Students set to create Le Mans race car capable of crushing Nurburgring record

Designing and creating an experimental race car destined for Garage 56 at the 24 Hours of Le Mans is typically reserved for your bigwig engineers who have experience building some of the world's fastest machines. Usually those mighty-minds get bored by regulation restraints and set out to build something revolutionary – like in recent years, the Delta Wing and Nissan ZEOD RC.

This is the InMotion IM01, a hybrid experimental race car hoping to debut at Le Mans in 2017, and in the same breath, crush the long-standing 6 minute 11 second lap record at the fabled Nurburgring. Only this isn't designed by ex-F1 boffins, or a bored Adrian Newey. It's the creation of a bunch of Dutch students.

Birthed from the minds of those studying at the Technical University of Einhoven and Fontys University of Applied Science in the Netherlands, the IM01 will be a four wheel drive hybrid with one electric motor per wheel. It will also feature a rotary engine used to extend the range. Final specifications will depend on testing, which will be done on the IM/e test mule, based off the Formula Bio race car which was developed by a fellow student. This allows complex systems like the IM01's blown diffuser, active suspension and active aerodynamics to be tested on some of the UK's toughest hillclimbs prior to the actual race car being built.

Creating the IM01 will, of course, not come cheap, and students have the backing of the universities and a company called ICT Automatisering. Exactly how many dollars have been raised for the project remains unknown, but I'd wager that it's probably not enough.

Hopefully this project meets reality. Racing used to be littered with experimental machines; it's what made the Indy 500 so special. But today, innovation is created in smaller, less noticeable ways, and in many forms of racing (ahem NASCAR) it doesn't exist at all. Students looking to reach for the stars is exactly what motorsport needs, and in the process, it's about time someone beat Stefan Bellof and his Porsche 956's record Nurburgring lap from 1983. If a 2014 Porsche 918 Spyder production car can beat 7 minutes, a fully-fledged race car should in theory beat 6. The question is, will a group of Dutch students be the ones to do it?