Cardiff Racing win award from IMechE

In July 2014 Cardiff Racing (Cardiff University’s Formula Student team) finished 3rd in the UK and 9th overall out of over 100 teams at the Formula Student UK event at Silverstone.

This is the team’s highest achievement to date with the team doing well on and off the track. As a result, Cardiff University alongside Bath and Oxford Brookes qualified to apply for a large financial award by the IMechE and were awarded £3000.

Last week Mr Anthony Chowings, a representative from the IMechE, visited Cardiff University to present the award and meet the team. The team intend to spend the money on the future development of the car, particularly to improve reliability and performance. Cardiff Racing has taken their aluminium honeycomb chassis as far as they can and are now looking at creating an innovative “flat pack” carbon sandwich panel chassis. Work has already been started by the Fourth Year Design team and Third Year students who are completing their projects and dissertations; the donated money will contribute towards the costs of carbon fibre tooling and further testing and development.

Cardiff Racing was the fastest team that did not run an aerodynamic package in 2014 at Silverstone. The competition is seeing more cars every year with large aerodynamic packages, but do they really work? Cardiff Racing are one of the first teams to carry out a full cost benefit analysis.  At the event points are awarded based on the cost of the car. The team are currently carrying out a full cost-benefit analysis to assess whether the deficit in cost points is worth the points gained from a faster car. The financial award is allowing the team to keep the 2014 car running to use for testing of aerodynamic parts. A running car also allows for data collection, an area that has significantly been developed in the last year. The team wish to run a number of sensors on the car so that data can be fed into the design for future cars.

Cardiff Racing will be attending 3 events this year and will be spending a whole month in Europe as part of a university initiative to encourage at least 20% of students to experience a month abroad as part of their university education by 2020. Cardiff Racing applied for a grant to take the car to 2 further events and visit other European Formula Student teams in August and September this year. The team were successful in obtaining the award, which will be used to help prepare the car and keep it running for a longer period than normal. It looks to be an exciting year for Cardiff Racing who are looking to improve on their performance from last year.