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LUMotorsport is made up of a number of students studying various degrees from Automotive Engineering to Business Management. Unlike other Formula Student teams, LUMotorsport is entirely organised and run by the student members, with guidance from the academic and technical staff only when required.
This means that the team is not only responsible for producing a new car every year, but also all finances, health and safety, and the business side of running a motorsport team. This tough task is made even more difficult by the fact that all of the work must be done around the team members on going degree courses. After about 8 months of build and 1 months of testing the team will then compete against other universities in the Formula Student Competition.
Held in a series of international locations, this design competition challenges Formula Student teams from all over the world to put their car and their team through a series of tough challenges. From an endurance 22km stint that tests the car's reliability to a series of events that test the team's knowledge of the car's design and cost, Formula Student events always prove to be enriching, social and challenging experiences.
After a year of designing, manufacturing, splicing, layups, component sourcing, and many late nights, the LUMotorsports team travelled down to Silverstone, on the 17th to 21st of July, to pit their 2024 challenger against other university teams from around the UK and worldwide.
Launched to an audience of sponsors, alumni and university faculty a couple of weeks prior, LFS24 looked the part, with a sloping nose, large wings and wide sidepods, draped in the iconic pink and purple of LUM, it had presence amongst it’s competitors, but FSUK isn’t a beauty contest, so the team needed to use what they’ve learnt and worked on to demonstrate their technical knowledge and justify the design decisions taken.
On the dynamics front, FSUK 2024 proved to be an uphill battle for the team throughout the weekend, arriving with the car on Thursday, to allow for further on car electronics work, we knew it would take a real push to get the vehicle looms finished and functioning on car to get the technical and low voltage scrutineering signed off. Our electronics team worked around the clock to connect, splice and wrap the car’s looms while constructing the various electronic boxes they terminate to, a monumental effort that was just too much to ask in the time frame given. Hindsight is easy to get hung up on, but looking back, the LFS24 car was a victim of overcomplication, relying on 3 looms for the whole car and having multiple functions on individual PCBs means when things go wrong, the diagnostics is that much harder.
The team’s lack of dynamic success also came down to plain old back luck. Thursday morning it was looking like the accumulator would cruise through scrutineering in under 2 hours, the scrutineers impressed at the accumulator’s neat packaging and clean fit and finish, but the smooth ride was cut short meters from the finish line when the accumulator refused to charge.
Initially the HV team believed this problem was caused by a snapped connector on the pre-charge board, an easy fix, but after replacing the broken connector, the accumulator still refused to charge. For the HV team the rest of the weekend was spent working through the accumulator with the scrutineers to attempt to diagnose the cause of this issue to no avail, a disappointment after all the work that has gone into the workability and reliability of the accumulator this year that saw it successfully charging a few months back.
With the Dynamic events out of reach for another year, the team’s success rested on their statics performance. The slot for business presentation came on Thursday morning where our head of business held their own against much larger teams to gain an impressive 9th place only a few points off of the final, and sizeable points haul. Cost and design documents had been put together in preparation for the early Friday morning slots and representatives of the team justified the LFS24 design from a function and cost standpoint.
The capability of the team members was reflected in the feedback, highlighting their engineering competence and knowledge. Thanks to this the team achieved a respectable 13th place in design and 14th place in cost. All in all this meant the team gained 306.2 out of the possible 420 points from static events, an impressive performance, once again showing the capability of the LUMotorsport members.
Thanks to the strong statics results, LUMotorsport achieved their highest position since the move to electric in 2020 with 14th place overall, beating half of the teams that managed to compete in dynamic events. A result as strong as this while missing out on the dynamics events points haul is a testament to the countless hours of hard work put in by all team members and indicates the potential going forwards, with a high top ten finish an almost certain when able to compete dynamically.
We give a massive thank you to all out sponsors and faculty who help make these cars possible and allow us to greatly expand our real world engineering knowledge while doing something we love and hope you continue to join us on our journey towards the top of the FSUK leader board.
For more information on our Team Members list, please visit our website.