From an announcement made by the team in late March, it’s no secret: 2022 will be the last year for Team Bath Racing and their E85 driven internal combustion team in the Formula Student competition. Bringing an end to a run of over twenty years of designing, building and competing at competitions in the UK, Europe and even the odd one in North America, we were delighted to have the chance to catch up with several members of the team over MS Teams. With three months to go before Silverstone, the first question on the agenda was, simply, why this decision?
“There’s a two-pronged answer to that,” explained Kevin Robinson, Team Bath Racing’s highly engaged Faculty Advisor and veteran of nearly forty competitions. “For one, we have noticed the way that the wind is blowing where some European FS competitions are prioritising electric and autonomous vehicles over traditional ICEs. At a university level, we already cater for this with our wholly separate Electric team and we while we collaborate with them for some things, we did not want to start building electric cars to fit these event requirements.”
“Secondly, upper management at our university have stated a preference for motorsport teams to develop cleaner running vehicles, so we have taken the decision to change and develop a Hydrogen-based car to take part in a land speed record attempt,” he finished.
Whatever the decision, there’s no denying that it will be a shame not to see the black and green machine after this year and the reactions within the team are bittersweet. But there is no denying the impact that the competition has had and that it has been worthwhile. “Every year of Formula Student we have designed and engineered a new car completely from scratch,” said Kevin, not without a measure of pride in his students’ work, “when you think about it, it’s a crazy amount of work but the educational benefit is enormous, and it’s been great for the students to learn.” Here the results speak for themselves, with the team regularly bringing home silverware from the UK and European competitions, most notably becoming the first UK team to win an FS competition outright at FS Czech 2016.
Meanwhile, there is still the question of what’s happening with this year’s competition entry and the expectation is for the team to put all their engineering know-how to the fore. Joe Dawe, Team Leader for the 2022 vehicle and former concept class team member, is keen to give 2022 their best shot. “For our last year in the competition we want to go out showing that combustion-powered cars are still relevant in the competition,” he explained. “Our 2022 car’s design is a true culmination of what we’ve learned over the most recent years of building cars, focusing on making a lightweight and reliable car with enhanced downforce that should be consistently faster once it gets on track at Silverstone.
Meanwhile, there is still the question of what’s happening with this year’s competition entry and the expectation is for the team to put all their engineering know-how to the fore. Joe Dawe, Team Leader for the 2022 vehicle and former concept class team member, is keen to give 2022 their best shot. “For our last year in the competition we want to go out showing that combustion-powered cars are still relevant in the competition,” he explained. “Our 2022 car’s design is a true culmination of what we’ve learned over the most recent years of building cars, focusing on making a lightweight and reliable car with enhanced downforce that should be consistently faster once it gets on track at Silverstone.”
“We have focused heavily on going back through previous ideas we’ve had and trying to test and validate some of them for this year’s car,” continued Joe, noting that this should help during the static events to explain the decision making on their car when questioned by the judges.” Sometimes we have been surprised with the results we have found and in terms of our goal of lightweighting, this means we have been able to justify which parts we keep and take off the car.”
Does this mean we will see a much more lean, mean and keen aero package then? Enter Jamie Orme, Aerodynamics lead for this year’s team: “well, we still have lots of space for sponsors,” he admits with a grin, acknowledging the rather large aero packages the team have been known for in the past, “however we’ve done a lot to optimise it and we’ve been more considered in creating efficient downforce with tyre wake management this year, something we may have neglected in the past.” He went on to outline that changes they have made to manage their vehicle’s geometry should have an impact on the performance of their car this year.
A perfect time to talk vehicle performance, though Vehicle Dynamics lead Will Bevan isn’t giving away anything too specific at this point, there’s still plenty to be optimistic about. This year’s car is powered by a KTM 500 naturally-aspirated engine with pneumatic shifting, with the team having chosen to remove the turbocharger. “Keeping in mind the idea of reliability that Joe talked about, we’re going for a back-to-basics, less-is-more approach this year,” he explained, adding that not creating a turbo map will add additional time to get the best possible NA map for the engine, which should be apparent by the time they come to testing.
Unfortunately, dynamic testing is an area that the team admit that they lack. With time between final assembly and the UK Formula Student competition being short, often the UK competition is a shakedown of the car ahead of their European campaign, though this year they are quietly optimistic. “We did have COVID restrictions that meant we had maximum of four people in the workshop and 2 meter social distancing, which isn’t great when you’re trying to build a car,” laughed Joe, “but with three months to go, our we’re firmly in the manufacturing phase for vehicle parts and we should be all finished by early June and have about a month for testing and ironing out any reliability issues.”
Additionally, some of the virtual testing that Will and Jamie have been running so far has been positive. In one example in particular, Jamie claimed that had they not had the reliability issues they saw during the 2021 competition and that their models predicted that they would have won the Sprint race based on the final results. Ultimately though, the proof is in the timing sheets and further highlights the importance of getting the car running ahead of the summer competition.
Looking back at their history, it’s easy to underestimate the impact one team has had on the careers of its members over more than two decades. You would be hard pressed to find a current day Formula One team without a Bath graduate and the number of Formula Student alumni that have gone on to compete in all kinds of motorsport series is easily in the hundreds. It’s all up to TBR22 to deliver a car that bookends this chapter of the team’s history and brings home the trophies for the team. As Will succinctly put it, “we want to give the car, the team and all our alumni a good send off this summer; we’ve tasted victory as a concept class team and we want more!”
On behalf of the team at the IMechE, we wish the team the very best on their final year in the competition and be sure to follow their progress on their website and Facebook, Instagram and YouTube channels. Their fundraising project has just gone live as well, to contribute simply visit the page to support the team in their three-competition Formula Student campaign across the UK, Austria and FS East.
If you want to join us at Silverstone to watch their progress for yourself, spectator tickets for the weekend’s track events are also available.
As for the Hydrogen Car Land Speed record attempt, progress is being made behind closed doors and with some of the first design reports due next month, fans and alumni of the team will soon be able to get a first look at what the next generation of young engineers at Team Bath Racing are working on. Once these have been submitted, we hope to preview their work, so stay tuned!