Sheffield Formula Racing

This year is a crucial year for the future of SFR and our ability to keep making cars and providing a valuable learning experience for our students. Whilst the initial plan was to build our first EV this year, budget cuts nationwide mean we are feeling this financial hit firsthand. Therefore we are competing with our last internal combustion car this year, and designing and testing our EV powertrain in the background in preparation for next year. We are asking for the generosity of the public to ensure we can keep competing at a high level in student motorsport. Click our JustGiving link below to learn more! https://www.justgiving.com/page/sheffield-formula-racing?utm_medium=fundraising&utm_content=page%2Fsheffield-formula-racing&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=pfp-share

Register your interest to join SFR! Click the following link to join the application process for our first year intake into the team. Best of luck everyone!
https://forms.gle/6sv9i8GniPWMseym9

Taking a look back to last week at Silverstone and our FSUK Competiton results.
Going into the long weekend, we knew it was going to be a difficult one, with the car having only started for the first time on Wednesday since its engine rebuild, delays throughout the year, no time on track, and parts still being finished, we had a lot in store for us. After many late nights, multiple suspension rebuilds and hours in the noise bay, we almost made it through scrutineering, just falling short when we ran out of time for the vital brake test.
Our efforts weren’t all wasted however, a big push for composites and our switch to a full carbon monocoque chassis meant we were the lightest car at the competition two years running, even with a full aero package. This meant that we did very well in Design, achieving 7th place, just shy of the finals. Our other static events were very strong, notably 4th in lap time sim, giving us an overall position of 24th despite not having been on track. SFR15 still got its chance to stretch its legs the other day at testing and we will be going back to test later this year. We will now be focusing our efforts on designing next year’s contender, SFR16, our first electric race car.
Thank you to everyone on the team who gave up all their free hours. Thank you to Kate, for all of your help this year. Thank you to all of our Sponsors who have contributed to our efforts this year.

It’s officially Race Week at Silverstone, the team will be arriving tomorrow to mark the start of FSUK2024 where we how SFR15 performs after a year and thousands of hours of work from all our talented engineers. A big thank you to everyone at the Uni and all of our sponsors who have helped us get to this point! We’ll be posting on all of our socials over the event weekend to keep everyone updated with our progress.🏁

This past Thursday the team was invited to Make a Mark Day hosted by Aston Martin Aramco Formula One Team. Hosted at their new Technology Campus in Silverstone, the event consisted of talking students through the routes into Formula 1 and the opportunities that they offer for placements and graduate positions. Overall, it was a very insightful and inspiring experience for all of our team that attended, thank you to Aston Martin F1 team for inviting us!

MANUFACTURING MONDAY: Recently our chassis team has finished the SES panel tests crucial for the UK Formula Student competition. SES stands for the Structural Equivalency Spreadsheet and is required from all teams to enter the competition. In our case, carbon fibre mockup panels are made which replicate the design of different areas of the chassis and are tested to destruction to determine the strength, stiffness and safety factor of the panels. With this task out of the way, we can validate the design of our chassis and move on to manufacturing.

Santas sleigh with a 2023 speed upgrade, merry Christmas from SFR

TECH TUESDAY: Over the past week, the chassis team has been putting in a massive shift to get our new chassis ready. This involves taking tooling board slabs, bonding them together with resin, then cutting and sanding them to shape. This is important as we will be sending them to our friends over at to be shaped according to the CAD we have designed. The next steps will be to lay the carbon up on top of these moulds to create our awesome carbon monocoque.

SFR15 DESIGN REVIEW: Today we hosted a design review for our last combustion engined car SFR15. Along with the current team, we had alumni come along to critique our new additions to the car and give us advice on how to better design and manufacture certain parts. This is vital for us as we are constantly iterating old designs as well as implementing new parts into our car such as our carbon wheels, ever-changing aero kits and chassis. We are also preparing for the future, expanding our electrical team and beginning the design for next year’s switch to an all electric vehicle, unchartered territory for SFR.

TECH TUESDAY: The Vehicle Dynamics team has been working on integrating new shocks into our decoupled suspension. By modelling the suspension in MATLAB, they have calculated the spring rates needed for the new shocks. These new shocks have a lot of adjustability including low- and high-speed compressions and rebound adjustment. This allows us to run slower spring rates on our car which is preferable.

TECH TUESDAY: One of our great engineers has been working on a new exhaust to make our engine, Sheila, run quieter. He’s spent the summer analysing noise data we’ve collected in testing to create a baffled muffler to pass crucial noise regulations whilst maintaining a free flow.