What happens when you blend the high-stakes world of Formula One with the untapped ingenuity of India’s engineering campuses? The recently concluded TrackShift Innovation Challenge, hosted by Plaksha University in partnership with Mphasis F1 Foundation and the MoneyGram Haas F1 Team, set out to find the answer. The hackathon proved to be a pointed demonstration of how global motorsport standards are being transposed onto the Indian student engineering ecosystem, producing not only prototypes but, crucially, open-source tools intended for real-world deployment.
TrackShift was not designed as a performative coding sprint. Over 1,800 students from institutes ranging from IITs and BITS to tier-3 colleges applied, and only 50 teams were invited to the final 48-hour grind at Plaksha’s Mohali campus. The prompt was direct: solve genuine motorsport problems like visual difference detection in images, resilient data transfer under poor connectivity, and live race strategy simulation, using advanced techniques in AI, data science, and simulation. But the underlying logic was to produce solutions that could leap across sectors, from racing to agriculture, logistics, and manufacturing, without being chained to one use case.
All tools and code emerging from the challenge are open-source, ensuring that the best work does not vanish behind a corporate firewall or be left to languish as code dumps on GitHub. In addition to receiving cash prizes, the top three teams also qualify for a structured internship at Mphasis designed to advance projects beyond the proof-of-concept stage.
Highlighting their commitment to ongoing support, Veda Iyer, CMO at Mphasis, explained, “We proactively take these solutions to customers, integrate them into our marketplace with AWS, Microsoft, Google, and seek direct industry adoption.”
Select participants will further have the opportunity to visit the MoneyGram Haas F1 facility in the UK, experience the high-stakes environment of race-day problem solving, and see how precision engineering translates across sectors. This will embed them in live industry contexts where the real-world applicability of their code will be put to the test.
For Prof Rudra Pratap, Founding Vice Chancellor of Plaksha, the goal is not merely to host another student competition, but to signal a fundamental shift in how Indian campuses approach engineering education. He argues that today’s complex, multi-dimensional problems cannot be addressed with the old, siloed model of training. “The past has been very, very siloed. You get training in a very narrow area, and then you expect that once you get to real life, maybe you will be able to do something based on what you have learned,” he observes. Yet in practice, that approach is seldom enough.
At Plaksha, and in similar campuses now emerging across the country, students are explicitly trained to look beyond technical parameters, to evaluate social, humanistic, and sustainability dimensions alongside the engineering challenge.
The problems Indian students are being asked to solve, both through programmes like TrackShift and in their regular coursework, are fundamentally different from those that shaped engineering in the West. As Prof Pratap points out, India faces scale and complexity at an order developed countries have not encountered. The talent pool is vast, but the real difference is the ability to navigate uncertainty, and to “think on your feet” as Gary Foote, CIO of the MoneyGram Haas F1 Team, describes it, a trait now prized as much as technical expertise.
Industry leaders are no longer looking for coders alone. As Foote explains, the last decade has seen a pivot toward hiring engineers who can demonstrate not only deep domain knowledge but also soft skills like collaboration, adaptability, and communication, which determine whether a solution survives the jump from codebase to business-critical deployment.
Much of the learning, the organisers insist, was not in the problem statements but in the mode of engagement, which was time-boxed, collaborative, and designed to simulate the real-world pressures of racing, manufacturing, and logistics alike. Students learned to measure, quantify, and optimise for failure probabilities in both hardware and software, a skillset that translates directly to sectors like agriculture and infrastructure. Reliability, so crucial in motorsport, is reframed as scientific discipline.
This was also a testbed for mindset: a transition from students as coders to students as systems thinkers capable of synthesising knowledge from across engineering, business, and the humanities. The emphasis on AI and agentified solutions further positioned participants as future-proof technologists, able to adapt as AI shifts the contours of the job market.
For the organisers, success is measured not by the immediate polish of a demo, but by the willingness of students to carry ideas forward, connect coursework to tangible solutions, and see their prototypes evolve into tools that can be adopted, extended, and commercialised. There is a cultural ambition as well, to build a broader Indian fanbase for motorsport, and embed collaboration as a professional norm for a new generation of engineers.
Innovation challenges like TrackShift are, by design, living experiments in how cross-border industry partnerships, open-source thinking, and educational reform can come together to grow not just employable graduates, but true innovators for India and beyond.