\n<\/p>\n
At the Oxford Brookes Headington campus, more than 100 students are busy building the fastest, best designed race car possible for this year\u2019s Formula Student competition.<\/p>\n
Oxford Brookes Racing (OBR) is the UK\u2019s most prestigious Formula Student team. They\u2019ve won more design awards than any UK university, and frequently occupy the international race\u2019s top spots.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Oxford Brookes Racing has won more design awards than any other UK university.<\/span> Photograph: Graeme Robertson\/The Guardian<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of the coverage on TV is based around the drivers, but not really the actual engineers,\u201d said Thomas Cawdery, a team manager and third year motorsports technology student. \u201cThis is what you don\u2019t see in Formula One. The engineers who make it happen.\u201d<\/p>\n Their team is entirely run by students. Across their two buildings you can see scores of people hard at work \u2013 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.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cThey\u2019re the same if not more complex than Formula One cars,\u201d Cawdery said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n <\/span>Oxford Brookes Racing team test drive an entry for the Formula Student race<\/span><\/p>\n In some aspects, OBR\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the industry, a lot of women find themselves the only woman on their team,\u201d she said. \u201cHere it\u2019s different. We have a lot more women and a lot of women in leadership roles. It\u2019s really encouraging.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Emma Deery, a first-year mechanical engineering student.<\/span> Photograph: Graeme Robertson\/The Guardian<\/p>\n With a tiny fraction of a Formula One team\u2019s size and an even smaller budget, what Formula Student manages to achieve grabs the attention of big industry names. \u201cThere are two really innovative forms of motorsport left,\u201d the legendary former team principal Ross Brawn once said. \u201cOne of them is Formula One and the other one is Formula Student.\u201d<\/p>\n The OBR team will compete for the top spot this summer. The preliminary team list includes 103 teams representing 27 countries.<\/p>\n Robin Bailes, an engineer at Mercedes, competed in Formula Student while he was at Oxford Brookes. \u201cWhat some teams create in terms of engineering is very high level,\u201d he said, explaining why the competition is a useful recruitment tool. \u201cAnd generally speaking, Formula Student has very open rules, so innovation comes through from students that you might not see in traditional motorsport.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Oxford Brookes Racing team straight-line test driving their car<\/span><\/p>\n Another helpful factor is that the team is based in an area nicknamed motorsports valley. They\u2019re about an hour\u2019s drive from the headquarters of F1 teams including Red Bull, McLaren, Alpine, Mercedes-AMG, Cadillac, TGR Haas, Williams and Aston Martin.<\/p>\n They\u2019re all there for the same reason: they can nip over to Silverstone to run some tests during their lunch break, which is what some OBR students did this week, and their close to the parts suppliers, who sell to the student team as well as Formula One professionals.<\/p>\n S\u00e9bastien Cavedon is OBRs\u2019s operations manager. He came to the UK from Switzerland to do his master\u2019s in motorsports engineering and join the OBR team.<\/p>\n \u201cHonestly, being from a country where motorsport isn\u2019t that big of a deal, then coming here where motorsports is huge \u2026 it\u2019s really life changing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At the Oxford Brookes Headington campus, more than 100 students are busy building the fastest, best designed race car possible for this year\u2019s Formula Student competition. Oxford Brookes Racing (OBR) is the UK\u2019s most prestigious Formula Student team. They\u2019ve won more design awards than any UK university, and frequently occupy the international race\u2019s top spots.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47900,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[1326,4729,3953,2284,2475,781],"class_list":{"0":"post-47899","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-dont","9":"tag-engineers","10":"tag-formula","11":"tag-future","12":"tag-race","13":"tag-university"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47899\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/47900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}