At the Oxford Brookes Headington campus, more than 100 students are busy building the fastest, most well-designed race car for this year’s Formula Student competition.
Oxford Brookes Racing (OBR) is the UK’s most popular Formula One team. They have won more design awards than any other UK university, and often take top positions in international competitions.
But the challenges go beyond the competition, which is held every year at Silverstone. With several alumni in each Form One class, success is what gets them noticed by the industry, where few engineering jobs can have more than 10,000 applicants.
Thomas Cawdery, team principal and third-year motorsports technology student, said: “This is what you don’t see in Formula One. The engineers make it happen.”
Their team is entirely student-run. Throughout their two buildings you can see many people hard at work – in one room they cut and shape carbon fiber by hand, in the other, the heat from the computers running the simulations makes the air uncomfortably hot. Students of all ages teach and learn from each other.
Real Formula One cars have more power than the students are allowed, for safety reasons. But in terms of sophistication, the cars are very similar. “They are similar if not more sophisticated than Formula One cars,” Cawdery said.
In fact, they can do some things that Formula One cars aren’t allowed to do, such as torque vectoring, where they power each wheel with its own engine to help their driver turn corners. It also helps with traction and wet weather driving.
In some areas, OBR’s engineering team exceeds industry expectations. For example, this new generation of engineers has a much better gender balance than industry, where in many groups more than 10% of engineers are women.
Emma Deery is a first-year mechanical engineering student, who assembles sand parts with a team of engineers as motorsports play on television in front of them.
“In the industry, many women find themselves the only women in their group,” she said. “It’s different here. We have more women and more women in leadership positions. It’s very inspiring.”
With a fraction of the size of a Formula One team and an even smaller budget, what Formula Student is able to achieve is attracting the attention of the biggest names in the industry. “There are two new types of games left,” former club principal Ross Brawn once said. “One of them is Formula One and the other is Formula Student.”
The OBR team will compete at the highest level this summer. The first team list includes 103 teams representing 27 countries.
Robin Bailes, a Mercedes engineer, competed in Formula Student while at Oxford Brookes. “What other teams are doing in terms of engineering is very high-level,” he said, explaining why the competition is a good recruiting tool. “And in general, Student Formula has very open rules, so there’s innovation from students that you might not see in a traditional motorsport.”
Another helpful factor is that the team is based in an area called motorsports valley. It is about an hour’s drive from the headquarters of F1 teams including Red Bull, McLaren, Alpine, Mercedes-AMG, Cadillac, TGR Haas, Williams and Aston Martin.
They are all there for the same reason: they can go to Silverstone to test during their lunch break, which is what some OBR students have done this week, and next to them at the parts dealers, who sell to a group of students as well as Formula One professionals.
Sébastien Cavedon is OBRs operations manager. He came to the UK from Switzerland to do his master’s in automotive engineering and join the OBR team.
“Honestly, coming from a country where cars are not that big, then coming here where motorsport is big…it’s really life-changing,” he said.
#dont #university #racing #engineers #future