Petrolhead Huddersfield University students heading to Europe for
Story copyright Nick Lavigueur, Huddersfield Daily Examiner 7 Aug 2010 Sat, 07 Aug 2010 16:03:00 BST
PETROLHEAD students are Europe-bound on a new university motor racing challenge.
The engineers from the University of Huddersfield’s Team Hare have just returned from the Formula Student event at Silverstone where they put in a strong showing with their hand built car.
But while most undergraduates have gone home for the summer, they are hard at work in the university garage preparing for another top motorsports event – this time in Hungary.
After mechanical gremlins denied them a top 20 finish at Silverstone the team are now sacrificing their holidays to have another shot at victory as the only British team at the three day Formula Student Hungary event beginning on August 19.
Team members Owen Wallbank, Ben Johannson, Scott Thompson, Chris Seavers, Andy Mitton and Romain Le-Therizien have been burning the midnight oil as they face a race against time to raise more cash and tweak their 400-bhp-per-tonne machine before they leave on August 16.
They are also hoping to add new sponsors to their car, which can do 0-60mph in three seconds, alongside current supporters, Denso cooling systems, David Brown engineering and Tri-Cast carbon fibre.
Team leader Owen said they had been given a small budget by the university but wanted to raise £6,000 for improvements and transport costs.
He said: “Something we always wanted to do was compete in a second event.
“We spend all year building the car and it’s something we pour our lives into.
“We can get out there as we are but if we want to win we need more money.
“The more you spend the faster you go, it’s just like Formula 1.”
Said Ben: “We work with quite a lot of companies and as soon as they see the car they’re always interested.”
At the Silverstone challenge last month, Team Hare (Huddersfield Automotive Racing Enterprise) recorded the fastest time in their class at the endurance test before disaster struck. They were four laps from the end when an oil cap came loose scuppering their bid for victory, leaving them 51st out of 80 at the end of all events.
Said Owen: “If that hadn’t happened we would have been up in the top 20.
“We were starting to do well at Silverstone but there’s a lot more to get out of the car.
“We got some really good feedback from the judges, they said it was the best they had seen all day.
“We struggled getting the car ready to race, but when we did get running we impressed a lot of the judges and we were setting times that a lot of other teams were scared of.”
Contact: teamhare@live.co.uk or www.teamhare.co.uk
Story by Nick Lavigueur, Huddersfield Daily Examiner
read on Examiner website
