UBeRacing has got off to an amazing start this academic year, from our wildly successful fresher integration project and our team growing to over 55 active members as a result to our first upcoming competition - this is really looking to be our year!
From the get-go, this term we focused on structuring our team and increasing the number of freshers staying in the society after Freshers’ Week ended. Our target for new member retention was 60%, double most UK extracurricular Formula Student teams. We aimed to achieve this with the help of the new fresher integration project. Though the society works as a whole towards building electric racing cars, our new members would complete an introductory project; a 6-week design project, intended to give them a crash course in the skills they need in order to contribute effectively to the team. These skills included the design process, effective researching, computer-aided and digital design, programming in the C language, simulation and analysis of 3D models, and many more.
The Alumni Impact Fund saw the potential of the project and very graciously awarded us £2,000 to fund the purchase of components and materials to undertake them; as well as an additional £2,000 for materials for our chassis manufacture. Thanks to their help, the integration project was a huge success and our team has doubled in size from last year, with all of our members actively pursuing projects within the team. Incredibly, we completely smashed our target of 60% retention - currently 90% of those who sign up stay active contributors. The feedback from our new members was overwhelmingly positive, especially on the educational aspect; most of our first-year engineers learned Solidworks CAD Software before their course covered it, and to a higher level. A third year completing a project in our Low Voltage Team reported she’d learned C code to a higher level in our team than she did in her weekly second year labs.
The main focus of the term was on getting our car designed and the team trained, and the second semester will see the majority of our manufacturing being undertaken. Our first car is due for completion this July with our first competition later that month; on top of this, there are tentative talks of our current third years taking it to the USA to complete a competition stateside.
Our team is always eager to accept help to progress and develop, by new members joining or by our generous donors. If you’d like to help us out, or are interested in any aspect of our society, we’d love to hear from you! Just hit us up on any of our social media: Instagram, Facebook, our website or drop us an email.