The University of Wales Trinity Saint David (UWTSD) and MCR Race Cars Ltd have debuted a new student-designed aerodynamic package for the Sports 2000 car. The bodywork design was the result of a collaborative partnership between the university, MCR Race Cars, sports race car manufacturers and professor of practice John Iley.
As part of the motorsport engineering course at UWTSD, students conducted wind tunnel and track testing before developing a computational model of the original Sports 2000 MCR bodywork package. Using CFD (computational fluid dynamics), students worked to identify areas for improvement and developed a new concept for a bodywork package, which was then manufactured by the project partners (John Iley of Iley Design manufacturing the patterns and Anthony Evans of MCR Race Cars Ltd manufacturing the molds and prototype bodywork).
The resulting design is visually very different from the original package. The plan is to continue to develop the bodywork and chassis platform over the next year to optimize its performance on circuit.
UWTSD motorsport engineering student, John Hughes, said, “Seeing the car in the flesh for the first time was an amazing feeling after all of the hours of design work we put in. I was still nervous though, as moving from a virtual model to a physical creation may display inaccuracies within the data we had collected over the past years, but thankfully the car performed faultlessly, and the performance feedback was incredibly promising. I feel humbled and proud to be part of such an achievement and so thankful that I got to collaborate with some amazing engineers during the journey of this project.”
John Iley of Iley Design Ltd and professor of practice at UWTSD, supported the project from its conception and was present at the debut. He said, “It has become a personal mission for me to see this ambitious UWTSD multi-student project reach fruition. Extensive development work from first concepts, iterated through process and tools to a final real solution, competing on track in such a high-level national series provides a fine testimony for both them and the university. I look forward to being track-side during the races ahead to help the UWTSD team develop and realize its full potential.”
