Birmingham City University Racing Team spent over £40,000 in 2023
Birmingham City University Racing Team (BCURT) spent over £40,000 in 2023, Birmingham Eastside has learned.
BCURT shelled out £43,591.95 for the Formula Student (FS) 2023 programme during the 2022/23 academic year, a Freedom of Information request by Birmingham Eastside has revealed. The programme is an educational engineering competition where universities from around the world build cars and compete at Silverstone Circuit.
BCURT’s budget for the 2024 season is £45,000.
The money is sufficient for the team’s needs, according to Jon Isaacs, technical manager and chartered engineer, School of Engineering and Built Environment at BCU.
“There are teams that clearly have big budgets,” the technical manager told Birmingham Eastside while speaking of a team that had a budget of over €200,000 in previous editions of Formula Student.
“You look at their team and it looks as if they've got €200,000. It's brilliant!”
“I don't think at BCU, we need to have those kinds of ambitions,” he said. “We're not trying to compete with the top five or even the top ten teams who go to this event.
“We're competing against ourselves. And for that reason, we can do that on £45,000.”
For that investment, the level of benefits that the student gets for value, for money is good, according to Isaacs.
“Let's say we had £200,000 to spend, I don't feel that we would get any more value for money from the student experience point of view,” he added.
All of the funding has come from the university.
‘Not easy to secure huge funding’
The technical manager said that it isn’t easy to secure such financial backing.
“If you were to start from a position where you're not doing Formula Student, to try and get enough interest, motivation, and backing for, let's say, £45,000, that's quite a challenge.”
Isaacs said that the student project has a process to acquire the funding.
“We have to justify it,” he said. “We have to show how we're going to improve.”
The chartered engineer said that students can find the process to be tough.
“It's not easy,” he said, “there's a lot of work they have to do to prepare to ask for the money and justify how we're going to spend it.”
With just over two months to go for Formula student that takes place from 17 to 21 July, the team is about to start building the car before testing it on track in the coming days.