UCLR Formula Student Progress so far…

Overview

We are a student-led team that competes in Formula Student UK with the University College London (UCL). Last academic year, our team consisted of 50 people working to design and manufacture our new car, Lola. We improved our performance in the static events, which was a highlight during our concept class competition in 2025.   

Our main design philosophy is to maximise mechanical grip and to be as lightweight as possible. We did this by reducing the weight of our chassis and front suspension and taking a radical approach to our rear suspension design, all in line with the regulations. Unfortunately, we could not manufacture the car in time for the 2026 competition, but we are working hard as a team to be ready for next year’s competition. 

This year, we're aiming to improve on our scrutineering performance and complete the endurance event, which held us back in previous years. We're also targeting a total vehicle weight of less than 200kg as part of our overall lightweighting philosophy.

Car Development  

When designing a new car, the most important things to design first are the chassis and suspension in parallel. We started with a few initial sketches around the front suspension pick-up points and load paths. We aimed to minimise the number of tubes using strong triangulation to retain stiffness and reduce weight to 30kg, in conjunction with FEA static studies in ANSYS to find the minimum wall thickness of the tubes that could withstand acceleration and cornering loads. Further considerations were to have a minimum clearance of 10 mm from the regulations to account for any manufacturing differences and to reduce the number of tubes going to a single node to make the chassis easier to weld. 

For the front suspension, we opted for a double-wishbone mono-shock pullrod assembly to lower the centre of mass and reduce weight. With this design, we achieved a 33% reduction in mass compared with our previous pushrod front suspension. Because we considered the front suspension pickup points during chassis design, no additional mass was required to accommodate chassis integration. 

One of the biggest challenges we ran into was sourcing components on the timeline we needed, especially with a small team managing procurement alongside design work. We also had to balance performance optimisation against our cost constraints, which is a big part of why we went with the solid axle and trailing arm setup instead of a differential. It meant more design work upfront to make sure we weren't sacrificing too much performance, but it kept us within budget.

Our approach to the rear suspension was constrained by cost because a differential can be quite complex, expensive and heavy. As our main goal for our car design is to reduce mass and cost, we went with a solid axle attached to two trailing arms, which is connected to a torsion bar. The torsion bar acts as an anti-roll bar by providing roll stiffness and heave decoupling. During cornering, the inside wheel is intentionally unloaded to help reduce tyre scrub and understeer within the corners. 

Figure 1 - Some manufactured parts of the trailing arms for the rear suspension.

Our engine is a single-cylinder Honda CRF450R as it satisfied the power-to-weight ratio we wanted to achieve by having a 15- 20 kg mass advantage compared to a four-cylinder engine while achieving similar lap times in OptimumLap. The only downside is that the single-cylinder engine produces a significant amount of noise and high vibrations. Meaning the exhaust design research needed to be conducted around acoustics to find a muffler and silencer that can reduce the engine noise in line with the regulation while reducing back pressure.

Figure 2 - The single-cylinder Honda CRF450R engine used for our car.

Sensor selection was the starting point of the loom design. This year we decided to manufacture our loom in-house with the electronics team to reduce cost and to allow for more freedom in sensor selection. 

The electronics team worked closely with the vehicle designers to identify what needed to be measured, define the operating requirements, and narrow down suitable sensors and electrical components. The component list was then restructured so that each component was represented by a single connector and its corresponding mating part. Connectors were grouped by system, particularly those in the shutdown circuit and those already fitted to the engine harness. Separate dash and gear-shifter blocks were also added to the architecture. An Excel connection sheet was developed to define the pin-to-pin wiring between components and provide a clearer basis for the final loom. Wiring diagrams and magnetic component blocks on whiteboards were used to explore the relative positions of major systems. Finally, individual components and complete subsystems were bench-tested before integration.  

Testing 

While Lola hasn't competed yet, our previous car's performance in the 2025 concept class static events gave us a strong base to build from, and a lot of the lessons from that scored performance directly shaped decisions like the cooling and intake redesign this year.

As Lola has not been produced yet, full car testing is not an option now. However, over the past year, multiple CFD simulations have been conducted on our new cooling system, which includes a sidepod redesign to find the optimal geometry to minimise overheating of our engine. From this, an 80% inlet area side duct produced an average 11.7 degrees Celsius drop across the radiator in trackside testing with our old car, which aligned with the predictions made in CFD.