Formula SAE Italy 2026: Tecnocad in the Driverless Jury
Varano de’ Melegari, 2026 — From September 2-6, 2026, the “Riccardo Paletti” Circuit in Varano de’ Melegari hosts the twenty-first edition of Formula SAE Italy. Tecnocad will be present with Matteo Barale, Tecnocad’s CIO, on the jury of Class 1DV, the category dedicated to autonomous racing vehicles. Formula SAE Italy brings together 1,600 students and 53 teams from 51 universities across 13 countries this year. But among electric vehicles, combustion engines, and engineering projects, Class 1DV poses a particular challenge: bringing a single-seater to the track and having it complete dynamic tests without a driver on board means entrusting the vehicle’s behavior to sensors, software, perception algorithms, localization, path planning, and control systems. These are precisely the topics Tecnocad works on every day in developing and validating autonomous driving systems.
How a driverless single-seater works
A Class 1DV vehicle must perceive what happens around it, understand where it is located, decide which trajectory to follow, and transform that decision into vehicle commands. Behind a single track test lies an entire autonomous driving stack.
The main functions include:
- Sensing and perception: acquiring and interpreting data from sensors and recognizing relevant environmental elements;
- Localization and mapping: determining the vehicle’s position and building a reliable reference for the path;
- Planning: defining vehicle behavior and generating the trajectory to follow;
- Control: transforming the trajectory into steering, acceleration, and braking commands;
- Vehicle interface, simulazione and validazione: integrating software and hardware and verifying system performance before and during real-world tests;
This is exactly what Tecnocad develops for projects like ATOM e Alba Ride. The scale changes. The problems remain the same.
The Class 1DV category at Formula SAE Italy 2026
For the 2026 edition, the organization had planned up to 15 participants in Class 1DV, including vehicles registered simultaneously in EV or CV categories. There are 11 teams competing this year in autonomous driving: five participate exclusively in the Driverless category, while six others also race with electric vehicles.
Overall, teams are distributed as follows:
- 24 in Class 1EV, dedicated to electric single-seaters;
- 12 in Class 1CV, with combustion or hybrid engines;
- 5 in Class 1DV;
- 6 in the dual 1DV + 1EV category;
- 6 in Class 3, dedicated to design;
The complexity, particularly technical, in the driverless vehicle category emerges from these numbers alone. Five teams working on building a genuinely functional driverless system must indeed integrate hardware, software, sensors, vehicle control, and safety procedures into a single reliable architecture. Developing an algorithm is not enough: everything must work together in real-time on a physical vehicle.
How autonomous vehicles are evaluated
In Class 1DV, the stopwatch matters, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Particular weight is given to Engineering Design, which is worth up to 200 points compared to 150 in Classes 1EV and 1CV.
During evaluation, teams must demonstrate how they built the system: from development approach to software release management, from simulation validation to safety, through to autonomous stack architecture. It means that when judging a driverless single-seater, what matters is how it was designed. How did you manage perception? How did you test the algorithms? How did you structure safety? How does the code behave when something goes wrong?
For the driverless section, the regulations examine very specific elements: perception, localization, mapping, path planning, path tracking, control, and real-time architecture. For the static tests of the competition, these include Engineering Design, Business Plan Presentation, and Cost & Manufacturing. Additionally, there is also the Trackdrive, which for Class 1DV is worth up to 275 points: the vehicle must autonomously complete the circuit, testing not only speed but above all the entire system’s ability to function continuously and precisely. This is where simulation meets the physical world. This is where most autonomous projects stop.
Why Tecnocad is on the Driverless Jury
Tecnocad has designed vehicles since 1986. Today, it develops autonomous driving solutions in partnership with universities, public operators, and mobility companies across Italy and Europe. It is from this experience that Tecnocad’s contribution to the Driverless jury emerges. Every competing team is a microcosm of an automotive company: limited budget, non-negotiable deadlines, technical specifications to meet, and the necessity to demonstrate that their design choices work. Students thus face many of the same constraints that characterize industrial engineering.
For Tecnocad, judging means engaging directly with a new generation of engineers confronting challenges remarkably similar to those in our projects: perceiving the environment, planning trajectories, controlling the vehicle, and validating the system while striking the right balance between performance, reliability, and available resources.
From the track to Tecnocad's autonomous driving projects
The competencies evaluated at Varano are the competencies we’ve built on real vehicles, developed by the Tecnocad AV team. One example is ATOM, a research project on autonomous mobility developed with Politecnico di Torino as part of MOST and NextGenerationEU, in which technologies and systems are brought from simulation to real-world operational testing.
Another is Alba Ride, the autonomous vehicle for pedestrian environments developed by Tecnocad for Alba Robot and designed to operate in settings such as airports, hospitals, and campuses. All these projects address the same steps: despite the applications being very different a competition single-seater versus an autonomous urban vehicle, they share a fundamental common part of the same engineering problem, perceiving the environment, localizing, planning a route, controlling the vehicle, and verifying the system continues to behave correctly under the conditions it was designed for.
The difference between a driverless single-seater and an urban autonomous vehicle does not lie in algorithms. It lies in Operational Design Domain (ODD), functional requirements, and the required safety level. These differences give the ability to design and validate these technologies in real scenarios. Whoever can design one has the foundation for the other. The transition from research to industry is there: knowing how to validate and test on real roads.
Formula SAE Italy 2026: where and when
Where: Riccardo Paletti Circuit, Varano de’ Melegari (Parma)
When: September 2-6, 2026 (twenty-first edition)
Organizer: ANFIA, with SAE International and Motor Valley Association
Main events:
- September 2, 9:00 PM: opening ceremony;
- September 5, 8:30 PM: static test awards;
- September 6: closing ceremony.
The event is open to the public. Full schedule, team list, and tickets at formula-ata.it. Tecnocad will be present on September 5.
Training tomorrow's mobility engineers
Formula SAE forges a rarity: university and industry converge around vehicles that must function, not merely in theory. For Tecnocad, this means engaging directly with those who will shape the future of mobility. It also means recognizing that the challenges these students face today are the same ones that will drive the automotive industry tomorrow.
Discover how Tecnocad addresses these same challenges in operational projects.