Moratuwa Uni puts Sri Lanka on Formula One map

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Formula motor car “D-Mora P1”

Marking a remarkable breakthrough in Sri Lankan engineering, the Moratuwa University engineering students created a noteworthy milestone producing a formula one automobile for the Formula Student UK 2016 competition and bringing home three awards, placing themselves among the top notch countries.

The Formula Student competition is an annual event organized by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers and is Europe’s most established educational motorsport competition backed by the industry attracting high profile engineers. Held in the Silver Stones racing circuit in the United Kingdom, it is one of the premier competitions in the engineering industry. The competition challenges university student engineers from around the world to design, build and race a single seat racing car in a span of a year in contention of competing on the main stage.

This was the first occasion that a Sri Lankan team participated in the competition that has a participation of 130+ university teams from around the world representing 30 countries. Participating as a rookie team, the Sri Lankan team, team Sharks from the Univerisity of Moratuwa was able to capture the spotlight in entire series winning three awards in total.

Photo Album – Formula motor car “D-Mora P1” – Press Conference

The formula 1 automobile named D-Mora P1 was developed by a team of engineering students of the University of Moratuwa in collaboration with the Diesel Motor Engineering PLC (DIMO) who funded the project entirely in terms of both financial support as well as technicalities was a pure Sri Lankan effort and was built from scratch over a span of two years. 

Speaking at the press conference, team leader of the Sharks engineering Harshana Kelasha added that it was a tough way forward and to compete with high-end teams was a challenge.

“This was our first time but we saw universities building formula one cars with the engineering of top companies such as BMW & Porsche while we had limited resources to work with initially but being a rookie team we were able to win three awards at the competition and were only behind Stuttgart University in terms of awards”

The Shark team was commended for their aerodynamic design that was applied onto the racing car and the specialty of the car was its paddle shift gear system.

“While all of the top university custom-made cars used a manual gear shifting method, our car had the paddle shifting system and all media and the people were interested in our model because of that. “ Harshana Kelasha further added.

The three awards that team Sri Lanka bagged were Best Newcomer in Class 1 award, Dedication Formula Student Award and the award for the Top Individual Driver. Among the three awards, the Team Sharks driver Induwara Munasinghe has been adjudged the Top Individual Driver for his exceptional skills in driving and control, surpassing all other experienced drivers.

Having achieved considerable success in their first attempt, the team intends to do better in the next segment. The D-Mora P1 was entirely built and tuned by DIMO who are one of the pioneer companies in the automobile sector in the country. From the provision of technical assistance to test driving the unit at the DIMO Technical centers, their efforts have reaped a heavy harvest.

Speaking for DIMO, Vijitha Bandara – Director of DIMO added these words,

“The exceptional performance by Team Shark and their impressive racing race car in their maiden appearance has certainly made other countries sit up and take notice of the engineering talent in Sri Lanka. We have certainly achieved our goal by identifying the talent in Sri Lanka and provide them with the relevant resources which have enabled them to bring back glory to the motherland in an international event”