‘There’s no perfect answer for ‘What’s the best Formula Student car?’’: chief judge Dan Jones

Formula Student returned last week (17-21 July), with an increased focus on autonomy and electric vehicles (EVs).

We sat down with chief judge Dan Jones ahead of the weekend’s track events. Here is what he had to say about the trajectory of the competition, the importance of experience – and why there is no such thing as the “perfect Formula Student car”.

How has this year’s event gone compared to previous ones?

Overall, very well so far. Covid happened in 2020 and we had to cancel the live event, so we did sim racing for running the cars instead, which worked really well.

We’ve now got a couple of events that are embedded in the competition, off the back of what we did for those Covid years. We run a sim racing competition that starts in October with monthly league races, and then we have a live final which is at Williams F1’s factory and their e-sports facility there.

Since Covid we’ve also had lap time simulation. IPG Automotive provide the software to the students and that’s embedded within the static elements.

Obviously, post-Covid, because of time off from the competition, there was a loss of continuity in lots of the teams. In 2021 we ran a hybrid event, where we allowed modified previous year’s cars, because they hadn’t had the time to access the workshop. And so from 2019 to 2022, when it was back to a first ‘normal’ event, most of the team members had either only seen one event in 2019 and it was a distant memory, or they hadn’t seen the event at all.

So there was a break in experience?

Yeah, and so we’ve been on a recovery phase, if you like, of the number of running cars, the standard of the cars. If you’ve been to Formula Student before there’ll always be the spread of cars in the pits and the ones that didn’t make it here. This year, the numbers are much better. With 110 registered teams, we’ve only had five not make it on site, which is a good improvement from last year.

This is the first year in the competition that the number of electric vehicles is higher than the number of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles, which wasn’t a surprise to us. We’ve seen the trend has been there for the past few years, and reflects the nature of what’s going on in the broader industry and society.

And sustainable fuel is available to all the ICE teams…

Yeah we trialled that last year, we provided the fossil fuel that been provided for all the years before that, but very kindly with Motorsport UK and Coryton fuel supplier, we came up with a spec of a pumped gasoline equivalent, so it’s a 95 Ron E10. We could have gone for a super unleaded, but then although it’s still a sustainable fuel, that still has some fossil elements in it to be able to get the octane rating high enough. The 95 Ron E10 is 100% sustainable fuel.

The teams can get normal pump fuel from their garage forecourt for testing and development away from the competition, then at the competition they come along and it's a drop-in replacement.

We've allowed E85 as a fuel for a long time as well. Last year every E85 car ran with fully sustainable E85. That's the same, that is a genuine 100%, and there's no fossil element for octane rating or anything on the chemistry.

That was such a success last year, and we'd always wanted to make it so that every combustion vehicle was running on a fully sustainable fuel. The thing that we potentially might like to do in the future is – for drop-in gasoline, there's not any engineering that the teams have to do to be able to adapt to running the fuel.

E85, whether it's sustainable or not, they have to understand the difference in the calorific value. The attraction for E85 is primarily for teams running some kind of forced induction, because of the extra knock resistance that the E85 gives you.

If we could get to a point where the less experienced teams can just use it as a drop-in fuel, but there's something there where the teams can use it as a performance advantage if they engineer around it, which is kind of getting the educational aspects in it, as well as the environmental aspects.

The FS AI element is increasing in size. Do you think it will increase further in the coming years, and how far can it go?

The autonomous aspect of the competition has been going for six or seven years now. We weren't the first competition to do it – in Formula Student Germany in Europe they created a driverless vehicle category. And in Europe, there's lots of teams who already made the shift to EV and had running cars. So the rules they put in place in Germany were: take a running EV from a previous year, put the autonomous vision system and processors and everything on there, and run that as an autonomous vehicle in the following year.

But we recognised as organising committee in the IMechE that most of the teams in the UK didn't have that as a platform. You can do an autonomous combustion vehicle, but it's another level of complexity because you have to do actuators for the clutch, shifting and everything else, and EV is a lower barrier to entry to do so.

With support from the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV), we commissioned and developed the car that you've seen on site here. On that first round, we made one car for ourselves. Coventry University brought one, and then we made a second car as the competition grew.

Then this year, we've secured a second round of funding with CCAV, where we've now built another two cars. This year they're only testing, but next year they’ll be fully operational cars so we'll have four in the fleet.

Last year we were limited on capacity by the number of cars available, ultimately. We do allow the full driverless Formula Student cars that some teams compete in in Europe. More teams will try, and if not next year, hopefully the year after we'll have someone successful.

What has impressed you at this year’s event?

I've not had the chance to talk to lots of the teams in detail. It's good to see Edith Cowan from Australia back, when they were here before they had an interesting powertrain and rear suspension arrangement, and they've continued to develop the idea. They’re unique in that kind of car arrangement that they brought and it looks like a nicely engineered solution.

It's kind of a pragmatic balance of “Is it the highest theoretical best performing suspension system, your design in isolation?” No, but as a compromised overall solution that gives them weight advantages, cost advantages and everything else within the Formula Student ethos, then yeah.

There's no perfect answer for what is the best Formula Student car but you know going down a particular track, it's an interesting and different solution.

We're getting close to what Formula Student used to be, in terms of the standard of the cars, the number of running cars. It's not where we were before Covid, but the trajectory is definitely in the right direction.