Cardiff Racing achieve great results at Formula Student 2020

Undergraduates from Cardiff triumph at this year’s Formula Student – the world’s largest student motorsport competition - winning fourth place in the virtual dynamic events.

Formula Student, which is run by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, challenges student teams to use their creativity and technical skills to design, build and race single-seater cars in a series of events.

This year saw the live competition at Silverstone become a completely online event with more than 80 teams taking part from across the world.

The hard work and dedication of Cardiff Racing and Cardiff Autonomous Racing (CAR), previously known as Cardiff Racing Driverless, throughout the year, paid off and they performed well in all dynamic and static challenges.

Cardiff Racing achieved an impressive fourth place in the dynamic events overall, which were taken online with lap-time simulations using multi-body dynamics model and recreations of the courses used at Silverstone. This included the quickest time in the skidpad event and coming second in the sprint event by just 0.06 seconds.

The team also achieved a good position in the static events, where they were required to justify their design choices and methodology, present costing and manufacturing plans, and a business case. This was particularly impressive because the event was led by third-year students this year - normally fourth-year students who completed the design would take the lead.

Cardiff Autonomous Racing achieved fifth place overall in the dynamic driving task class where the team were tasked with developing the sensing, software, and control for an autonomous vehicle. The team were required to complete several dynamic and static events and performed well across all events, achieving fourth places in both the design judging and the simulation events.

The staff at the School of Engineering would like to take this opportunity to congratulate all the students involved in both teams for such a great set of results, which have come from a lot of hard work in a difficult environment.

For students at Cardiff, the Formula Student competition has been a year-round, extracurricular activity for dedicated individuals from various disciplines. It provides students with the opportunity to apply the skills and knowledge from their degree in a real-world engineering project.