UC Motorsport students take Formula race car to Melbourne

UC Motorsport students take Formula race car to Melbourne

Inspired by racing legend John Britten, UC Motorsport students hope they have the world-beating formula as they head to Melbourne to race a car they built from scratch.

The team of University of Canterbury (UC) students will be competing in Formula SAE, against 30 university teams from New Zealand, Australia, Japan, India, Europe and America.

UC Motorsport (UCM) team principal Peter Sise says that while the goal is to win, the project also provides students with real-world engineering experience.
“It is much more complex than any other project that the students will complete at uni and it’s comparable in scale to projects they’ll tackle in the workforce.”

This year, UC Motorsport’s race car has been painted in the blue and hot-pink colours of the Britten V1000 as a tribute to Canterbury racing legend John Britten, on the 20th anniversary of his death. The UCM race car was built in the workshop where John Britten created his record-beating motorbike.

There are more than 50 students from a range of disciplines involved in the UCM project, the majority undergraduate engineers. Supported by three UC staff, 32 members of the UCM team are heading to Melbourne.

Formula SAE is not just about who can race the fastest. Different events within the competition test factors such as endurance, acceleration and efficiency.
The students also have to ‘pitch’ their car to a mock panel of investors, giving a full business proposal with cost summaries and a price, if it were to be mass produced.

This will be the third year a UCM team has competed in Formula SAE, and the students are learning more each time, Sise says.

In 2014 the team was “plagued by reliability issues” so this year an aggressive design and build schedule was created which had the car built by early July. Since then the team have been testing and perfecting it.

“Achieving this has allowed us five months of testing before competition to iron out reliability issues and given us an excellent shot at success,” Sise says.

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