At the Oxford Brookes Headington school, more than 100 trainees are busy developing the fastest, finest designed race cars and truck possible for this year’s Formula Trainee competition.Oxford Brookes Racing(OBR)is the UK’s many prominent Formula Student group. They’ve won more design awards than any UK university, and regularly inhabit the international race’s top spots.But the stakes go beyond the competition, held every yearat Silverstone. With several alumni in every Solution One team, success there is what gets them discovered by the industry, where a handful of engineering tasks can have upwards of 10,000 applicants.Oxford Brookes Racing has actually won more style awards than any other UK university. Photo: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian”A great deal of the coverage on TV is based around the chauffeurs, however not actually the actual engineers,”said Thomas Cawdery,
a group supervisor and third year motorsports innovation student.”This is what you don’t see in Solution One. The engineers who make it happen. “Their group is completely run by students. Across their 2 structures you can see scores of people hard at work– in one space they are cutting and shaping a carbon fibre chassis by hand, in another, the heat from computers running simulations makes the air uncomfortably hot. Students of all ages are teaching and learning from one another.Actual Formula One cars and trucks have much more power than the students are enabled, for security factors. However in regards to complexity, the automobiles are very comparable.” They’re the exact same if not more complex than Solution One automobiles,”Cawdery said.In truth, they can do some things that Formula One cars and trucks are not allowed to do, such as torque vectoring, which is where they power each wheel with its own motor to assist their chauffeur twist into corners. It also assists with traction and damp weather driving.
Oxford Brookes Racing group test drive an entry for the Formula Student race
In some elements, OBR’s engineering team surpasses industry expectations. For instance, this brand-new generation of engineers has a far better gender balance than the market, where in the majority of teams simply over 10% engineers are women.Emma Deery is a first-year mechanical engineering trainee, sanding parts with a group of engineers while motorsports plays on the TV in front of them.
“In the market, a lot of women discover themselves the only female on their team,” she stated. “Here it’s different. We have a lot more females and a lot of ladies in leadership functions. It’s truly encouraging.”
Emma Deery, a first-year mechanical engineering trainee. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian
With a tiny portion of a Solution One team’s size and an even smaller sized budget plan, what Solution Student manages to attain grabs the attention of big industry names. “There are two truly ingenious forms of motorsport left,” the famous former team principal Ross Brawn once said. “Among them is Formula One and the other one is Solution Trainee.”
The OBR group will compete for the top spot this summer. The initial team list consists of 103 groups representing 27 countries.Robin Bailes, an engineer at Mercedes, competed in Formula Trainee while he was at Oxford Brookes.” What some teams create in terms of engineering is extremely high level,” he said, describing why the competition is a useful recruitment tool. “And normally speaking, Solution Trainee has extremely open rules, so innovation comes through from students that you might not see in standard motorsport.”< img alt=" Oxford Brookes Racing team straight-line test driving their car "src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2026/04/02/Oxford_Brookes_Racing_team_take_their_car_for_a_spin___loop--ee6d6fba-78f7-410b-887b-56d18214930a-1.0.0000000.jpg?width=120&dpr=1&s=none&crop=16%3A9"/ > Oxford Brookes Racing team straight-line test driving their automobile Another helpful aspect is that the team is based in an area nicknamed motorsports valley. They have to do with an hour’s drive from the headquarters of F1 groups consisting of Red Bull, McLaren, Alpine, Mercedes-AMG, Cadillac, TGR Haas, Williams and Aston Martin.They’re all there for the exact same factor: they can nip over to Silverstone to run some tests during their lunch break, which is what some OBR students did this week, and their close to the parts providers, who sell to the trainee group along with Formula One professionals.Sébastien Cavedon is OBRs’s operations supervisor. He came to the UK from Switzerland to do his master’s in motorsports engineering and sign up with the OBR team.”Honestly, being from a country
where motorsport isn’t that huge of an offer, then coming here where motorsports is huge … it’s truly life altering,”he stated.