“A rigorous process.” So says Dave Robson, the Williams Formula 1 team’s head of vehicle performance, of the process for deciding the Autosport Williams Engineer of the Future Award. This prestigious contest was much revamped for 2023, following its return last year after a pandemic-enforced hiatus.
The winner of that Award, Michael Preston, turned judge this year to help whittle down a field of over 200 initial candidates, which for the first time was open to anyone currently studying an engineering degree at any university or college in the UK.
The Williams team itself went over the application field to get that down to 60 contenders, before sending 20 to an assessment day involving Williams’s Esports team, where Preston is now the chief engineer, as well as working in the Formula Regional European Championship by Alpine and Eurocup-3 series. The most promising 10 budding engineers then made the final selection for the full eight-month process.
They initially stayed working in the virtual world through April and May, helping the Williams Esports squad in various competitions around their studies and work placements. This included a win in the 2023 iRacing Nurburgring 24 Hours. At the end of this four-month stint, the field was again slimmed down. Now just five candidates remained.
This group returned to Williams’s Grove headquarters for two assessment days in early September regarding F1 race strategy and driver-in-the-loop (DIL) simulator work. Robson, overseeing the race strategy tasks, reckons “a decent friendship” had evolved between the candidates, which he believes added “a nice dynamic of friendly rivalry” to the whole process.
But, as with the brutal world of professional sport, only the best would progress – the field finally settled at two finalists: David Crespo and Riccardo Calzetta. Entering the process, Crespo was a Motorsport Engineering Master’s degree student at Oxford Brookes University, while Calzetta was an Aeronautical Engineering MEng student at the University of Glasgow.
The finalists had two challenges remaining. The first was to attend a race weekend in the GB3 single-seater series working with the Rodin Carlin squad at the Zandvoort round in October. They were chiefly asked to work through video and driver performance-related items for the team’s racers: Costa Toparis, John Bennett and Callum Voisin.
Source: Autosport