SEOUL, September 02 (AJP) - Two electric race cars built by undergraduates finished first and second at South Korea's biggest student car-building competition last weekend, giving Kookmin University a 10th straight overall title in the event's Formula division.
About 1,800 students from 43 universities competed at Formula Student Korea 2026, which ran from Aug. 27 to 30 at the Korea Automotive Technology Institute's vehicle and driver safety research center in Yeonggwang County, Jeonnam-Gwangju Special Metropolitan City. The Korean Society of Automotive Engineers organized the event with the institute.
The overall title went to KEF-26, one of two cars entered by the university's student car-building club, Kookmin Racing. The team also received an award from the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources. The club's second car, F-26, took gold in the electric formula class.
The competition has run every year since 2007. Teams spend roughly a year designing and fabricating a single-seat open-wheel car, and judges score both the quality of the design and how well the students can account for the choices they made. The cars then run timed events measuring acceleration, cornering and durability.
The Korean Society of Automotive Engineers (KSAE) frames the event as workforce training. Students who finish a car have worked through suspension geometry, battery packaging, and manufacturing cost, the kind of full-vehicle problem that engineers at automakers rarely touch in their first years on the job.
KSAE gives its top award, the KSAE Grand Prix Formula, to the team with the highest combined score across every event.
Rain fell through the driving events. KEF-26 placed at or near the top of all of them and completed the endurance race with the fastest lap time in the field. Kookmin teams also swept the individual awards for acceleration, for the skidpad, a figure-eight course that measures how much cornering grip a car can hold, and for the written design report.
Formula Student Korea accepts both combustion and electric entries. Kookmin ran two electric cars this year, as it did in 2025, the first season the club fielded a pair of them.
F-26 had already been on track this summer. At Formula SAE Electric, run by SAE International from June 16 to 20 at Michigan International Speedway, the car finished eighth overall in a field of about 100 university teams. It placed third in the endurance event, ninth in the skidpad and 11th in autocross, and reached the design final, where it finished 12th. It was only Kookmin's second entry in the electric class.
That left the club about nine weeks between Michigan and Yeonggwang.
"There was a lot of pressure in preparing for the domestic competition right after the world event," said Cho Hyun-sung, an automotive engineering student who managed the F-26 project. "Winning the overall title for a 10th straight year and raising Kookmin University's standing makes me proud."
Shin Sung-hwan, dean of the university's College of Automotive and Mobility and the club's faculty adviser, said the streak reflects both the students' work and sustained backing from the university, and pledged continued support for training engineers who will lead the future auto industry.
Kookmin Racing was founded in 2001. Its best result at Formula SAE remains a fourth-place finish in 2015, the highest placing by an Asian team that year.
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