A high-performance steel with MIT origins has come full circle. After proving its worth in Formula One and Baja 1000 race cars, the computationally designed material has now been incorporated into the 2026 electric race car built by the student-run MIT Motorsports team.
The MIT car is scheduled to race against cars from other universities in the Formula SAE Electric competition in June.
Designing materials
Gregory B. Olson founded the MIT Steel Research Group (SRG) in 1985 with the goal of using computers to accelerate the hunt for new materials by plumbing databases of those materials’ fundamental properties. It was the beginning of a new field—computational materials design—that would eventually lead to the Materials Genome Initiative, a national program announced by President Obama in 2011.
In 1985, however, “nobody knew whether we could really do this,” says Olson, Professor of the Practice in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Olson and colleagues eventually showed that the approach worked, and around 1990 the Army Research Office funded an SRG project aimed at developing high-performance steels for the gears in helicopters. That work came to the attention of producers at Infinite Voyage, a science documentary that ran on the Public Broadcasting System.
“When Infinite Voyage came to see me about the helicopter gear steels,” Olson remembers, “we got into a discussion about my interest in race cars” and whether the steels might have an application there.
The answer was yes, and Olson found himself connecting with the Newman/Haas racing team that Michael and Mario Andretti were driving for. Newman/Haas was also featured in the Infinite Voyage program, so “my first discussion with their chief engineer was on live television,” says Olson, who is also affiliated with the MIT Materials Research Laboratory.
He and colleagues went on to design a novel gear steel that could withstand the extreme conditions associated with a race car. They did the work over a weekend. “The surface hardness was the same as for a conventional gear steel, but we gave it the core properties of an armor steel,” Olson says.
Introducing Ferrium C61
That steel, which became known as Ferrium C61, was commercialized through QuesTek Innovations, the materials-design company Olson co-founded. It became the company’s first product.
Although it was never used in Newman/Haas cars, QuesTek pitched it to Baja 1000 offroad racers. “We particularly focused on the 1600 class of those racing dune buggies. They would go flying over a sand dune with the wheels spinning in the air. And when they land, there would be a tremendous jolt to the drive gears,” Olson says. The result: the racers’ gears made with conventional steel regularly failed.
“The average life for conventional drive gears was .6 race,” says Olson (meaning on average they lasted for only 60 percent of a race). “With Ferrium C61we changed it from .6 to 6 races.” The gears could now complete an average six races before failing.
QuesTek brought that data to meetings with different Formula One teams “to try to get C61 into other racing classes,” Olson says. Enter Red Bull, the British-licensed Formula One team. “The leading mechanical failure in Formula One racing is gearbox failures,” Olsen says. The gearbox houses the gearset, or collection of gears, in a car’s engine. “Once Red Bull adopted our steel for the gearset, they never had any gearbox failures and they were world champions four times in the last decade.”
MIT Motorsports heard of this history and within the past year approached Olson about getting a sample of C61. “QuesTek had some stock available, and sold it at a high discount to the MIT team with, of course, instructions on how to heat-treat it,” Olson says. Because, of course, the students, who are mostly undergraduates, made the gears—and the car—themselves.