Eco Racing Team from Crete wins a silver medal at Shell Eco-marathon in Poland, enduring extreme weather conditions
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Winning the silver medal
The eco racing team from Technical University of Crete, the TUCer Team, achieved an outstanding second-place finish, winning the silver medal at the Shell Eco-marathon 2026, held from 24 to 28 June in Poland. This marks the highest ranking ever achieved by a Greek team in the competition’s 41-year history.
Sharing the vision of eco-mobility and a passion for motorsport racing, the students Konstantinos Athanasopoulos, Dimitrios Rammos (both School of Production Engineering and Management), Andreas Vythoulkas and Georgios Syntychakis (both School of Electrical and Computer Engineering) under the supervision of Dr. Savvas Piperidis (Laboratory Teaching Staff at the School of Production Engineering and Management) competed in the Hydrogen Urban Concept category, which is considered the most demanding, complex, and technically challenging category of the competition.
Extraordinary conditions for drivers and cars
After successfully completing the technical inspection of both the vehicle and its drivers, the team received the much-anticipated approval to enter the track and compete.
Due to the extreme heatwave with ambient temperatures exceeding 40°C every day, the race schedule was condensed for safety reasons. From ten teams competing in the category ‘Hydrogen Urban Concept’, only three successfully completed the event, as the extreme weather conditions posed an unprecedented challenge for all participants. One of those three teams was TUCer, successfully completing two valid race attempts. Their final attempt proved to be their best performance, securing second place overall. The driver Dimitrios Rammos completed this final race attempt while enduring a cockpit temperature of 47°C. Including the pre-race inspections and post-race performance measurements, he remained inside the vehicle for approximately one hour.
To mitigate the effects of the extreme heat for the car, the team covered the vehicle with reflective material during the fourth and fifth days of the competition – a strategy that was subsequently adopted by several other teams.
With this year’s participation in Poland, TUCer has now competed in the international Shell Eco-marathon fifteen (15) times. The 2026 competition proved to be the most demanding in the team’s history due to the extreme weather conditions.
The official competition results are available on the event’s website: results.sem-app.com/app/sem_2026_pl/UC/H2
About the TUCer team
Since 2007, the TUCer (Technical University of Crete Eco Racing) team has been designing, building, and racing prototype ultra-energy-efficient, zero-emission vehicles powered by hydrogen. The team consists of students and research staff of the Technical University of Crete who share a vision of environmentally friendly mobility and a passion for motorsport.
The founding and permanent members of the team are Professor Nikolaos Tsourveloudis and Laboratory Teaching Staff members Savvas Piperidis and Polychronis Spanoudakis. Since 2020, Assistant Professors Eleftherios Doitsidis and Dimitrios Ipsakis have also been members of the team.
