Lane Motorsport continues to support a number of UK University based teams of budding car designers with exclusive pricing on connectors and free technical advice to support their joint goal of participating in the Formula Student UK (FSUK) challenge.
To meet the challenge teams are tasked to design a single seat racing car to compete in the FSUK competition which culminates in a competitive event at the Silverstone racing circuit. These student- designed and built racing cars may also be entered into similar races around Europe for international competitions.
FSUK is Europe’s most established educational engineering competition celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2023 and is a testing ground for the next gen of world-class engineers. Intended to encourage more young people to take up a career in engineering, there are now over one hundred university teams taking part every year.
The project usually forms part of a degree-level project and is viewed by the motorsport industry as the standard for engineering graduates to meet, transitioning them from university to the workplace. It is a gold standard for real-world engineering experience, combining practical engineering experience with soft skills including business planning and project management.
One entrant into the challenge supported by Lane Motorsport is the Loughborough University Formula Student Team (LUMotorsport). They report that overall, 2022 has been a successful year and that issues with the manufacturability of the previous car had led to a large design change at the beginning of the year, which the team took in their stride. Attendance at FSUK had been the first in-person event for many members of the team due to earlier covid restrictions. The aims of the team going into FSUK were to gain knowledge of EV scrutineering, verify the design is legal and transfer as much knowledge to younger members as possible.
Due to the fundamental design changes during the development of the current LFS22 racing car, the team prioritised preparing the new sections of the vehicle for FSUK scrutineering and therefore sadly fell short of target in other areas. This did, however, give the team great experience of design, cost management and business static events. The new crop of students is now hard at work making sure the LFS23 car is very competitive for the 2023 competition season.
Lane Motorsport is a specialist division of Lane Electronics and was set up eight years ago with the aspiration to become one of the leading names in the support and supply of electrical connectors and accessories to the Motorsport industry in all its forms.
Peter Costin, Business Development Manager for Lane Motorsport, says: “Lane Electronics is a family run electrical connector distributor established for 60 years and it is part of our ethos to support both our local community as well as the next generation of engineers, vital to the continued growth of our economy. Having received several requests for sponsorship from universities participating in the annual Formula Student competition we made the decision to support all the FSUK teams with our best pricing for connectors and accessories and offer access to our knowledge base of connector technologies to ensure all applicants had the same resources.”
