University of Florida students build cars and compete with Gator Motorsport

GAINESVILLE, Fla. (WCJB) – In this week’s Tech Tuesday, our partners at UF Innovate and SCAD Media spotlight Gator Motorsports, where University of Florida students design, build, and race a Formula-style car while gaining real-world engineering and management experience.

“Building a car from scratch is exactly as hard as it sounds. We’re here with Gator Motorsports to learn more. Daniel, tell us more about who you are and what you do,” said Bethany Gaffey, host of UF Innovate.

“Yeah, I am the captain of Gator Motorsports for the F ’25 to F ’26 season. Every year, we build a two-thirds formula car, just like this one, from scratch to compete at the Michigan International Speedway. I basically am in a project management role, so I oversee two chief engineers underneath me and we oversee about 40 engineers every year to build our car,” said Daniel Patel, team captain of Gator Motorsports.

“So, how hard is it to build a car from scratch?” asked Gaffey.

“A lot harder than most people would think. The biggest part of it is the project isn’t an engineering project at the end of the day. We always say it’s a people management project. A lot of people, a lot of personalities with a really huge task. From a technical aspect, we’re really good engineers. The university teaches us a lot, and we teach ourselves a lot to build the car, but getting all of us to work together and make deadlines on time is the biggest challenge,” said Patel.

“What does it take to build a successful car?” asked Gaffey.

“A lot of what it takes is building off of our past failures. So, our first electric car in ’23 unfortunately ended in a small electrical fire. That was really shocking to a lot of people there. And in ’24, we didn’t get through any of our technical inspections. Well, we only got through two of them. This year, we got through all our technical inspections. We finished with only, we had only one lap left, and we didn’t finish in our 2025 season. So, our major priority is figuring out why that happened and fixing it. But on top of that, we want to get through all of our technical inspections faster and we want to have our car more prepared before we go to competition, drive all the dynamic events, as well as, well, obviously the major goal is to win. The more realistic goal is to aim for about a top 10, top 15 finish of about 85 teams,” said Patel.

“How do you see that helping you transition to industry once you graduate?” asked Gaffey.

“A lot of the major skills is being able to work with a bunch of different personalities, a bunch of different people. The interesting thing about engineers is a lot of us tend to be really stubborn and really stuck in our technical ways, but a lot of being on the team forces you to communicate with each other and learn those skills that you don’t necessarily get in the classroom level,” said Patel.

“For updates on the 2026 season, follow Gator Motorsports on social media,” said Gaffey.

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