Lane Motorsport continues to support the Loughborough University Formula Student Team (LUMotorsport) in their efforts to design a single seat racing car to compete in the Formula Student UK (FSUK) competition which culminates in a competitive event at the Silverstone racing circuit. These student designed and built racing cars may also be entered into similar races around Europe for international competitions.
FSUK is Europe’s most established educational engineering competition celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2023 and is a testing ground for the next generation of world-class engineers. Intended to encourage more young people to take up a career in engineering, there are now over one hundred university teams taking part every year.
The project usually forms part of a degree-level project and is viewed by the motorsport industry as the standard for engineering graduates to meet, transitioning them from university to the workplace. It is a gold standard for real-world engineering experience, combining practical engineering experience with soft skills including business planning and project management.
Lane Motorsport is a specialist division of Lane Electronics and was set up 8 years ago with an aspiration to become one of the leading names in the support and supply of electrical connectors and accessories to the Motorsport industry in all its forms. Peter Costin, Business Development Manager for Lane Motorsport, says, “Lane Electronics is a family run electrical connector distributor established for nearly 60 years and it is part of our ethos to support both our local community as well as the next generation of engineers, vital to the continued growth of our economy. Having received a number of requests for sponsorship from universities participating in the annual Formula Student competition we made the decision to support all the FSUK teams with our best pricing for connectors and accessories and offer access to our knowledge base of connector technologies to ensure all applicants had the same resources.”
The LuMotorsport team reports that overall, 2022 has been successful and that issues with the manufacturability of the previous car had led to a large design change at the beginning of the year, which the team took in their stride. Attendance at FSUK had been the first in-person event for many members of the team due to earlier covid restrictions. The aims of the team going into FSUK were to gain knowledge of EV scrutineering, verify the design is legal and transfer as much knowledge to younger members as possible.
Due to the fundamental design changes during the development of the current LFS22 racing car, the team prioritized preparing the new sections of the vehicle for FSUK scrutineering and therefore sadly fell short of target in other areas. This did however give the team great experience of design, cost management and business static events. The new crop of students are now hard at work making sure the new LFS23 car is very competitive for the 2023 competition season.
Lane Motorsport provides the latest high-performance connectors and accessories and is committed to having the right product available from stock or with very short lead-times through a portfolio of franchised suppliers which now includes Eaton Souriau, Hellermann Tyton, Weald Motorsport, Lemo and Nicomatic.
