Canadian lands the ultimate student job
Engineering with Infiniti and Renault F1
C RAN FIELD, U. K .• One day, your new vehicle might stop faster than cars could ever brake before, preventing you from crashing. And that might possibly be because a student from London, Ont., went to London, England, to work on race cars.
Brakes are just part of what Matt Crossan, an engineering student at University of Western Ontario, is doing right now. He’s the Canadian member of the current Infiniti Engineering Academy, an annual competition that picks seven top students worldwide. The students work for six months on consumer vehicles at Infiniti’s European Technical Centre, and six more on F1 cars at the Renault Sport Formula One Team Technical Centre.
From 341 Canadian entries, 10 finalists competed in a two- day challenge in Montreal last summer, where Crossan was named the winner. Worldwide, the program drew 12,000 entries from 41 countries. This is the program’s fifth year.
For the students, it’s the ultimate dream job. For Nissan/ Infiniti and F1, it’s an opportunity to bring young engineers into the fold. While a permanent job isn’t guaranteed, the students’ experience is an advantage if they try to stay on.
It isn’t a classroom. The students work as regular employees, earning a graduate engineer’s salary. Cros- san, 24, studied mechanical and materials engineering, and is working on a Masters in composite materials. He’s currently at F1, and will move to Infiniti in May.
“One of the big things I’ve been working on is braking,” Crossan says. “It’s about performance in motorsports, and one of the most important (features) in a road car.”
Mixing F1 and Infiniti isn’t about making showroom vehicles go faster, but finding symbiotic ways to improve both. Crossan is developing better tools to crunch a huge amount of data from the car when it’s racing. With similarly quick analysis time, automakers could potentially find and fix design or production issues much sooner.
“We look at how many braking events there are, with the pressure on each,” he says. “I work on the stats from 2017. When ( driver) Carlos Sainz came in, he was 20-per-cent more on the brakes than (our) other drivers. It was the highest brake pressure we’d seen all year, so we had to work on that. If we are better at predicting these forces and measuring them over the life cycle of the car, you can make it safer.”
Even if racing doesn’t create a new technology, it can speed development of existing ones.
“Take carbon disc brakes,” Crossan says. “They have a higher coefficient of friction, and you’re starting to see them on the hyper cars. F1 has accelerated it, and it will likely trickle down to cheaper road cars eventually. You could brake in five metres, not 10 metres, and that’s the difference between hitting or not hitting a pedestrian.”
The previous Canadian winner, Felix Lamy of Gatineau, Que., also worked between the two.
“In F1, I was in the design office,” Lamy said. “Then, at the Infiniti Centre, I was working in vehicle dynamics, where we do simulations and models to predict the behaviour of the car, how it feels, how it handles.”
Every Nissan and Infiniti model sold i n Europe is tested at the Technical Centre. The trials are extensive: monsoon rain chambers, weld and bolt tests, sound characteristics, and thousands of kilometres of durability testing.
The Renault Centre builds the race cars, creating the chassis and carbon- fibre body, and using engines from France.
“We were de veloping new laminates for the chassis, and technical drawings for the parts,” Lamy says. “I worked on gearbox parts, on the cooling system. These were development pieces for the tests they ran in Barcelona.”
It was more than just engineering, he adds.
“You learn all the things you don’t learn in university, like communication skills, management skills, all those soft skills you need. You have to work under high stress, under very tight deadlines, so all those factors come into play.”
The process to find next year’s students starts next month with online applications. This year, for the first time, the final selections will be held at a race, and students will perform a challenge on an F1 car at the track.
The program’s global aspect is paramount, says Tommaso Volpe, director of Infiniti Global Motorsport.
“We have some diversity in Infiniti because it’s Japanese, but most people working ( at the European Centre) and in F1 are European. We brought talent f rom ever ywhere in t he world.
“Last year, the student from China was asked to design an F1 rear wing, and hers was the one used in Barcelona in testing. They were not expecting a junior engineer to do it. She was young, but she came from a totally different background and study, because every country has a different approach.”
The student program has also opened new opportunities between the two centres.
“The senior engineers meet every month to follow the students’ progress, and they start to talk about other things,” Volpe says. “They have high- tech 3- D printing machines at F1, and now the Infiniti Centre is thinking of bringing some printing jobs over because it’s much more advanced.
“On the other side, the Technical Centre is sophisticated on testing electronic systems, because the road cars have so many of them, and they might be able to leverage that with F1. The student program has opened a corridor. As far as we know, there is no other program in the world with this type of student challenge, and this type of placement.”
YOU HAVE TO WORK UNDER HIGH STRESS, VERY TIGHT DEADLINES.