The design of the car is currently being finalised and we will be heading into the manufacturing phase very soon. With the help of all of the team members, we have been able to improve our time management. As a team, we are on schedule and are not as late as we were last year in terms of the designing and manufacturing of the car.

Here is a newly finished render of the car. 

Silverstone 2019 is getting closer and closer, especially after we entered the Formula Student competition as Class 1 division  – where the team is required to participate in both, static and dynamic events. 

This is a great achievement to be very proud of, therefore, congratulation to all our teams! Keep up the great work done so far.

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In the meantime, re-watch the Silverstone 2018 Highlights video here. 

The first semester saw the revitalisation of the Queen Mary Formula Student team: new team, new car and new branding. The Freshers Fair saw record breaking over 300 people sign up, with over 100 applications. Only 25 new members were selected in a tough application pool – all in the aim to get the car qualified for the competition.

27th October 2018 saw the testing of the old car at Bruntingthorpe Airfield to develop the new car. You can watch our car run for the first time here.

Coming to Silverstone to participate in the Formula Student competition not only has been a wonderful adventure for us as a team but also an important learning experience. We have accomplished to build our second car ever, which is 100kg lighter than our first car, and passed 4 out of 6 scrutineering checks: Tech, Chassis, Safety and Tilt. The team also achieved 35th place for the Business Presentation

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Even though we were not able to participate in the dynamic events, our second car demonstrates how much the team has progressed since designing and building the first ever car last year. We are excited to come back to Silverstone next year and prove that success is a series of small wins as we go forwards.

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Check out the QMFS Silverstone 2018 Highlights video here:

On Saturday 14th July, whilst the engineers were working hard in the pits our Marketing Team and Head of Operations were invited to an event hosted by Santander for all FS teams with a University link to the corporation in Silverstone’s elusive BRDC Clubhouse. The event allowed us to network with not only other teams but also industry experts from places such as Mahindra tyres.

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At the event, the team got to listen to a panel discussion made up of many industry experts hosted by none other than Sky F1’s David Croft. Along with doing the Panel discussion 2009 Formula 1 World Champion Jenson Button gave an exclusive interview with Croft followed by a Q&A, and even answered QMFS’s question on the progression of new media from an F1 drivers perspective. 

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After the Q&A session we met with Matt Hutnell, director of Santander Universities UK, who passed on our information to Chand Meghji who maintains a relationship with Santander at QMUL. Thank you to everyone who helped arrange such a unique event during the Silverstone weekend!

Another important aspect of attending the Formula Student competition is the chance to meet up with other teams from all around the world. We had already established relationships with other teams through our social media channels but seeing each other face to face is always more fun!

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Among many others we want to give out special shoutouts to Align "Waffle" Racing from University of Agder, Norway, and thank them once again for the tasty treats, and to Edinburgh University Formula Student for the help that we received from you! 

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All in all, shoutout to all FS2018 teams that took part at Silverstone this year and congratulations to all the winners!

See you all again next year! 

On Friday 29th June 2018, our newly manufactured exhaust manifold and collector finally arrived! The design was made by Ahmed Abou Sherif, Deputy Head of Powertrain, using SolidWorks and was virtually tested with the flow simulation function of the same programme. The exhaust manifold and collector were then manufactured from stainless steel and the bends of the manifold were formed using a CNC Mandrel Bender.

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If you want to see more of our new exhaust, add us on Snapchat as we will be posting specifically about it in the next few days in our Snapchat Story.

It is also a perfect way of keeping up with the team when we will head to Silverstone next week!

Add us as queenmaryfs

In the lead up to Silverstone, our team drivers have been selected.

This year’s drivers were picked after the team did a number of Go Karting socials at TeamSport Docklands. After analysing lap times and consistency, the drivers were chosen based on their performance. 

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Congratulations to this year’s four drivers Ruben Lambert-Garcia from Powertrain, Tasha Wrigley from Marketing, Tom May from Electronics and Joan Queralto from Chassis!

Well done to all the drivers and good luck at Silverstone!

We are very excited to reveal our brand new steering wheel that was introduced in our previous newsletter!

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The construction of the wheel has recently been completed by the Electronics Team as it was announced in our mid-June newsletter (scroll over to the previous page to revisit the article). 

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In order to celebrate this, Nina Mangold and Kristiina Saarinen from the Marketing Team made a video showing the design and construction process of the steering wheel.

It has been uploaded to our YouTube channel, enjoy and don’t forget to give us thumbs up and subscribe!

In the run up to Silverstone, the Powertrain Team has been working on some very exciting projects.

Following the completion of CAD designs, our custom fuel tank has been fabricated in-house to optimise capacity and minimise sloshing. 

