The most visible person in a Formula One
team is the driver, the man who receives most of the glory for a
victory or the blame for a failure. So it is no surprise that it is his
career path that attracts most public attention.
Tales
of teams nurturing future drivers from a young age are now typified by
the careers of the Briton Lewis Hamilton, who is second in the drivers’
standings heading into the Hungarian Grand Prix in Budapest this
weekend, and the German Sebastian Vettel, the reigning world champion.
But
out of the spotlight, the multitude of engineers who provide the driver
with a racing car are now also being nurtured by teams as they develop
programs similar to the young-driver programs to come up with the best
technical minds of the future.
In
the past, as recently as the 1980s and ’90s, most of the top Formula One car designers came from backgrounds unrelated to car design or
engineering. At the time, it was still possible for one designer to
conceive of and build the whole car.
But
today, each task has become too highly specialized for one designer to
master them all. Teams now have dozens of engineers, all devoted to a
specific element of the car, from suspension to aerodynamics, from the
engine to the electronics.
Formula
One has become so competitive and the teams’ technical departments so
large that teams fight for the best engineers in every area and devise
their own programs and methods to develop, hire and train them.
Some
of the programs aimed at cultivating young engineers have existed
outside the series much longer than the young-driver programs. Formula
SAE, for example, was founded in the United States in 1978 and also has
European and Asian programs called Formula Student.
Formula
Student is run by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, an
international organization based in England, and organizes a competition
for college engineering students to design and build a racing car using
a basic set of regulations. Cars from the competing institutions are
then judged according to several criteria, including design attributes
and results in endurance and sprint races.
The top prize this year was awarded on July 13 to an electric car
developed by a team from the Delft University of Technology in the
Netherlands. The competition was held at the Silverstone track in
England, involving 3,000 students and more than 100 teams from around
the world.
Some
teams, like McLaren and Williams, have developed secondary technology
businesses that are independent but linked to the series and connected
to racing, and they also require engineers.
“McLaren
is a pretty sizable company now, we have 2,200 people across the three
main companies,” said Ben Heatley, a McLaren spokesman, referring to
McLaren Automotive, McLaren Applied Technologies and the Formula One
team. “As a result of which, we have increasingly taken on a similar
kind of approach to this kind of activity to other big technical
companies. So it’s not far from what somebody like a Rolls-Royce, a GSK
or a BA Systems would be undertaking.”
He
noted that McLaren offers graduate trainee programs, apprenticeships,
technical trainee programs, work-experience placements for internships,
summer replacements and full-year internships. It also sponsors Ph.D.
students, who work for the company while completing their doctorates.
To
encourage young people from 11 to 14 years old to become scientists or
engineers, McLaren has a number of programs linked to studies of
science, technology, engineering and math. The McLaren Manufacturing
Challenge, for example, invites youths to design a nonmotorized vehicle
that they race in McLaren’s factory. McLaren also is a partner with GSK,
the global healthcare company based in England, in the Scientists in
Sport Pit Stop Challenge, which seeks to inspire students to apply their
classroom studies to Formula One. With its technology partner Exxon
Mobil, McLaren sponsors a program that this year challenged European
teenagers to “design the safest, fastest and most energy efficient
Formula 1 racing car for the 2040 F1 season.”
One
of the oldest programs, F1 in Schools, is also one that takes students
from the youngest age. The program was founded in 2000 and was
sanctioned by Formula One in 2005. It is now promoted in 42 countries
with more than 20,000 schools participating, according to Andrew
Denford, its founder and chairman.
For
students from 9 to 19, the program involves making a miniature Formula
One car to specifications provided by the organization. Two cars race
each other like dragsters on a straight track, powered by a burst of
compressed air.
“There
is a massive shortage of engineers in the automotive industry,” Denford
said, “and we are using the magnetic appeal of Formula One to attract
students.”
He said the way that the miniature cars are built and the team atmosphere and organization replicate the real world of racing.
“It’s
like taking the whole world of Formula One and putting it in the
classroom, where six kids will come up with the concept of their
design,” he said.
Design
software is provided free to every school and students do an
aerodynamic computational fluid dynamics check, manufacture the cars and
even use 3-D printing technology. One team at the world finals last
year produced a carbon-fiber front wing, nose cone and rear wing.
The
cars are high precision, working to thousandths of an inch to make sure
they fit within the tolerance, like taking the Formula One rules and
fitting them into the F1 in Schools rules. The world finals this year
are to be held Nov. 13-16 in Abu Dhabi, a week before the Abu Dhabi
Grand Prix.
F1
in Schools has spawned engineers who went on to study engineering and
take part in Formula Student and then joined Formula One teams. There is
an engineer at the Mercedes team, now 26, who started in F1 in Schools
at 14, and at Red Bull Racing another is working in the aerodynamics
department under the technical director, Adrian Newey.
Newey
is involved in a program called the Infiniti Performance Engineering
Academy, run by Infiniti and the Red Bull team and designed to give work
experience at the team to three students chosen from 1,500 from around
the world. The Infiniti car company, a Red Bull team partner and
sponsor, aims to develop engineers to help bring racing know-how to road
cars.
The
winners of the competition this year, announced at the British Grand
Prix at the beginning of July, were a Briton and two Americans: William
Priest, 23, of England, and Eric LaRoche, 25, and Jason Zide, 21, from
the United States. LaRoche had also been involved in the Formula SAE
program.
“What
really got me into motorsport specifically is the connection to the
automotive industry,” he said. “I really like the types of motorsport
that will push technology and then have some sort of technology
transfer, which is what this program is about.”
The students said the competition itself was like a microcosm for their future careers.
“It’s
a breeding ground for the future of race car and road car engineering,”
Zide said. “It was a very intimidating competition, there were a lot of
interesting challenges, but it was a lot of fun at the same time. And
it was similar to what you would see in the racing industry: You are
competing against other individuals who are all extremely well qualified
for one or three positions.”
The three winners have each been rewarded with a one-year job at the Red Bull team, to begin in September.
Williams
and McLaren also take part in programs sponsored by the British
government to encourage university students to pursue science and
engineering studies. Heatley, the McLaren spokesman, said the company’s
promotion of the program resulted from a desire to cultivate science and
technology talent in Britain in general, as well as to find future
engineers for its own racing team.
