Garrett Motion’s commitment to emerging engineering talent is helping a young, diverse and female-led technology team build an electric racing car to compete in Formula Student (FS) events across Europe in 2024.

Garrett is providing both technical support and business process guidance to the EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne) Racing Team in keeping with its community strategy to encourage and inspire future generations of automotive technologists and scientists.

Garrett’s support for Team EPFL is now in its fifth year – and the latest program kicked-off last month with product development and career growth workshops at the world headquarters in Rolle, Switzerland. The sessions included insights into Garrett’s Differentiated Simulation and Differentiated Manufacturing processes, and an opportunity to engage with the senior leadership team. The program also serves as a very powerful way for student engineers to put theory into practice, and prepare for them for the real world.

“This is a truly inspirational program for young engineers, and I find it very encouraging to see the number of female participants in the EPFL team grow from 10 to 20 in just the last year,” said Craig Balis, Garrett’s Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. “It’s also great to see a woman, Jade Gibouin, leading the team for the very first time.

“This is just the sort of diversity that we promote and celebrate at Garrett as part of our university outreach commitment to encourage more young women to consider a career in automotive engineering. We look forward to supporting the team over the coming season.”

FS is Europe’s most established educational engineering competition and celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2023. Over 100 teams take part every year, offering students real-world automotive engineering experience as well as business planning and project management skills development.

“Thanks to Garett for the amazing opportunity to participate in this workshop,” added Jade Gibouin, chief executive officer at EPFL Racing. “We could all learn a lot from these powerful and inspiring women. Furthermore, the unique opportunity to meet a part of the chair has been appreciated by everyone.”

EPFL Racing is scheduled to participate in four FS events in 2024 – in Switzerland, Hungary, Germany and Czech Republic. The students will design and develop a single seated formula style racing car and compete against other teams in areas such as engineering design, cost and manufacturing, business and performance.