The University of Malta’s racing team won the Endurance category in the prestigious Formula Student competition held in Silverstone in the UK over the past weekend, amidst a host of great overall results.

Between the 6th and 10th July, the University of Malta Racing Team participated at the Formula Student event held at the Silverstone Race Circuit, UK. Formula Student (FS) is Europe's most established educational engineering competition, which celebrated its 20th Anniversary in 2018.

Each year, Formula Student sees over 100 university teams from around the top Universities in the UK and from around the globe travel to Silverstone to compete in static and dynamic events.

Static events include a mix of on-track as well as boardroom presentations. Teams are tasked to produce a prototype for a single-seat race car for sprint racing, and present it to a hypothetical manufacturing firm. The teams are then judged by some of the racing industry's top professionals on design, cost and sustainability, as well as business presentations.

Students then compete in a vehicle which they have designed, built and tested themselves, in line with the Formula Student rules. Before the team can then compete in the dynamic events, they have to pass through a gruelling set of scrutineering exercises. These include Technical and Safety Scrutineering, a Tilt Test, Brake and Noise Tests. These tests are carried out on the vehicle by a team of highly experienced scrutineers and race marshals. Given the difficulty and safety standards which need to be achieved, not all teams make it through to the final dynamic events.

The University of Malta Racing Team was the 5th to pass the scrutineering phase out of the 61 teams competing in the dynamic events.

Then, the racing begins. The dynamic events included the Skid Pad (Figure of 8), Sprint, Acceleration, Endurance and Fuel Economy. The racing car is driven by the University students themselves, who have obtained a racing license, and passed all the necessary tests, including a 5 second vehicle egress test.

Notwithstanding the many challenges the team had to face, UM Racing achieved some truly amazing results competing against top tier UK and International Universities, including the University of Oxford, University College London, Universities of Glasgow, Brunel, Liverpool, Coventry, Bath, and many others.

The teams full results were:

3^rd overall in FS-Class

3^rd overall in Dynamic Events

1^st in Endurance

Most Entertaining Driver – Cleaven Caruana

4^th in Lap Time Simulation

5^th in Acceleration

5^th in Skidpad

7^th in Sprint

9^th in Design Event

The Endurance event is considered as the main racing event of the competition, and is what all the teams aspire to. Teams have to do a gruelling 24 laps of approximately 1 Km each, including a driver change half way through. The endurance event is aimed at testing all the components of the car, from the chassis to the engine, to the suspension and electronics, and many teams do not make it through.

Further to the above results, UM Racing was ranked as the first non-UK team overall at the FSUK 2022 competition.

“The results achieved are a sign of the hard work, dedication and commitment of past and present UM Racing team members who have made this possible, and are a mark of excellence to University and its students,” the team said in a statement.

“The team would also like to thank their sponsors for all the support provided during the years, without which such results could not have been achieved.”