IMechE celebrates its 26th annual Formula Student competition

The Formula Student competition challenges university students from around the world to design, build and race a single seater race car.

The season follows the university year, and ends in a finals event comprised of formal presentations of the teams’ engineering knowledge and on-track events to demonstrate the speed, handling and reliability of their finished vehicles.

This year, Australia’s Edith Cowan Racing were crowned the grand champions of the overall Formula Student Class event. The team scored 915 points out of a possible 1000, and also took home the coveted Engineering Design trophy in addition to their Sprint and Endurance wins from the on-track events.

Cardiff University, who won the competition in 2017, secured second place, while Spain’s University of the Basque Country came third overall.

The teams were judged by industry experts across key criteria, including engineering design, cost and manufacturing, lap times, technical inspections, acceleration and fuel economy. 

Elsewhere in the competition, the team from Cairo University retained their Concept Class Engineering Design win - where teams are judged on their project plan or parts rather than a completed vehicle - while Glasgow University secured the overall Concept Class win following strong performances across all the presentation-based events.

IMechE said that it was committed to further improving sustainability at this year’s event, partnering again with Motorsport UK, the competition’s key sustainability partner, and Coryton Fuels, who provided sustainable fuels to all competitors.

The SUSTAIN Racing E85 and 95 RON E10 fuels offered an 80 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions for the combustion vehicles at the competition, when compared to fossil fuel-based equivalents.

Coryton said that both fuels are second-generation advanced biofuels, created from agricultural waste, and were designed to be a drop-in solution so that the student teams didn’t need to modify their existing engines to realise their benefits.

The FS-AI competition was also improved this year, with 20 teams participating in the autonomous vehicles challenge – the most number of student teams seen since its inception in 2018.

FS-AI is comprised of two different competition classes: Automated Driving System (ADS), where teams compete with an autonomous car that they have developed and built completely themselves, and the Dynamic Driving Task (DDT), where they can borrow the Autonomous Driving Systems – Dedicated Vehicle  (ADS-DV) which has been developed exclusively for the competition.

Due to renewed funding from the Centre for Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV), IMechE said that the number of drone vehicles supplied doubled from two to four vehicles, which allowed more students to engage with the FS-AI competition. The four cars were controlled by autonomous navigation and driving systems developed by the university teams, which were tested through on-track obstacle courses.   

Edinburgh University secured the overall win across the FS-AI competition, while ECE Paris were awarded the Real-World AI presentation event in their first year competing.

IMechE said that the applications process for teams for Formula Student 2025 will start in in late Autumn 2024, with official registration beginning in December 2024.

More information on the event, and the full list of this year’s award winners, can be found here.

The Student Engineer is a special channel of The Engineer aimed at educating and inspiring engineering undergraduates about the career opportunities in engineering and also offering practical advice on how they can access these opportunities. 

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