City University Team at the Formula One Student Competition at Silverstone....
Students who take part in this often end up working in F1....
I have been mentoring the City University team over the last year and during July the International UK finals were held at Silverstone in the week after the British Formula 1 Grand Prix. The annual event is sponsored by Ross Brawn OBE and run by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers . This year was the 19th birthday of the competition and there were over 3,500 students taking part. Universities from 33 Countries entered the competition . There were 114 entrants in the class that City University entered.
Students who take part in this competition often end up working in F1 and at the world’s leading engineering firms . The competition offers the students practical experience which is so often important in the professional world.
The car design has to be a production prototype for a single-seat race car for autocross or sprint racing. The target customer for the final product is a non-professional racer , with high standards of performance and value for money.
The City car design is innovative and utilises a monocoque design and a very light weight specialised lightweight competition Motocross powertrain. The team had to design and build the car. 
This included manufacturing a number of components. Detailed drawings and business presentations and costings had to be produced and presented to the judges .
The car also had to go through rigorous scrutineering by experienced engineers from the likes of Red Bull, Jaguar Land Rover, and Torotrak . After passing scrutineering there were two days of performance testing and endurance racing .
This year’s team completed all the scrutineering process successfully, but unfortunately could not complete the track testing because of a fuel system fault that developed.
The progress of the car build being explained ....
Included are photographs showing the progress of the build of the car, the launch presentation at City where I am explaining some of the design details to Second Warden David Johnson - and the complete car after scrutineering.
Next year’s team will design and build a new monocoque and incorporate a number of new design features. I am very keen that the team gets greater marketing and promotional exposure and an increased level of sponsorship support. The top teams such as Hertfordshire, Bath and Oxford Brooks have strong sponsorship backing, so any connection we can help the team develop would be very useful . One initiative they intend to undertake next year will be to exhibit the car at some hill climb events such as Shelsley Walsh , Chateau Impney and Prescott.
