The UK Formula Student competition celebrated its 25th anniversary this year. The competition challenges student teams to produce a working prototype of a single-seat race car, with a combination of formal presentations and on-track dynamic events used to test their engineering skills.

Despite conditions getting increasingly wetter at Silverstone throughout the week, the teams braved the rain and slippery conditions to post their best times across multiple races. The rain lessened by Sunday and the track eventually dried, leading to an exciting Endurance event at Copse corner that also featured a parade with previous entrants from Glasgow, Aberdeen and Birmingham to commemorate the 25th anniversary.

For the last three years IPG Automotive UK have been proud to be a sponsor of the competition and to donate complimentary CarMaker licenses as part of their virtual Lap Time Simulation (LTS) competition. Each team can submit a car which they can easily develop, adapt and improve in CarMaker’s virtual simulation environment. The course this year had been adapted to test their cars around a new track designed by our engineers to stretch their vehicles dynamics, the winner being the team with the best lap time.

Our congratulations go to UGR – University Glasgow Racing for winning the FS Class and NUST Formula Student Team – Pakistan for winning the Concept Class.

Our IPG Automotive UK team had an extremely busy stand at Silverstone this year showcasing their Static Driving Simulator which was pre-loaded with the team’s final submission LTS competition cars, all ready for them to drive! All the teams’ enthusiasm and interest in using CarMaker was really encouraging and the IPG Automotive UK team had some great conversations in demonstrating the improvements and tweaks they could make to improve performance.

The winners of the overall competition were the Italian team from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, with their combustion entry running on E85 fuel. Staffordshire University were equally delighted with their runner-up position and Oxford Brookes University clinched third place while retaining the coveted Engineering Design for a second year running. Egypt's Ain Shams University also showed excellent development year on year by securing the Concept Class Overall Winner for 2023.

The students we spoke to last week, the energy they brought to the competition is all the proof we needed to know that the future of engineering is very bright indeed!

The full list of award winners and scores are available on the Formula Student website.