Engineering news
The Silverstone race track was filled with the sound of roaring engines today as the IMechE’s Formula Student motorsport event got underway.
A total of 125 teams from universities and other academic institutions located as far afield as Egypt, Nigeria, Thailand, Russia and Australia have gathered at the famous Northamptonshire circuit to take part in the four-day competition. The teams are competing to race single-seater cars that they have spent the past year designing and building. The cars will be judged on their speed, acceleration and endurance around the Silverstone circuit. The teams themselves will be tested on their design, costing and business presentation skills.
The event was opened by Ross Brawn, the team principal of the Mercedes GP Petronas Formula One team and a Formula Student patron. Brawn said he was always impressed by the amount of engineering talent that the event attracted. He said: “Given the excellent quality of the car designs, it is easy to forget that the competitors making these cars are so young.
“Students go through the entire process of designing, financing, building and eventually racing a car, which gives them an excellent insight into the real world of engineering and business. It is a very positive way to start off a career in engineering.”
The first day of the competition saw teams arriving from all over the world. The team from UAS Saarbruecken had spent the previous 12 hours transporting its car from Germany to the Silverstone track and were busy in the garages putting the vehicle together ahead of technical and safety ‘scrutineering’.
The UAS Saarbruecken team is entering Formula Student for the fifth time, with a car fitted with a four-cylinder in-line engine of a Honda CBR 600RR. Jan Loew from the Saar Racing Team said he had high hopes that the car would perform well. “The engine refinements we have carried out in recent months should make the car perform much better than it has before,” he said.
Loew said he enjoyed taking part in Formula Student because it gave him hands-on experience. “I get to see how the designs I come up with work, or don’t work, as the case may be. I think practical experience is very important for young engineers,” he said.
The team from Swansea University had had fewer miles to travel to get to the event, but were no less enthusiastic. The Swansea team was putting together an improved version of a car it had previously run at Formula Student, featuring a refined chassis, and enhanced drivetrain which had been optimised for lightness.
Tom Lake from the Swansea University Race team said: “We hope the car will perform well, particularly in the endurance event. It’s a tough call to say we will win it, but you never know.”
Lake said that Formula Student gave him the chance to meet top engineers from sponsoring companies such as Mercedes-Benz and Jaguar Land Rover. “The sponsors are always on hand to give careers advice. That sort of thing is really valuable to budding engineers.”
This year’s Formula Student has been given added interest by a very strong line-up of cars entering class 1A, the low-carbon category designed to encourage students to research and develop alternative powertrain technologies. The category had attracted a particularly novel entry from Delft University of Technology from the Netherlands which has developed a fuel cell car which runs on hydrogen. The fuel system has an electrical power output of 12kW and is aided by an energy buffer consisting of ultra-capacitors.
Class 1A hade also attracted electric vehicles and cars that ran on ethanol-blend fuel.