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The fuel tank is currently in our welding shop and is getting assembled to go on the car. The bending process of the stainless tubing for the exhaust manifold has begun and the exhaust system is scheduled to be assembled by the end of the month. Whilst the SLS printing of the glass reinforced nylon intake manifold is in process, a prototype has just been completed with ABS. 

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The engine has met the new chassis and the cooling system has been installed, along with the engine’s loom, ahead of the scheduled engine testing.

The construction of the steering wheel has  recently been finished and  the significant improvements to last year’s design have come to life. This year, the front of the steering wheel is made from carbon fibre and the rear enclosure is made from a single aluminium billet.

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A full colour 4.3 inch LCD screen displays key information to the driver. The steering wheel also houses two paddle shifters for changing gears without letting go of the wheel, giving the driver more control over the car. For more details, one of the articles included in our newsletter for January thoroughly described the design completed by the Electronics Team  (if you wish to revisit the article, scroll over to page 5 to the January newsletter section).

Racecar Engineering is a leading publication by Formula Student covering all aspects of motorsport technology and engineering. As part of this year’s Communication Award competition, they have provided Formula Student teams with the opportunity to set up their own profiles on Racecar Engineering Student Zone.

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Queen Mary Formula Student’s profile  went live earlier this month and our application for the Engagement, Outreach and Communication Award was submitted on June 16th. Our profile can be found under the ‘Class One’ category and it consists of team information such as our car number 21, contact details, link to the website and links to our social media channels.

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In addition, the site includes team news on our outreach activities and engineering updates. It also features images, videos and links to external publications. The profile will be updated frequently until Silverstone, so stay tuned and  click the link below to keep up to date with our progress. 

Our team was excited to take part in the Festival of Communities in our local Stepney Green Park on May 12th. We had a stall showcasing last year’s car as part of a photo booth area and ran some fun activities like an engineering tower-building challenge with spaghetti and marshmallow.

We were delighted to interact with our local community and it was inspiring to have the opportunity to encourage young people towards engineering. 

We are excited to announce that the IMechE granted QMFS a cheque of £3000 towards the cost of competing at this year’s Formula Student UK competition at Silverstone. It was a pleasure to have Mr. Terry Griggs, representative for the Formula Student Awards and Grants Committee, visit us and present the award in person on May 1st.

Thank you very much for this extra financial support!

To celebrate International Women’s Day this year, one of our members, Kasia Adamska, wrote an article about women in engineering and motorsports. The article features an overall view of women in the industry, as well as views of the subject from some of the women in our team. The article was published by the Queen Mary Students’ Union newspaper The Print.

After being awarded Silver last year, we are happy to announce that this year, Queen Mary Formula Student has been awarded the QMSU Societies Excellence Award Gold. Out of all the participating societies, QMFS was the only one to receive a maximum score in all categories, including Marketing, Finance and Community. Thanks to our efforts we have been rewarded with extra support by the Students' Union and also some additional funding to help us cross the finish line at Silverstone.

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As part of this award QMFS has also had the opportunity to work alongside other societies to help give students at QM valuable skills for the workplace. 

As a team everyone has worked together to get the best out this year and create not only a society but also a community between members, which is something that helps QMFS thrive as society here at Queen Mary.

We co-hosted our first-ever Computer Aided Design (CAD) Workshop on Friday, 2 March 2018 with Engineers Without Borders Queen Mary in our Engineering Building. Our Project Manager, Awais Yousaf led the session and was assisted by Fahd Pervaiz and Gabriel Zenkner. Carolina Navarro, President of EWB QM, opened the session with a short talk about Engineers Without Borders UK and why it is an important cause. The activity focused on designing an upright of QMFS’s 2017 car and a few general items on the use of CREO. 

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The early 9AM workshop was well-attended by 10 students from different departments including School of Engineering and Material Science, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and School of Physics. The group consisted of first-year, second-year and third-year undergraduate students. Many expressed that the workshop was very enjoyable and helped build on what they learnt in their courses. There was much demand for future workshops of this kind where students can improve their CAD skills, so keep an eye out on our social media, we might host another one!

During the last week of March we organised a bake sale to raise money for Education Partnerships Africa, which is a charity that works to improve the quality of education at rural secondary schools in East Africa. Everyday between 26th and 29th of March we’ve been in Library Square on Queen Mary campus, selling pizza, brownies and cakes.

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We want to say a special thank you to Anjali Bhatt from the Suspension Team who has put so much effort into organising the bake sale.

Thank you to everyone who came to our stall, bought some delicious food and supported EP Africa!

