The Formula Student Sim Racing Series has returned for another season, with Salford Racing partaking once again.
The Esports series is ran alongside the Formula Student competition, as a way of friendly competition between universities.
Last year, Salford Racing won the first ever round of the series, which takes place once a month until July, where the final round is held at Silverstone.
We spoke to Head of Dynamics Jonny, who will be spearheading Salford Racing’s Esports team this year:
How did Salford Racing perform in the Formula Student competition last year? Well, last year was the inaugural season, I don’t want to brag, but we did win the first round ever, so we’ll take that! What preparation do you have to do? Last year we did a lot of setup work during the week before; you have to go on and set a practice time, and then you go into a qualifying session and obviously that dictates where you start the race. So, we do setup changes for the qualifying, then we have to run a different setup for the race because we have to think about things like the fuel decreasing over time and also the tyre wear. So again, it's an idea of what we can make to a car and how that affects performance. Would you say there are any transferable skills that you have gained? There's things where you make a setup change on the car and you notice it in the simulator, so if you put a tyre pressure up really high, then you'll notice that the tyre gets really hot and you lose performance but then if it went down a little bit, you get different behavioural characteristics from the tyre, so there's a lot of things which transfer from the knowledge of the esports simulator into how that affects a real world car, and we can use that on our car when we go to Silverstone next year. Currently it’s just dynamics lead Jonathan Wheater taking part in the competition, however Salford Racing are looking to gain new members for the e-series championship. After a successful start, the Formula Student competition is looking better than ever for Salford Racing, as the team are preparing for the season ahead.