Having our design award and overall 2nd place on FSUK still fresh in our minds, we are currently busy preparing for the next event: FSG at the Hockenheim F1 circuit in Germany. The test team is testing and improving the DUT09 and its drivers. The operations department is planning the trip and arranging everything else necessary for another nice event. The chiefs and engineers are preparing for the static events and several other team members are packing the truck and the machinery.

Thanks to the promising results in England and with a car in perfect shape, we are very confident about our participation in Germany next week. Placed third on the updated world ranking by fs-world.org, just behind the universities of Stuttgart and Western Australia (who are both present on FSG as well), we will have a tough job defending our first place from last year. But, of course, we will do everything we can to beat all the other 75 teams competing.

Formula Student Germany will take place from august 5 th to 9 th at the Hockenheim Formula 1 circuit in Germany. To stay up-to-date you can visit this site or subscribe to the daily newsletter.

We are home from Silverstone for a week now, and the preparations for FSG (the event in Hockenheim, Germany from the 6th untill the 9th August) are started already, nevertheless we made a movie of the final day at Silverstone. You can see it below:

We’ve just returned from our Award Ceremony and to our lovely surprise we returned with five awards! First of all we’ve won the Class 1 design winner award for best Engineering Design (FISITA Award for Engineering Excellence) and the accompanying memorial award. This memorial award was first introduced in 2003 and our predecessors won it immediately and after six years this baby is finally home again. This price is awarded to us because of our lightweight, ergonomic and reliable designed racecar.

The third award is an obvious result of the above, the Airbus Lightweight Award for the lightest car which finished the Endurance race. Then to our surprise we’ve won the overall Statics award for all our Business, Costs and Design presentations, the best of all the teams!

But the most important award was the second place overall, with just 5 points of the 800 behind the number 1 of the world we were very close in beating our biggest rival: Stuttgart.

We are very happy with our results and we wouldn’t have won without all the help outside our team. Therefore I would like to thank all our sponsors, friends, family and Wim Thijs for their amazing support and effort! Three years in a row second at Silverstone, is really unbelievable considering the size of the competition and its prestige, what a success…

Just in three weeks: FS Germany, all the biggest players in the world will be there! Now we know for sure we can win! But first a beer, or two.

Stef de Jong,
Team Manager

After two days of strange looks, some members of other teams got the guts to join our morning gymnastics session. With about 10 extra participants we had a very positive start of the first dynamics day. Today started with the acceleration and skidpad events. Our first two drivers would do both events, starting with the skidpad. Up next was the acceleration and after noon the sprint/autocross started. Considering the very fast time of Stuttgart, we knew it would be very difficult to beat them. Our first Erik had to set a decent time, not taking too much risks. This resulted in the 7th time. Our second Erik had to set an even better time. Sadly, he missed a corner and hit some cones. With a final 6th place we were a little disappointed. This disappointment was compensated by our selection into the design finals. Just after the panoramic picture, our chiefs went to the design finals and as we know, did a very good job. Today is the last day of the event where the Endurance race was driven. We finished the race in a good time, so it seems we did well here. We still have to wait for the final overall result which will be announced tonight.

We placed a few of our pictures at the website as well, they can be found here: FSUK 2009 photos

Here you can see a self-made movie of day 5:

It’s 7 o’clock and again the whole team stands in front of our bus for the second session of morning gymnastics this week. Today we will have to finish the last part of scrutineering, the brake test. But, as today is statics day, we will have to attend the cost, design and business judging. Together with all the team members and the car we started with the cost judging and we have the impression we did quite well. After that we moved on to the design judging, and finally, Stef gave his business presentation before several judges. Considering the responses of the judges, we guess we did a good job on statics today. The only disappointment was the cancellation of the soccer competition organized by our event crew. The cause is not hard to guess, rain, rain and some more rain.

Here you can see a self-made movie of day 4: