Formula UMA: this is how to build a motor racing team

More than 100 million euros. That is the annual budget for a Formula 1 team such as Ferrari. More than a thousand people work on the car that Carlos Sainz gets into every weekend, the pinnacle of motorsport engineering. That makes it even more striking that with just under 20,000 euros and around 60 people, a group of students at Malaga university have managed to get the MART (Malaga Racing Team) project off the ground. It is a team which may not have the history of the Maranello factory behind it, but it is competing in a category - Formula Student - which is a training ground for the ‘Big Top’ and similar jobs among the university community.

This is how Sonia Porras, who is a student at the School of Engineering, explains it. She acts as team manager, and she has spent the little spare time she has outside her studies building a single-seater which competed in the Montmeló Circuit in August. Nevertheless, she stresses that this competition is not only based on the driving, but is more of a “competition between engineers”.

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“In Formula Student they assess the design, the carbon footprint we leave and how we resolve that, and even the effect that Covid has had on building the car,” she explains.

But far from being solely a technical issue, MART also has to set other objectives, and that includes profitability. Beyond the results on the racetrack, the viability of the project depends on how the team manages the office side of things.

“They want us to draw up a business plan in which we explain how we will obtain financing,” says Sonia, and this is why the team comprises students from different faculties, making this a completely cross-disciplinary project.

In fact, for the director of the team and principal researcher - Pepe de la Varga, who is a professor of Company Organisation - the MART is possibly the most cross-disciplinary project at Malaga university, especially since for the 2021/2022 cycle they have included the speciality of Physiotherapy, with the aim of studying the ergonomics of the driver.

“This is what we have called the ecosystem of innovation. It is the union between Malaga university, City Hall (via ProMalaga) and the business park. The MART is a tangible expression of this ecosystem,” says Pepe, who co-directs the project with Joaquín Ortega, a professor at the School of Engineering.

Both Pepe and Sonia agree on the difficulties involved in finding sponsors and the importance this has in a context in which some of their European rivals in the same category have budgets of more than 100,000 euros, five times higher than the Malaga team.

For this reason, this term they will start looking into electric motors - while continuing to develop the combustion car - to access funds relating to clean energy, which at the same time would require more money.

Although it is not the most important part, for this Formula Student competition MART has a female driver who is also part of the team.

Alba Camacho has been fascinated by motorsport since childhood, because her father is a driver in various categories. She is studying engineering and her intention in the future is to focus on competition, in some way. She is at the controls of the MART, but she recognises that the role of women behind the steering wheel lags far behind that of men. “But there are more now,” she says, “and I hope to be one of them one day”.