Events
Over the past couple of weeks, we have been liaising with teams regarding the effect of COVID-19 on your projects. As social distancing and lockdown measures filtered around the world, your optimism and commitment to amending your critical paths in order to make it to a July event has been inspirational. We have shared some of our ideas for a modified 2020 competition and you have provided valuable feedback, as well as contributing thoughts of your own in a rousing display of creativity and spirit in a time of adversity.
The organising committee reviewed all of your feedback, consulted extensively with other similar event organisers and continues to monitor and be guided by the global impact and projections for the spread of COVID-19. A decision has now been unanimously reached to cancel the live event at Silverstone, scheduled to take place 22-26 July this year.
The primary reason for this is that we don’t feel it’s responsible to be asking anyone to prioritise building a race car, which is very much a collaborative project, at this time. The second reason is the uncertainty around how long this is going to last and the consensus that mass gatherings with an international delegation, even if deemed safe, are unlikely to return to favour as early as July.
We know that you will join us in being desperately sad that we do not all get to come together as a community and physically share in the result of months of hard work, but we are not defeated.
We are currently planning a number of ways to honour your efforts and ensure the core purpose of Formula Student, education and real-world experience, is still possible whilst ensuring that any preparatory work required to complete the events can be done remotely but collaboratively, from your individual locations.These include:
- Virtual FS-AI competition
- Virtual Business Presentation, Engineering Design and Cost & Manufacturing presentations
- Scrutineering documents feedback
- Virtual racing competition
The organising committee has split off into sub-groups to investigate these options and we will continue to consult with teams as ideas are collated, to ensure we find solutions that are achievable for as many as possible.
We know that you will have lots of questions and we invite you to email fs@imeche.org or use the FSQD (question type ‘Other’). We will respond as quickly as we can but do bear with us as we do not have all the answers ourselves just yet. Here are some things we can advise at this stage:
- Document submission deadlines for the Design Report and Design Spec Sheet are, at this point, unchanged
- The Cost Report format may need to change for a virtual event so we have removed the online BOM and Cost Report from the document submission tables for now
- Scrutineering document submission deadlines have been removed for now and we are working on revised absolute deadlines
- There is no viable option to postpone the 2020 live event. The next live FS event is planned for 2021
- We will confirm what is happening about entry fees as soon as possible. We do not yet have a clear picture of whether any of the considerable costs already incurred by the IMechE are refundable or transferable to 2021
- There will be a rules freeze for the 2021 competition meaning your designs for
2020 can be carried over to next year
- Team members who graduate in 2020 will be permitted to take part in the 2021
competition if jobs / further studies allow
You must continue to follow social distancing instructions from your governments and
the advice of your public health institutions. Until any such restrictions are relaxed, we
would like to remind you all of the following:
- Please do not conduct face to face meetings as a team to work on your cars or on
your projects
- Only conduct project work which can be completed remotely but collaboratively,
using the abundance of online platforms available
As mentioned above, we will be liaising with teams throughout the process of working
out what the virtual events will look like with a view to having everything confirmed after
Easter.
Please continue to do your part to keep yourselves, your colleagues and your families
and friends safe.
Lucy