Meet The Team: Hein Mæland

Hein is the Head of Drivetrain for Imperial Formula Racing. Read below to find out more about Hein and his team for the 2025-2026 season.

Hey, my name is Hein and I’m a second year MechEng student. I’m Norwegian but have lived most of my life in Italy with a couple years in the outskirts of London when I was younger. I love playing and watching football, with AC Milan and FK Viking (Norway's best team) being my teams. I also experience the weekly emotional rollercoaster as a Ferrari fan. I’ve also had an interest in cars, especially Italian ones, so much so that my dog’s called Enzo.

I joined IFR last year as a fresher as a drivetrain team member. While my main focus was helping to develop and manufacture the mounting system for the differential, I eventually transitioned into getting a good understanding of the drivetrain system as a whole. I also helped other teams with an extra pair of hands in build up to competition.

I have a couple favorite IFR moments from the past year. Getting to drive IFR01 at our second track test was an awesome experience and motivated me to work even harder to make the car even better. While driving was exciting I’d argue my favorite part of IFR was the early mornings to late nights rushing to get stuff done for a dyno testing and shackdowns right before we got kicked off campus in the month and a half before comp. Lastly, getting to go to Silverstone was a great experience both the social aspect and learning from other teams and watching our car out on Copse Corner.

This year I’ll be the Head of Drivetrain and will be working to further build on the immense work last year's team put down. The drivetrain team's main aims will be to improve the current tensioning mechanism and simultaneously developing a new system for 2027 chassis. Additionally, we will look into optimising our gear ratio and potentially driveshafts as well. I look forward to working with the team on exploring new concepts and learning even more about the engineering world. While I hope everything will run smoothly, the drivetrain does tend to find ways to break itself so I’m excited to see the team come together to brainstorm solutions.

People should join the drivetrain team because it gives you the ability to work on both static and dynamic parts and how to bridge between them. Furthermore, working on the drivetrain sets your academic learning into practice with force analysis, engineering drawings and tolerancing being very important to achieve a functional yet reliable system. Lastly and most importantly, drivetrain team members have exclusive access to the wonderful IFR hammer collection and are the only team members who can get away with releasing their frustration by hammering their subsystem together. With that I encourage you all to join the drivetrain team for a challenging but fun year with IFR.

If you're interested in joining the Drivetrain team this year, follow our socials to stay updated when our recruitment opens in October.