Canadian engineer gains invaluable F1 experience during Renault internship
Aspiring engineers gathered in Montreal this week to take a shot at a unique opportunity.
The Infiniti Engineering Academy winner from Canada, one of seven from around the world, will get to spend six months working with Infiniti, as well as six months working with the Renault Formula One team.
While this year’s crop of prospects took part in two days of activities and interviews, last year’s winner sat back and watched during a break from his work with Infiniti.
Matthew Crossan is seven months into his internship, but the 24-year-old was able to sit back and watch as Chase Pelletier, 22, was named the winner of the 2018 edition.
Crossan, from London, Ont., has completed his six-month stint in the United Kingdom with Renault and is one month into his time with Infiniti.
From Day 1, Crossan had to prove himself with the F1 team. And he was surprised by the type of work he was given and the attention paid to even the smallest details.
“It wasn’t just busy work,” he said. “I was doing work that if I wasn’t doing it, someone else was going to be doing that work. So it really was vital and important for the team.”
At Renault, he worked with the vehicle performance group, specifically performance optimization.
His projects involved trying to find appropriate settings for ride height, springs, dampers and more to find the optimal setup for the race car.
“There are some things I wouldn’t have even thought how in depth they go into something,” Crossan said. “But when they are looking for every 10th of a second, you have to go into detail into so many different things to find it.”
Unlike the mechanics you see at the track every week, Crossan worked with software and simulators, not torque wrenches and air guns.
“I was also working in the mission control room during the races,” Crossan said. “There’s only room for a limited amount of engineers at the track, so we have a NASA-style control room that we work from.”
Some of the tools and programs he worked on are used to better analyze the brake system.
“For Montreal, it’s the hardest track of the year on the brake system,” Crossan said. “So a lot of the tools that I developed will be used between practice sessions and before the race to try and optimize the brake configuration for the weekend.”
With Infiniti, Crossan is with the ride and handling division, working on trying to improve the ride comfort.
Using software and simulators, he is able to adjust settings on the car and run it through a virtual set of road tests to see how it will react.
“It is a lot quicker to iterate than it would be with a physical car,” Crossan said. “With the push of a button, I can change the springs in the virtual model versus taking a couple of hours in a real car.”
Crossan hopes all his hard work will pay off.
“The end goal is to stay on at either one of these companies,” he said. “I definitely really enjoyed my time with the Formula One team.”
Infiniti global motorsport and performance projects director Tommaso Volpe was one of the judges who selected Crossan as the winner in 2017 and said “he impressed a lot.”
Based in Hong Kong, Volpe doesn’t work directly with Crossan, but does receive monthly updates on how he is performing.
“He is doing a very good job, specifically on the Formula One side,” Volpe said. “There are some talks about potential opportunities for him.”
And Crossan wasn’t only working hard at the office, but back in his room as he prepared to present his master’s degree thesis, which he completed last month at Western University in London.
“It’s been a long winter,” Crossan said. “But now I get to come home from work and just chill out instead. It’s going to be nice.”