One of the documents that we have to submit to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers is the structural equivalent spreadsheet (SES). The SES is a breakdown of the car’s structural integrity. It includes details such as the thickness and dimensions of the chassis and pictures of the design. It needs to be approved by the IMechE and this aspect of the car will be inspected again at Silverstone. Our Head of Chassis, Fahd Pervaiz and one of his team members, Pietro Squillace, took the lead in collating this information according to IMechE specifications.

On 24th January, Phil Bishop, a consultant working for Williams Advanced Engineering came in to Queen Mary to give a talk on aerodynamics. This gave us a chance to ask Mr Bishop questions to get feedback on various aspects of the car. Mr Bishop is also a former Aerospace Engineering student at QMUL.

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His talk focused on the process that engineers use when coming up with new aero designs. The initial process starts with CAD modelling of various designs for the same purpose on the car. These designs are then analysed using CFD and the best designs are selected to be optimised. Lift, drag and balance coefficients are monitored both locally and globally in CFD modelling and then working models are created.

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These models are usually scaled e.g. F1 70% models, and contain working mechanical parts. Rolling roads are used to simulate the car on the track and create the most realistic scenario. After further wind tunnel testing the car may then be tested on the track containing the new part, if it’s a particularly new or radical design. However, track testing only gives an overview of the performance rather than more accurate CFD and wind tunnel methods. It is also expensive so isn’t used in all cases.

Nina Mangold and Kristiina Saarinen, our Heads of Marketing, made a short video to announce that we will be competing with car number 21 at the upcoming IMechE Formula Student UK competition at Silverstone Circuit. Last year we won the Best Newcomer award with this number so let’s hope it will bring us even more luck this year!

Feel free to subscribe to our YouTube channel and give us a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video!

With the start of the new semester, we are happy to welcome several new members to the Operations team: Nayara Fakir and Katarzyna Adamska joined Marketing, Ibrahim Maniku joined Administration, and John Luk joined Finance. Glad to have them on the team moving forwards from now! In addition, we have received our new team t-shirts from PSM Sportswear, so keep an eye out for a new team picture and updates on the team website soon.

The new steering wheel was created to enable the mounting of an LCD screen, which shows the driver key information about the car for racing or diagnostics. It is a big step forward, as last year’s design was very simple and provided no added functionality. The wheel will give the driver more control over the car because it houses 2 shift paddles for changing gears without removing hands from the wheel. Also, it has 2 buttons on the front, which will allow the driver to toggle through displays, decide what key information they want to see, and activate launch control.

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The front of the wheel is made from carbon fibre for light weight and rigidity. The rear enclosure, which contains all the sensitive electronics, adds strength to the wheel, and connects to the quick release for removing the wheel is made from a single billet of aluminium. Finally, the grips use foam tape to fill them out and add comfort.

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The wheel is being designed by Antonio Brozičević and programmed by Charles Miller and Armaan Maniar Mohammed. The information it displays is read from the ECUs CAN stream, which gives us a constant stream of information to show the driver, from RPM to Water Temps. The decoding from the Data Stream is done by a microcontroller, which is on a custom PCB and is also designed by Charles.

Over the holidays our team members got the chance to recharge for the new year at various different locations, and we were able to create an amazing collage of these various places (as we also did last year!) that also demonstrates our team’s diversity. As the holidays are now well behind us, we are all eager to continue working on the project with new energy.

Queen Mary Formula Student was honoured to attend this year’s Guest Night at the People’s Palace. Our team got the opportunity to showcase our race car in front at the entrance and our members got to talk about Formula Student to many of the invited guests. Thank you for having us, it was an amazing evening!

We fabricated a mock-up of the chassis of our next year’s car and are also working heavily on the designs of all the other parts. It looks like the chassis is going to be smaller and lighter than this year’s and we can’t wait to get it manufactured!

​​​​​​​We were delighted to have Chris Smout and Lucy Killington from IMechE visiting us on our university campus. They caught up with the team on how we achieved to win Best Newcomer this year and we told them what’s in store for next year.

After completing recruitment for this year, we are pleased to welcome the new members in our team! May a fun, productive and successful year lie ahead!

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On Friday, 13th October 2017, some of our members went to Coventry to represent the team and learn to win (of course). Even though it was Friday the 13th, it was not an unlucky day at all: former Project Manager Aqil Hussain, current Project Manager Awais Yousaf and Head of Operations Paras Sidhu had the chance to open the event in the morning as Best Newcomers 2017 on behalf of the whole team and tell the other teams why Learn to Win is an important event. We had a wonderful day, talking to various judges, scrutineers and other people involved in the Formula Student competition but also meeting people from other teams. We cannot wait to get started now!

Queen Mary Formula Student was featured in the official newspaper of Queen Mary Students’ Union with an article about our success at the IMechE Formula Student competition 2017 at Silverstone written by our very own Head of Marketing, Nina Mangold.

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Check it out here: