Over the past year I have been involved in designing, manufacturing and building a bespoke steering wheel and electronic dash display for a formula student car along with other members of the UWE Racing team. After taking the majority of our designs and manufactured components to this year’s Formula Student event at Silverstone to be judged. Although we achieved an 8th place finish, we were surprised with some of the feedback from the judges regardling simple principles and major oversights.

Work has now begun using the information gained from the event to modify, refine and improve our designs for the car that will be built over this coming year. I will be recovering all of the decision making and design work for the steering wheel and display from the last year, in order to design and build a much improved version.

The start of the design process started with making a comparision of steering wheels available on the market and a feasible product that could be manufactured and assembled within University. The design of our steering wheel evolved in shape, size and complexity from the standard Momo design (1) to the final design we used for the prototype (9). This was due to tailoring to our needs in terms of; available cockpit space, driver ergonomics, loading requirements, material selection and positioning of the electronic display components.