‘This is what you don’t see in Formula One. The engineers who make it happen,’ says Thomas Cawdery, team manager. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The GuardianView image in fullscreen‘This is what you don’t see in Formula One. The engineers who make it happen,’ says Thomas Cawdery, team manager. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The GuardianOxford Brookes’ student racing team target Silverstone win For this year’s Formula Student competition, the UK’s most prestigious university team are designing the fastest race car possible
At the Oxford Brookes Headington campus, more than 100 students are busy building the fastest, best designed race car possible for this year’s Formula Student competition.
Oxford Brookes Racing (OBR) is the UK’s most prestigious Formula Student team. They’ve won more design awards than any UK university, and frequently occupy the international race’s top spots.
But the stakes go beyond the competition, held every yearat Silverstone. With several alumni in every Formula One team, success there is what gets them noticed by the industry, where a handful of engineering jobs can have upwards of 10,000 applicants.
View image in fullscreenOxford Brookes Racing is the UK’s most prestigious Formula Student team, with more design awards than any UK university. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian“A lot of the coverage on TV is based around the drivers, but not really the actual engineers,” said Thomas Cawdery, a team manager and third year motorsports technology student. “This is what you don’t see in Formula One. The engineers who make it happen.”
Their team is entirely run by students. Across their two buildings you can see scores of people hard at work – in one room they are cutting and shaping a carbon fibre chassis by hand, in another, the heat from computers running simulations makes the air uncomfortably hot. Students of all ages are teaching and learning from one another.
Actual Formula One cars have much more power than the students are allowed, for safety reasons. But in terms of complexity, the cars are very similar. “They’re the same if not more complex than Formula One cars,” Cawdery said.
In fact, they can do some things that Formula One cars are not allowed to do, such as torque vectoring, which is where they power each wheel with its own motor to help their driver twist into corners. It also helps with traction and wet weather driving.
Oxford Brookes Racing team take their car for a spin – loopIn some aspects, OBR’s engineering team surpasses industry expectations. For example, this new generation of engineers has a much better gender balance than the industry, where in most teams just over 10% engineers are women.
Emma Deery is a first-year mechanical engineering student, sanding components with a group of engineers while motorsports plays on the TV in front of them.
“In the industry, a lot of women find themselves the only woman on their team” she said. “Here it’s different. We have a lot more women and a lot of women in leadership roles. It’s really encouraging.”
View image in fullscreenEmma Deery, a first-year mechanical engineering student. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The GuardianWith a tiny fraction of an F1 team’s size and an even smaller budget, what they manage to achieve grabs the attention of big industry names. “There are two really innovative forms of motorsport left,” former F1 managing director Ross Brawn once said. “One of them is Formula One and the other one is Formula Student.”
The OBR team will compete for the top spot this summer. The preliminary team list includes 103 teams representing 27 different countries.
Robin Bailes, now an engineer at Mercedes, competed in Formula Student while he was at Oxford Brookes. “What some teams create in terms of engineering is very high level,” he said, explaining why the competition is a useful recruitment tool. “And generally speaking, Formula Student has very open rules, so innovation comes through from students that you might not see in traditional motor sport.”
Oxford Brookes Racing team take their car for a spin – loopAnother helpful factor is that the team is based in an area nicknamed motorsports valley. They’re about an hour’s drive from the headquarters of various F1 teams, including Red Bull, Lotus, McLaren, Alpine, Mercedes-AMG, Cadillac, TGR Haas, Williams and Aston Martin.
They’re all there for the same reason: you can nip over to Silverstone to run some tests during your lunch break, which is what some OBR students did this week, and you’re close to the parts suppliers, who sell to the student team as well as F1 professionals. Sébastien Cavedon is OBRs’s operations manager. He came to the UK from Switzerland to do his master’s in motorsports engineering and join the Oxford Brookes Racing team.
“Honestly,” he said, “being from a country where motorsport isn’t that big of a deal, then coming here where motorsports is huge … it’s really life changing.”
