Calling all petrolheads. There are more and more opportunities for engineering graduates to work in Formula One, according to Craig Dawson, a lecturer at Oxford Brookes University. A sandwich placement working in Formula One is the best way for undergraduates to meet the right people and prove themselves, he says. But once in the job, don’t expect a champagne lifestyle.

“Formula One requires more dedication and effort than a lot of other areas that graduates could go into, purely because the time constraints are so tight. The people who succeed are the people who can deal with that pressure and are prepared to put in the very long hours and lots of travelling that go with it.

“If people go into it with the perception that it’s going to be very glamorous, I think they are probably in for a little bit of a shock.”

So, what’s the big draw? Hundreds of people are involved in getting a racing car on to the grid. Mechanical engineers are largely involved in the design and development of the cars. It’s a very satisfying area of work, Dawson says.

“You take a car from a blank sheet of paper in maybe June/July, to a completed product in January/February, and you do that every single year. You never stop designing something, esssentially.”

Dan Jones, a design engineer at Flybrid Systems, studied motorsport technology at the University of Hertfordshire and took a year out in industry to work at the Nissan Technical Centre Europe, where he worked on road cars. A graduate job at Bentley as a suspension design engineer followed. His father used to drive rally cars so motorsport is in his blood. But perhaps the most influential practical experience – the one that put him on track to work in motor racing – came at university when he took the opportunity to get involved in Formula Student. This is a competition open to teams of students all over the world who are interested in designing, building and racing a single-seater racing car from scratch. Jones managed the team, organising the procurement of materials, checking drawings, signing off designs and getting the car to the start line at Silverstone.

“The extra experience all stood me in good stead for working in the industry... I’d actually been there and done that already.”

Now Jones is part of a team of five engineers working to develop a mechanical kinetic energy recovery system for Formula One cars. The device will store the energy that is normally wasted as heat when a car is braking and recover it to power the car back up to speed, saving fuel and reducing emissions. The technology could be available for road cars in five to seven years.

Jones doesn’t feel that he’s missing out by working for a technology company rather than a race team. “Because there are so few of us, I am getting to have an involvement in all areas of it,” he says.

You don’t have to be a Formula One enthusiast to work in the industry, says Jon Hilton, the managing partner at Flybrid Systems and a former Renault Formula One technical director. “I am a fan but there are lots of people who are not.”

Working in Formula One is exciting and challenging. And it beats road car engineering hands down. “It’s kind of engineering without boundaries. There is very little cost restraint on our product. That gives [us] a huge amount of freedom. You get to design different things, make them all and see how they work and learn from your own experience at a rate that is impossible in any other business.

“I have personally designed seven whole engines. I shouldn’t think there is anyone who has ever done that for a road car,” he says.

www.formulastudent.com

Times Recommends

• Inspirational leadership
• How to get a new job
• The reluctant CEO