By Robert C. Jones, Jr.
Even with a high-tech automotive shop and the most advanced tools at their disposal, some of the most seasoned mechanics would still find an engine swap a gargantuan task.
Gabe Elias pulled it off at just 17 years old—from the parking lot of his college apartment.
“It was my first car, a used 1991 Nissan 240SX,” he recalled. “I drove it to the University of Miami campus my freshman year after graduating from high school and ended up doing a lot of the wrenching in the lot of the old student apartments, where the basketball arena now stands.”
With the help of a few friends, Elias installed the new engine over a weekend, tweaking it until it sounded like the high-pitched whistling motors of the race cars he had always admired as a little boy.
But he had not always envisioned himself as a gearhead.
Long before he took a wrench to his first car, he would sometimes accompany his father, a photographer for Homestead Motor Speedway, to the oval-shaped track, where he would watch IndyCar spring training sessions. “I liked things that went fast and made loud, beautiful sounds,” Elias said.
Elias also watched legendary Formula 1 drivers such as Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher dominate road circuits and decided he wanted to race cars, not fix them.
Limited family finances, however, made that dream unlikely. So, Elias, with advice from his father, quickly changed gears, deciding to design the cars that famous race car drivers drive to victory lane.
And it was a letter from Roger Penske, the motorsports titan with a record 20 Indianapolis 500 victories as a team owner, that convinced Elias to pursue a career in race car design. “I was only 9 years old, and I wrote to him asking how I could become his engineer one day,” Elias recalled. “A few months later, I got a response—a letter from Penske that encouraged me to study math, science, and physics and to major in engineering in college. And that really launched me in that direction.”
Enticed to the University of Miami College of Engineering because of its program in internal combustion engines, he decided to make the Coral Gables Campus his home for the next four years. He graduated from the college in 2010 with a degree in mechanical engineering, landing a job with Honda R&D soon after. There, he designed engines for passenger cars. It wasn’t glamorous work, but Elias learned the quintessence of automotive design.
Still, the desire to design race cars burned within him. Not just any racing cars, but the pinnacle of motorsports machines: Formula 1 cars—the sleek, fast, and technologically advanced speedsters he’d grown up watching on television.
But for an American to gain a foothold in that sport can prove just as difficult as an engine swap. From engineers to mechanics, the vast majority of Formula 1’s workforce hails from Europe.
So, that’s where Elias decided to go. He sold everything he owned, left Honda after two and a half years, and enrolled in a master’s in motorsports engineering program at Oxford Brookes University in England. He used Formula 1 simulation software in his thesis and graduated with honors.
Still, there was no guarantee he’d land a job in Formula 1.
Then, one day, Elias saw a job posting from the Mercedes-AMG Formula 1 team. “They wanted someone with experience in future car concepts, scheming, and early layouts of cars,” he recalled. “I had some experience with that at Honda and knew how to approach it.”
After Elias’s grueling interview with Mercedes, the team awarded him the job, agreeing to sponsor his visa.
His career with the team skyrocketed. Save for the suspension and braking systems, Elias worked on virtually every aspect of Mercedes’ F1 cars—from tooling on the powertrain and incorporating upgrades into the vehicles to working on the cars’ carbon fiber elements.
And the Mercedes machines on which Elias toiled excelled, winning Formula 1 World Championships all seven years (2014-2020) he worked as a design engineer for the team.
“For me, the 2017 car was the coolest,” Elias said. “I was a part of it from inception to reality—the manufacturing, the testing, the validation.”
Today, Elias still has a penchant for designing, but his creativity and inventive nature have moved from cars to batteries. Through the company he co-founded, Material Hybrid Manufacturing, or MATERIAL, he wants to revolutionize battery design and power.
Think of electric cars that travel across the country on only one battery charge. Battery-powered drones that fly higher and stay aloft for hours. Wearables such as smartwatches that operate for days without the need to recharge them.
Such seemingly limitless energy would be made possible by 3D printed batteries that conform to the shape of any device they power. “If you fill a cereal bowl with conventional cylindrical-shaped batteries, you’ll still have a lot of empty space in that bowl,” Elias explained. “What we’re doing is making energy behave like a design material, 3D printing batteries in any shape or form based on the device and filling every gap, every crevice, every void.”
The company he founded with Chris Reyes, who was the first to 3D print lithium-ion batteries in an academic setting, and Miles Dotson, who earned a degree in audio electrical engineering from the College of Engineering, recently raised $7.1 million in seed funding to support its 3D printing platform, dubbed HYBRID3D. The venture is co-led by Outlander VC and Harpoon Ventures, with participation from GoAhead Ventures, Myelin VC, Demos Capital, and Giant Step Capital.
MATERIAL also recently won a $1.25 million Air Force contract to produce conformal batteries for small drones and other defense applications. The goal, said Elias, is to extend flight time and payload capacity by more than 50 percent. And MATERIAL is collaborating with Huntsville, Alabama-based PDW and other companies to integrate conformal batteries into small unmanned aerial systems.
The College of Engineering, Elias said, played “a huge role in my success.”
