SHU Racing's Best Ever Result

Our Best Finish Yet

FSUK 2025 marks SHU Racing’s highest-ever finish — and what a journey it was to get there. Here’s how the team made history at Silverstone.

Prepped and Ready

This season, we put a stronger focus on project planning than ever before. By incorporating decision matrices into every system, we made sure our time and energy went into what mattered most: building a car that could go the distance and complete every event.

Our Team Principal, Dan Choudhury, brought invaluable experience from his placement at McLaren, guiding the team to work smarter and more effectively.

That planning really paid off. The weeks leading up to competition are usually the most stressful of the year, but this time they were calm, giving us space to perfect the car. We even ran our own internal pre-scrutineering session to make sure everything was ready before heading to Silverstone.

Scrutineering Success

Scrutineering hasn’t always been kind to SHU Racing. In the past three years, we’ve stumbled at static scrutineering (2022), noise (2023), and brakes (2024). But with each setback came lessons — and this year, we came prepared.

Armed with a brand-new brake system and exhaust, we tackled scrutineering with confidence. After a few small tweaks, we cleared safety and technical inspections on Friday, followed by aero adjustments to pass chassis.

Dynamic scrutineering was smoother still: tilt, noise, and brake tests all passed first time, giving us the green light to hit the track on Saturday.

Static Events

This year, we appointed two statics coordinators, Abigail Williams and Amelia Curran, to lead our design and costing preparation. With detailed input from every department, they produced comprehensive reports and trained team members to confidently present their systems to the judges.

Other highlights included:

Business Presentation – Led by George Swanbury, who drew on his experience in quality control and

private racing teams to deliver a polished investment pitch.

Lap Time Simulation – Headed by Sam Caswell, who used advanced computational methods to find the

best setup for Silverstone’s sprint track.

Dynamic Events

With scrutineering behind us, Saturday kicked off with a very wet Acceleration event. Drivers Dillon Brookes and Sam Caswell adapted quickly, posting a best time of 5.556 seconds.

Next came Skid Pad, where Abigail Williams made history as SHU Racing’s first-ever female driver. Alongside Sam, she helped us set a best time of 6.278 seconds in tricky wet conditions — a result that played to our strengths against higher-powered rivals.

The final event of the day was Sprint, where new unlimited run rules came into play. Early on, Dan and Dylan matched a competitive 1:06 despite heavy rain. But in our push to improve as the track dried, mistakes crept in. A 15-cone penalty slowed us down and damaged our impact attenuator, forcing a

late-night trip back to Sheffield for a spare.

Endurance: The Big One

On Sunday, with the car repaired, we lined up first for Endurance — the toughest test of the weekend.

Dylan opened with consistent laps and even overtook two cars. After the mid-race driver swap, Dan took the wheel and guided the car through changing conditions and even avoiding an on-track incident involving another team. Thanks to his composure, we brought the car home safely and passed post-event scrutineering.

Our goal at the start of the year was simple: compete and complete. At Silverstone, we achieved exactly

that.

Results Rundown

Costing: 18th – 77 pts

Design: 13th – 105 pts

Business: 19th – 84.94 pts

Lap Time Simulation: 16th – 11 pts

Acceleration: 9th – 25.36 pts

Skid Pad: 6th – 48.04 pts

Sprint: 21st – 5 pts

Endurance: 10th – 145.6 pts

Efficiency: 15th – 80 pts

Overall: 8th place – 623.3 points

Our best-ever FSUK finish!

Thank You to Our Partners

None of this would be possible without the support of our partners.

This time, we want to give a special shoutout to DJ Racecars. They’ve supported SHU Racing for years, providing access to their autoclave for curing composite components and sharing expert industry knowledge. Many of our members have even gone on to placements and graduate roles with DJ — including Ollie Mitchell, Jack Holmes, Fin Ellershaw, Dylan Hardaker, and Joe France.

From all of us at SHU Racing: Thank you for a monumental year