USW Racing Formula Student Team

USW Racing is a formula student team from the University of South Wales (based in Treforest, Pontypridd). We're a relatively small team with a core group of just under twenty members and have an extremely limited budget to work with. For us, USW Racing is about creating an inclusive & welcoming environment for students across a range of degrees. There is also an added importance of recognising our welsh heritage and promoting the importance of the language & history. The university has had several variations of a formula student team but due to many factors including COVID-19 no previous teams ever reached the competition stage. Thus, this year we made it our mission to relaunch the team and compete at Silverstone. However, this has not been an easy process for us and we have faced several challenges. Since September, there have been multiple changes within our leadership team which has meant that our progress slowed on occasion. But we have now begun to enter our cross-over period with our new leadership group for next year - with them taking over many of the responsibilities already.

Initially, we had intended on entering both the static and dynamic events. However, we realised that we didn't have the resources, experience or budget to successfully create a car that we would be happy with and that would accurately represent the ability of our students & university as a whole. So, in late January we made the decision to switch our entry to the concept class. This has enabled us to focus on the design aspect of the process whilst looking ahead to 2023. Having realistic expectations has been one of our biggest challenges and choosing to focus on the static events was a difficult decision. But, we knew that if we wanted to not only reach Silverstone but be proud of our achievements and secure the future of our formula student team we needed to give ourselves a longer time frame to complete our car.

Although we've not been primarily focused on the build, the tools and components we were able to purchase with our build fund has allowed us to access products that were previously inaccessible to us. We are excited to see what the future has in store for us as we ready ourselves for Silverstone and afterwards switch our focus to our 2023 build.