GCU Racing scores new sponsorship deal

The GCU Racing team has acquired a new external sponsorship with component company Accu.

GCU Racing consists of students from across the University who work throughout the academic year to design and build a race car to compete at the annual Formula Student competition at Silverstone.

The team's recent sponsorship from Accu will provide them with the support they need to get their car ready for the Formula Student competition in July.

Ethan MacColl, a member of the Non-Technical Team within GCU Racing who specialises in social media content said: "Accu are our components company, they supply us with a lot of the components that will be used on the car."

The team's Technical Director, Joe Abbott also added "Accu sell a wide variety of items generally used to assemble designs from nuts and bolts to bearings and handles.

The assembly hardware that we get through Accu quite literally holds our car together and therefore is a very valuable sponsor to GCU Racing."

Trying to build a race car is by no means a cheap feat, so the team spend a lot of time throughout the year trying to acquire sponsorships with companies across the country.

Ethan said: "Any sponsorship is hugely beneficial in any way, whether or not we've had some cans dropped off by Barrs, Monster, Red Bull, whatever it is, it's all a huge help to the actual team when they're there, it keeps them going but also saves them a bit of money. Our direct sponsorships in the forms of credit, vouchers or cash help fund directly towards the car, and some companies offer sponsorship by saying they will make a specific part of us.

"Being such a small team with a small budget, this is so much more meaningful than the teams with much larger budgets. For example, there's teams from the likes of New Zealand which have huge budgets, so saving a couple hundred pounds might not be as important as a small team like ours."

Accu's recent sponsorship will help the team work towards their number one goal this season: getting the car on track at Silverstone! Ethan explained that "sponsorships such as Accu are definitely beneficial towards our goal of getting the car on track, it provides us with a bit more support that allows us as a team to push that wee bit further.

"Last year, we had to build the car from scratch which took up a large portion of the team's finances, but this year we are able to re-use some parts so Accu's funding can help us develop new parts of the car."

Project Manager for GCU Racing, Robbie McGregor said: "The provision of components that Accu provides really helps the team out, it allows us to focus our budget on larger projects within the team and allow us to take our designs to the next level. Thanks to Accu’s website being really intuitive to use, we can go from needing a bolt for example, to having exactly what we need the next day."

The Formula Student competition is one of Europe's largest educational engineering competitions and sees over 100 teams travel from around the globe to compete at Silverstone. Some of the teams, especially international teams, have much larger budgets than GCU Racing. Most teams are able to use their budget to finance both the car and the team's time at the competition, but for newer and smaller teams like GCU Racing, this is not currently possible with the available funding.

Ethan said: "I know from last year going myself it's such a good experience and it was great and worth every penny, whether that was from a networking perspective so people could go on and get jobs with the companies that are down there, to just enjoying the weekend!

"However, it would be great to get to the point where we do have enough sponsorships that everything from the full cost of the car to our trip to the competition could be covered, so steps like getting companies like Accue to sponsor us are really important.”

Robbie also added: "A massive thanks to Matt and everyone at Accu for their continued support. The team look forward to continuing our partnership and hopefully meeting again at Silverstone this year."

By Derry Wyllie.