20th Jul

Brunel Racing Placed 6th Overall at Silverstone

Brunel Racing have enjoyed a hugely successful weekend at Formula Student Silverstone 2009, exceeding all expectations to finish 6th overall at the competition.

The result makes Brunel the second placed UK university in the largest Formula Student competition ever - with 87 teams competing, and the entire team is immensely proud of our achievement. The final result is Brunel's best normalised Class 1 finish in the ten years the University has competed in Formula Student, having previously finished 4th of 40 teams in 2002.

BR-X attended scrutineering on Friday morning and passed all five checks (safety, technical, tilt table, noise and brake tests) first time without encountering any problems.

The competition's static events - Design, Cost and Business Presentation - were held on Friday afternoon, with Saturday seeing the dynamic events of Acceleration, Skid Pad (figure-of-eight) and Sprint.

With the weather changeable, Andy Tomlin completed 'banker' runs in Acceleration and Skid Pad first thing in the morning. Following further practice and setup work over the next few hours, George McDonald was able to complete further runs in Acceleration and Skid Pad before lunch, posting a final 0-75m time of 3.928s and a fastest Skid Pad lap of 5.419s. The team ended up 15th fastest in Acceleration and 23rd fastest in Skid Pad.

The afternoon saw the Sprint event, with drivers completing a timed 'hot lap' of a complex race circuit laid out around the final corners of the Silverstone track. Despite accidentally hitting the emergency stop switch mid-way round the lap, stopping the engine for around four seconds, Andrew Bonjour was able to post a fastest lap of 59.550s to place the team 32nd in the Sprint rankings.

On Sunday, BR-X competed in the Endurance event, the toughest test of the weekend counting for 40% of the competition's overall points. In a heavily rain-affected session, Rob Still and Andrew Bonjour posted consistently fast lap times enabling the team to finish fourth in the Endurance timings. With an excellent third-lowest fuel consumption of 2.124l, our combined endurance-economy score was the highest at the competition at 355.7 points.

The final results show an incredibly close tie between positions 4, 5 and 6, with Brunel University finishing 0.4 points behind fifth-placed Helsinki Metropolia UAS and 1.6 points behind fourth-placed top UK team the University of Bath.

Having achieved such great success at Silverstone, the whole team are now eager to press ahead with a thorough development and testing program over the next two weeks in preparation for the Hockenheim competition on August 5-9.

We would like to give a huge thank you to all our sponsors who have made such an amazing result possible, and to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers for organising the event. Our thanks also go to the School of Engineering and Design at Brunel University for providing the budget and facilities to allow us to compete in Formula Student. (A thank you also to the Delft team for their post-event entertainment on Sunday evening!)

http://www.formulastudent.com/events/2009+Results.htm

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