Even with a high-tech automotive shop and the most advanced tools at their disposal, some of the most seasoned mechanics would still find an engine swap a gargantuan task.
Gabe Elias pulled it off at just 17 years old—from the parking lot of his college apartment.
“It was my first car, a used 1991 Nissan 240SX,” he recalled. “I drove it to the University of Miami campus my freshman year after graduating from high school and ended up doing a lot of the wrenching in the lot of the old student apartments, where the basketball arena now stands.”
With the help of a few friends, Elias installed the new engine over a weekend, tweaking it until it sounded like the high-pitched whistling motors of the race cars he had always admired as a little boy.
But he had not always envisioned himself as a gearhead.
Long before he took a wrench to his first car, he would sometimes accompany his father, a photographer for Homestead Motor Speedway, to the oval-shaped track, where he would watch IndyCar spring training sessions. “I liked things that went fast and made loud, beautiful sounds,” Elias said.
Elias also watched legendary Formula 1 drivers such as Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher dominate road circuits and decided he wanted to race cars, not fix them.
Limited family finances, however, made that dream unlikely. So, Elias, with advice from his father, quickly changed gears, deciding to design the cars that famous race car drivers drive to victory lane.
And it was a letter from Roger Penske, the motorsports titan with a record 20 Indianapolis 500 victories as a team owner, that convinced Elias to pursue a career in race car design. “I was only 9 years old, and I wrote to him asking how I could become his engineer one day,” Elias recalled. “A few months later, I got a response—a letter from Penske that encouraged me to study math, science, and physics and to major in engineering in college. And that really launched me in that direction.”
Enticed to the University of Miami College of Engineering because of its program in internal combustion engines, he decided to make the Coral Gables Campus his home for the next four years. He graduated from the college in 2010 with a degree in mechanical engineering, landing a job with Honda R&D soon after. There, he designed engines for passenger cars. It wasn’t glamorous work, but Elias learned the quintessence of automotive design.
Still, the desire to design race cars burned within him. Not just any racing cars, but the pinnacle of motorsports machines: Formula 1 cars—the sleek, fast, and technologically advanced speedsters he’d grown up watching on television.
But for an American to gain a foothold in that sport can prove just as difficult as an engine swap. From engineers to mechanics, the vast majority of Formula 1’s workforce hails from Europe.
So, that’s where Elias decided to go. He sold everything he owned, left Honda after two and a half years, and enrolled in a master’s in motorsports engineering program at Oxford Brookes University in England. He used Formula 1 simulation software in his thesis and graduated with honors.
Still, there was no guarantee he’d land a job in Formula 1.
Then, one day, Elias saw a job posting from the Mercedes-AMG Formula 1 team. “They wanted someone with experience in future car concepts, scheming, and early layouts of cars,” he recalled. “I had some experience with that at Honda and knew how to approach it.”
After Elias’s grueling interview with Mercedes, the team awarded him the job, agreeing to sponsor his visa.
His career with the team skyrocketed. Save for the suspension and braking systems, Elias worked on virtually every aspect of Mercedes’ F1 cars—from tooling on the powertrain and incorporating upgrades into the vehicles to working on the cars’ carbon fiber elements.
And the Mercedes machines on which Elias toiled excelled, winning Formula 1 World Championships all seven years (2014-2020) he worked as a design engineer for the team.
“For me, the 2017 car was the coolest,” Elias said. “I was a part of it from inception to reality—the manufacturing, the testing, the validation.”
Today, Elias still has a penchant for designing, but his creativity and inventive nature have moved from cars to batteries. Through the company he co-founded, Material Hybrid Manufacturing, or MATERIAL, he wants to revolutionize battery design and power.
Think of electric cars that travel across the country on only one battery charge. Battery-powered drones that fly higher and stay aloft for hours. Wearables such as smartwatches that operate for days without the need to recharge them.
Such seemingly limitless energy would be made possible by 3D printed batteries that conform to the shape of any device they power. “If you fill a cereal bowl with conventional cylindrical-shaped batteries, you’ll still have a lot of empty space in that bowl,” Elias explained. “What we’re doing is making energy behave like a design material, 3D printing batteries in any shape or form based on the device and filling every gap, every crevice, every void.”
The company he founded with Chris Reyes, who was the first to 3D print lithium-ion batteries in an academic setting, and Miles Dotson, who earned a degree in audio electrical engineering from the College of Engineering, recently raised $7.1 million in seed funding to support its 3D printing platform, dubbed HYBRID3D. The venture is co-led by Outlander VC and Harpoon Ventures, with participation from GoAhead Ventures, Myelin VC, Demos Capital, and Giant Step Capital.
MATERIAL also recently won a $1.25 million Air Force contract to produce conformal batteries for small drones and other defense applications. The goal, said Elias, is to extend flight time and payload capacity by more than 50 percent. And MATERIAL is collaborating with Huntsville, Alabama-based PDW and other companies to integrate conformal batteries into small unmanned aerial systems.
The College of Engineering, Elias said, played “a huge role in my success.”
