Cars anyone?
January has been a very busy month all round for the team. A lot of us had exams, which meant spending some time away from our projects, but we’re back now, getting on with the manufacture!
As you would have seen in Ross’ recent blog post, some of us went to the Autosport Show. It was my first time going and I really enjoyed it! Some members of the team got to meet John Surtees (F1 Champion 1964 and multiple champion on two wheels) and take a look some classic cars from different race formulae as well as new cars making their way into the industry. Ross and Jamie did a really good job with the Live Action show and there is some video footage somewhere of some of the action from the weekend!
Recently, I actually was able to meet with Formula Student team members from other universities and it was really nice to be able to compare experiences that we have had so far. Some worked in suspension, some worked in aerodynamics and one worked with electrics. It was a mix of Masters and Bachelors students, so some had the extra task of managing the team too. It was mentioned that our team were seen as ‘really professional and well managed’, which is a massive credit not only to us, but to the Masters students that put in the hard work to make sure everything goes as smoothly as it can.
But, the absolute highlight of the month goes to meeting the McLaren race team during their winter season team bonding sessions!! They were training with the Hertfordshire Mavericks Netball squad, who are a Superleague netball team (which is shown on Sky Sports) and we were invited to watch. It was really fun seeing them try something that was out of their comfort zone and they seemed to really enjoy the evening. We got a chance to meet some of them individually, including and Jono Brookes, who is a Chief Engineer and Kevin Magnussen, their new driver for the 2014 season. It was really good to be able to speak to people who are working in the sector that we wanted to go into and get some tips on what to do for future employment.
Our dissertation hand in dates are drawing closer and closer, so we are spending longer and longer in the Formula Student lab we have here at the university. I’ve lost count how many times I have stayed past 10pm to finish fine tuning FEA (Finite Element Analysis) and CATIA (design software programme) work! A lot of us have started the report as well, which has a limit of 50 pages so you can imagine how many words that will take!
Finally, thanks to one of our team members, there will be some individual photos of all the team going up on the website soon, so you will finally be able to put faces to the names!
That’s all for this month, but look out on Facebook and Twitter (as well as the website) as there are a lot of activities that will (hopefully) be taking place soon!!
Stephanie Alexander.