboard controller. It connects to our PCB dashboard to provide all computation, power, and storage. Last year's dashboard was incredibly useful to debug our car and see real time information. This year we're improving on the design by including dedicated indicators for high priority information and improving the user input methods, as well as using a brighter screen.

VCU Layout

Our VCU (Vehicle Control Unit) is the central hub for controlling the state of the car. It instructs the rest of the car what to do based on if we are inactive, in neutral, or in drive. It also operates as part of the shutdown circuit, a critical safety feature required by rules.

This year we've designed these boards to be highly integrated with one another, aligning their connectors and mounting hardware to improve packaging, communication, and maintainability. All of them will be housed in our dashboard enclosure, which has been designed with our frame, suspension, and aero package in mind.

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Aerodynamics Lead Highlight:

Our next mechanical lead! Reese Wu, responsible for our Aerodynamics subteam.

Reese is a junior from Houston, Texas, studying mechanical engineering. He joined aerodynamics as a freshman, working on the front wing, and continued as a sophomore working on the undertray and side-aerodynamic components. Outside of formula, he enjoys playing basketball and golf with his friends, and watching movies.

Reese's experience in manufacturing and his time spent on the team have provided him with in-depth understanding of our cars and how to improve their performance. He has plans to place heightened priority on numerical justifications for design decisions, and we can't wait to see how the car looks wrapped in a beautiful new aero package!