2026-06-02 08:30

Epic Charging Sponsors Gopher Motorsports, the Formula SAE Electric Team Building the Next Wave of EV Engineering Talent

Menlo Park, CA, June 2, 2026 – Epic Charging, the fastest-growing EV charging software provider in the U.S., announced today its sponsorship of Gopher Motorsports, the Formula SAE Electric team at the University of Minnesota. The partnership supports a student engineering program that is designing, building, and competing with fully electric race cars at the highest level of collegiate motorsport, with custom in-house technology that places the team among fewer than ten in the world using their own custom electric motors.

For Epic Charging, the sponsorship is an investment in the people who will shape the next decade of electric mobility. For Gopher Motorsports, it is fuel for a program that operates more like an engineering startup than a student club.

Who is Gopher Motorsports

Gopher Motorsports is the University of Minnesota's Formula SAE team. Formula SAE is a collegiate design competition where students design, build, test, and compete with a formula-style vehicle to meet a ruleset put forward by SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers). For the past two years, Gopher Motorsports has exclusively built cutting-edge electric formula-style vehicles, with the goal of preparing student engineers for the real world.

The result is a team that runs a full product cycle every year: design, fabrication, integration, testing, and competition. It is one of the few environments in higher education where students take an electric vehicle from a blank page to a functional, race-ready machine.

A car built from scratch, with custom electric motors

This year's car is a full monocoque chassis containing a new 600V tractive battery, built from 140 13Ah lithium-ion pouch cells. Total capacity sits at 6.78 kWh, driving all four wheels at a peak power of 80 kW (107 hp). Each wheel produces 461 Nm (340 ft-lb) of torque, for a combined 1,360 Nm across the vehicle.

The standout design of the car is the custom outboard motor with custom planetary gearbox, all contained within an in-house designed upright. It packages a >15 kW/kg custom electric motor designed and manufactured in-house with the support of several sponsors, and a 12.82:1 compound planetary gearbox also designed in-house. According to the team, this places Gopher Motorsports among fewer than ten teams in the world using custom electric motors, with the most powerful hub motor in the United States and the second most powerful in the world.

This year also marked the biggest architectural shift the team has made in years. Moving to a full monocoque chassis and all-wheel drive replaced the hybrid monocoque, space frame, rear-wheel drive setup the team had used for the previous four seasons. As Sorren Villafane, the team's Chief Engineer, put it: "this year we completely flipped the script."

Real engineering, real challenges

The hardest technical problem the team faced this year was packaging. Fitting a motor, gearbox, brake rotor, brake caliper, suspension upright and knuckle, and motor cooling all within a single wheel well is the kind of constraint that does not show up in a textbook. The solution came from hours of CAD work and whiteboarding for tolerance stackup and rotating parts clearance, until the team converged on a very tight, fully integrated wheel well design.

Asked what they have learned that does not get taught in class, the team did not hesitate. Almost nothing they do is taught in coursework. Underclass members often learn the fundamentals of engineering on the team before they ever see them in a lecture. Simulation and hand calculation for structures, heat transfer, cooling, custom high-voltage battery systems, custom battery management systems, custom vehicle controllers: this is systems-level engineering, applied to a real vehicle, on a real deadline. It is the kind of work most engineers do not encounter until they are several years into a professional role.

This is what makes Formula SAE Electric programs strategically important for the EV industry. The talent pipeline is being trained on real systems, in real time.

Why Epic Charging supports the next generation of EV talent

Epic Charging operates the software layer behind EV charging infrastructure across the United States. The company's charge point management system (CPMS) is hardware-agnostic, OCPP-compliant, and used by fleets, multifamily properties, public networks, and large accounts. Recent milestones include the migration of thousands of chargers from Enel X, Shell, and EvoCharge, a strategic partnership with LAZ Parking to deploy 50,000 Level 2 charging stations across the U.S. and Canada, becoming the first CSMS in the country to earn CTEP certification, and being named a Darcy Partners Top 10 Innovator in 2025.

Supporting Gopher Motorsports is consistent with how Epic thinks about the industry. Electric mobility does not scale through software alone. It scales through the engineers who design the vehicles, the systems, and the infrastructure that connects them. Many Gopher Motorsports members are already pursuing internships at EV companies and planning careers in electrified vehicles after graduation. Others will go into adjacent fields like electrical systems and medical devices, carrying the same systems-level engineering discipline with them.

"Sponsoring Gopher Motorsports is not a brand exercise. These students are solving real engineering problems, on real hardware, under real constraints. That is exactly the kind of work the EV industry needs more of, and the talent pipeline behind it is what will determine how fast electric mobility actually scales over the next decade," said Alvaro Carreira, Sales and Marketing Manager at Epic Charging.

What comes next

The 2026 season is now in full motion for Gopher Motorsports, with competition ahead and a car that represents the team's most ambitious technical platform to date. Epic Charging will continue to support the program throughout the season, with shared content highlighting the engineering work and the team behind it.

For Epic, the goal is straightforward: back the people building the future of EV, and let their work speak for itself.

About Epic Charging

Epic Charging is a Silicon Valley-based B2B SaaS company on a mission to become the world's leading EV charging software provider by elevating customer experience, reliability and scale. Its OCPP-compliant, hardware-agnostic CPMS is specifically designed to address the industry's most pressing challenges, including uptime, transparency and profitability. Epic delivers seamless interoperability with major EV charger manufacturers and an intuitive user experience for fleets, businesses and municipalities. Recent successes include the migration of thousands of chargers from Enel X, Shell and EvoCharge networks, the acquisition of Bluedot Technologies, a strategic partnership with LAZ Parking to deploy 50,000 Level 2 charging stations across the U.S. and Canada, becoming the first CSMS in the country to earn CTEP certification, and being named a Darcy Partners Top 10 Innovator in 2025. For more information, visit www.epiccharging.com.

About Gopher Motorsports

Gopher Motorsports is the University of Minnesota's Formula SAE team. The program designs, builds, tests, and competes with fully electric formula-style race cars under the Formula SAE ruleset, preparing student engineers for the real-world challenges of electrified mobility. For more information, visit gophermotorsports.com.