By Thursday’s opening ceremony the paddocks were filled with some of the world’s brightest young engineers putting the finishing touches on some of the most advanced cars ever seen at Formula Student. Some rare Northamptonshire sunshine greeted the opening day’s special guests – motorsport icons Ross Brawn, Mercedes GP boss and Formula Student patron, James Allison, Lotus Renault F1 Technical Director, and Leena Gade, Race Engineer at Audi Sport and the first female engineer to win Le Mans.
Leena Gade, making her first visit to Formula Student, was impressed. “People can come out of motorsport courses or engineering degrees with all the theory in hand,” she said, “but when they come to apply it in practice the working world can be so very different. Formula Student doesn’t just give you the work ethic, it gives you the practical knowledge of what goes where and what type of spanner to use. It sounds odd but you don’t always get that with a degree. I wish my university had done Formula Student while I was there.”
After the VIPs toured the teams, Formula Student kicked into gear with the first event – the business presentation. Team after team subjected themselves to a Dragon’s Den-style grilling from leading industry experts, who picked apart the business plan that went behind the manufacturing of their racer. As well as designing and building the car, the teams are encouraged to get to grips with the business side of engineering, assuming that a manufacturing firm has engaged them to produce a prototype car for evaluation. The University of Hertfordshire, who had partnered with management consultancy
Pcubed specifically to improve their business presentation, and Swansea Metropolitan University shared first place.
Every car was then rolled to the cost judging, where manufacturers from across the motor industry valued every nut and bolt that went into the cars to make sure they were cost effective. Teams spend anything from a few thousand to a few hundred thousand pounds on the racers, many of which are plastered with big-name sponsors like Red Bull and Santander. The University of Bath, one of the early tips for the overall prize, came out on top. Next came the design judging, one of the toughest events at Formula Student, in which the judges look at how well the car has been put together. The University of Stuttgart chalked up their first win of a successful weekend, and went into the dynamic events leading the field after consistent top 20 finishes in the three static events.
The end of the static events also brought the competition to a close for the Class 2 and 2A entrants. These classes are designed for teams in their first or second years, or first-time entrants, and only require the students to design a car – no manufacturing is needed. The University of Bath took the Class 2, with TU Budapest close behind, while the University of Warwick won the Class 2A competition by a mile, gaining 296 points to second
place Aston University’s 199. After two days of rigorous scrutineering to make sure the cars were safe, on Saturday the Class 1 and 1A cars began to take to the track for the acceleration, skid pad and sprint events. The Swedish team from Chalmers University of Technology were the first to
impress, taking the acceleration event – a drag race over 75m – by a margin of nearly a second. TU Munich won the skid pad – a figure of 8 designed to test the cars’ handling – with Bath close behind. Then the impressive Global Formula Racing (GFR) car, the product of a collaboration between Oregon State and Ravensburg universities and the only car at Formula Student with a rear wing, stormed the sprint event.
Throughout Saturday’s dynamic events one car above all was causing a stir amongst the industry experts packing out the pit wall and the judging rooms. TU Delft’s electric car, competing in the low-emission Class 1A category, had opened up an almost unassailable lead in its class during the static events.
The weight of electric cars had traditionally been a drawback when competing against their petrol- powered cousins, but Delft had put together a car that was the lightest of all the cars at Silverstone. It now outperformed all but the very best petrol cars on the track, reaching the top 5 in both the acceleration and sprint events. With Class 1 and 1A set to merge next year, allowing the electric cars to battle it out with the petrol cars on a level playing field, Delft sent a clear message that the future of Formula Student, and perhaps motorsport as a whole, could well be electric.
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