Grandelfino Student Team

The Grandelfino team from Japan’s Kyoto Institute of Technology competes in Formula SAE Student, a racing competition in which students design, analyze, manufacture, drive and manage a Formula race car. The competition also serves as a hands-on engineering education platform to evaluate teams on design capability, development processes, team collaboration and project management.

Through the competition, the Grandelfino team aims to strengthen their engineering skills and team development capabilities required for industry. As a result of their efforts, Grandelfino has achieved four consecutive championship wins at the Formula SAE Japan from 2022 to 2025 and hope continue winning.

Each year, the competition is composed of a new team of students who take full ownership of vehicle design, analysis, manufacturing and team operations. 

Grandelfino places strong emphasis not only on single-year results, but on building a team structure that extends to the next generation.

Grandelfino Team has been the winner of the Formula competition for the past four years. This achievement of four consecutive championships at the Formula SAE Japan competition is proof that the team development framework is delivering results. As design and simulation activities advance, the challenges specific to collaborative team development are becoming increasingly apparent. Formula Student teams typically consist of many members with clearly divided roles. There are team leader, project managers, technical leader, like for an industry project.

To move design and analysis forward efficiently, it is essential for the entire team to share outcomes with members from the previous year, as well as who made each decision and why. 

The team started transitioning to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the cloud in 2020. Now the team works in a single environment with CAE and CAD, which gives them confidence that development speed and design quality will improve. Most importantly, with a single, unified and fully accessible environment on the cloud, the burden of handovers during annual member transitions will be significantly reduced.

“Since it is cloud-based, we can immediately reflect both past data and the latest design changes. I feel that the process of referencing previous analysis results and applying them to the latest simulations is handled very smoothly.” says Sakuta Ikenori, Grandelfino team member, in charge of the vehicle development.

Kazuha Kaji, the 2024 team leader of Grandelfino, is convinced that the way information is shared will directly influence the team’s success. “With the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, data is integrated in the cloud. In addition, having CAD and CAE in the same environment allowed us to expect improvements in both design quality and operational efficiency, Kaji said.

Since the adoption of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, Grandelfino’s development process changed significantly because design and simulation were no longer treated as separate activities, but as a continuous workflow. This improves both the speed and quality of design validation. Through its collaborative environment, students could be more agile and master the solutions that the automotive industry already uses. It has been a real game changer for the team.

By enabling students to independently learn tool operations and underlying concepts, it became easier to bridge gaps in experience levels, creating an environment where students could focus on the design and engineering work itself, and leverage collaboration.

“By seamlessly switching between CAD and CAE and continuously reflecting the latest design data in our analysis, we were able to shorten both assembly time and manufacturing schedules,” said Sakuta Ikenori. “Being able to reflect design intent directly in simulations also made it possible to complete more iterations within a shorter validation cycle", he added.

Centralized management of design data in the cloud also transformed day-to-day development practices for the team. Previously, data had been shared via a file-based system, which sometimes made it difficult to identify the most up-to-date version. With real-time updates on the platform, however, the risk of working with outdated data was significantly reduced, helping to minimize errors.

“We also plan to run more advanced detailed analysis, including vehicle dynamics, by continuing to leverage the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.” said Yusei Onishi, Grandelfino’s 2025 team leader. 

This environment improved efficiency, and also helped foster a culture of collective thinking and communication across the team. “Having everything integrated in the cloud was a massive advantage for information sharing as our team has a large number of members”, says Kazuha Kaji.

Grandelfino’s achievement of four consecutive championships at the Formula SAE Japan competition is proof that the team development framework is delivering results. However, current team leader Onishi views this achievement as a milestone rather than a final goal.

To continue winning the competition, the team plans to further refine its management approach and evolve its design and validation processes.

“In addition to improving how the team is run, we want to further enhance areas we have not fully explored so far — particularly aerodynamics and structural analysis,” Onishi said. 

These technical challenges are not pursued solely for better competition results. Through analysis and simulation, students develop the ability to think, make decisions, and explain their reasoning – which raises each individual’s engineering skill level and contribute to their future careers after graduation.

Ultimately, Grandelfino aims to not only be a winning team, but also a place that continuously nurtures talent ready for the next stage.