Trinity College students build Formula One car to race at Silverstone

A group of Trinity College students are set to take off around the Silverstone track next week, in the Formula One-style ride they have built from scratch and unveiled on Thursday.

Formula Trinity is the team of more than 100 students representing Trinity College Dublin in the international Formula Student engineering competition, taking place at the famed Silverstone Circuit in Northamptonshire, England.

Students from backgrounds in everything from engineering to music have spent the past academic year crafting their own Formula One-style vehicle, called Bertie, complete with tubular steel spaceframe chassis, independent front and rear suspension, and a Honda CBF600 engine.

Team captain Colm O’Brien said they have been fine-tuning the vehicle design from last year.

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“Last year we submitted a car; we built it in a team member’s shed in Bray under a bit of tarpaulin. It was quite rough and ready but we did quite well. We came away with a number of awards: a best newcomer award, a diversity and inclusion award, and a best real world AI award, and we were the top-performing Irish team,” he said.

“We learned a lot from it, and we used that in building this year’s car, which is a lot better, and we hope to compete up there with the UK’s top universities this year,” he added.

Now in its 25th year, the Formula Student competition will attract more than 130 university teams from around the world to Silverstone from July 19th to July 23rd.

“A lot of students on the team are aspiring towards a career in Formula One, it is seen as the pinnacle of automotive engineering, and obviously it’s a very fun circus to be part of. This is like doing Formula One on a smaller budget, it’s actually more similar than I would have ever thought,” he said.

Bertie has been built from scratch with a total cost to date of close to €12,000, funded by sponsors and students committing their own money to the project.

Mr O’Brien said the team hopes to raise enough funding to eventually enter a fully autonomous, electric vehicle into the competition.

“We would easily need €50,000 to develop an electric vehicle, and currently we just can’t get that in. The plan for next year is to design a fully autonomous car with a combustion engine, and hopefully off the back of that raise enough sponsorship to bring a fully electric, autonomous vehicle to the competition,” he added.