After a virtual event in 2020 and a stripped-back hybrid event in 2021, the Silverstone paddock is once again bustling with teams competing in a full-scale Formula Student, as the chair of the organising committee reflects on the return of the IMechE student event.
“Last year was reasonably busy, but there were only UK teams. Now we’ve got the international contingent back, which is always good to see,” he says. The international teams bring “different ideas, different ways of doing things,” he adds.
Dr Deakin helped bring the competition to the UK after starting a Leeds University team in 1995, which competed in the US. A lot has changed between the first iteration in 1998 and the 25th annual event.
“The level of sophistication has changed, going from a lot of carburettors in the very early years to everyone [using] fuel injection and that sort of stuff,” he says, speaking on Friday (8 July). “There were some monocoques in the early years, but now there are a lot of monocoque cars. Teams have tried active suspension, CBTs and all those sorts of things as well, so lots of different technologies have been tried, and some of them are quite complex to do in a year for a student project. Some of them succeed very well, some fail. It’s part of the competition.”
The changes go far beyond the evolution of the internal combustion (IC) cars. The event, which concluded on Sunday, saw more than half of the teams use electric powertrains.
“We’re hoping to go more and more towards the EV (electric vehicle) side of things, because that’s what industry wants, it wants engineers with that kind of experience,” he says.
“It’s a different technology to get used to. You can’t just go to a scrapyard and pull an engine out of a broken motorcycle these days – you’ve got to design your own battery system and talk to a number of electric motor companies to select an electric motor, and then work out how to fit that all into the car with all the control systems and everything else.”
‘The future is electric’
The University of Nottingham are relative veterans in the EV class, taking part for six years. After winning best EV in 2021, they added a new chassis and upgraded the inverters for a future move to four-wheel-drive (4WD).
The philosophy of the team is “making it reliable, making it work,” says deputy team leader Jhotinder Mahapatra. “In the past we’ve tried to be really ambitious, go 4WD, everything custom-built, but we realised that actually the most we can learn is by actually getting onto the track, getting data, seeing what works, seeing what doesn’t.”
The lessons learned from each year are documented and shared with new team members, and other universities are now asking for advice as the shift to electric accelerates.
“We’ve had other teams coming to us and saying ‘We’re looking to transfer, what set-up do you have, what safety equipment do we need, how can we transfer and be in the position that you’re in?’ It’s great to be leaders in that sense,” says Mahapatra, speaking in the team’s garage before the weekend’s track events. “The future is electric.”
Getting started with AI
This year’s event also saw more autonomous FS-AI teams than ever before, with more than a dozen universities deciding to take on a new challenge. Some brought their own car and software, while others added their own software to a base model developed by the IMechE.
Formula Trinity from Dublin took that approach for their first year in FS-AI. “We took the plunge at the start of the year,” says head of engineering Katherine Hardgrave, speaking next to the AI practice zone as the team tunes the system. “We know we’re not going to win this year, but we jumped right in and we’re all learning so much, it’s really accelerated everyone’s learning.”
Going autonomous creates a whole raft of new challenges that IC and EV teams do not have to tackle, but Trinity faced some other hurdles. Getting access to the car “would be a nightmare” in Ireland because of logistics and Brexit-related restrictions, says team member Daniel Flood, severely limiting the amount of testing they could do. The University of Edinburgh stepped in to help, providing access to the car for a few days of testing.
The Trinity team, which clinched the Real World AI award on Saturday (9 July), aims to buy and use its own Lidar sensor next year, with ambitions of developing their own car in a few years.
Hydrogen combustion
After more than 20 years developing and entering vehicles into the competition, Team Bath Racing entered their final IC car after a number of awards throughout the years.
“The reasons behind it are twofold really. Firstly, the university is wanting to move away from fossil fuels,” says Kevin Robinson, faculty advisor and senior lecturer in mechanical engineering at the University of Bath. “It’s also a reflection of the fact that some of the competitions are trying to steer towards much more electric, autonomous driving… We already have a sister electric team, and we felt the time was right to hand it over to them.”
Rather than simply retiring, Robinson and colleague Geraint Owen now have a new, ambitious project for students to take part in – breaking the world land speed record for a hydrogen combustion engine car.
“We’re about four or five months into it at the moment, we have a design, we’ve been through the process with the same stream of students coming through, the automotive, mech eng. students, and we have a design. We’re at the point now where we really want to consider ‘Do we build what they designed, or do we have another design iteration?’ so we’re not quite sure how we’re going to play that yet… We’re quite excited about it.”
Get to grips with the future factory at Advanced Manufacturing (18-22 July), part of the Engineering Futures webinar series. Register for FREE today.
Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.