The world’s first online motorsport engineering degrees

[Kevin Riley – National Motorsport Academy]

We are at the British Racing Car Show, which is the biggest show of its kind in the world. For the last 10 years I’ve been involved at the highest level of GT Racing in the UK. Driving first of all a Ferrari for 2 years and then, having seen a Mosler and fallen in love, a Mosler. This part of the world is the centre of the world in terms of motorsport expertise, 80% of the world’s Formula 1 teams and people are around here within a few miles. This is the Silicon Valley of motorsport and the ideal place to launch our online degree.

Courses at the National Motorsport Academy

First of all, you’ve got a wide range of subjects that you can start with us and we will be increasing that range considerably over time adding more modules. If you want to specialise in aerodynamics or in engine design or chassis design, you can take our course and run with it until you’ve got the job that you’re looking for. You have access to our tutors, 9-5, 5 days a week, which is pretty unusual. At university conventionally, you have to start on a particular day, you have to keep up and you can’t go any faster than the university prescribes. The other thing, in terms of access, apart from being more convenient working from home, is the enormous saving in cost.

How do you study motorsport engineering online?

Most of motorsport engineering is maths and physics and science, you don’t need to go to a campus or to a race track for all of that. And so 90%-95% of what you need to learn is classroom stuff, you can do it with a computer screen. But obviously you need to actually have a spanner or a laptop in your hand, you need to interface with other people in the sport and so we have over 30 races planned for this season, to which all of our students are invited. This allows them to get a feel for the whole thing, they can play with the cars, talk to the engineers. There’s more to motorsport than simply engineering, there’s the PR factor, it’s a commercial operation and you need to know the commercial side of the venture as well, so that you can experience at the track side. We also have track days where we simply test we make the car, if we can, a bit quicker. And we’ve got more freedom then and more space to work in.

Motorsport engineering experience

You don’t need to restrict your physical access to our team and our races. You can offer your services to any race team, that race team can get in touch with us, so if you offer your services free or expenses only, you can learn right at the front line exactly what you need to learn. And nothing is easy, this whole subject is not easy, you need to know the hard parts as well and deal with them and that’s where exposure to the real racing and the noise and the excitement and the timetables come in.

[Rosen Daskalov – Sin Cars]

The National Motorsport Academy, for me, is doing a very good job. This is an advanced step for the future which will be appreciated by a lot of people, a lot of young students and so on.

[Will Pedley – Will Pedley Racing]

The new online degree sounds absolutely brilliant, I studied as a mature student and had to take a break from my career to go and study, if there had been the opportunity for me to study online at the same time as I was working, that would have been absolutely phenomenal and I think that an online degree really will open the door for a lot of people who are currently working and really want to progress with their career.

[Rupert Manwaring – Lotus Motorsport]

The National Motorsport Academy online degree course is a very useful tool for somebody that maybe went straight into work from school, missed university, it gives them a second chance to get that incredible qualification online whilst working and develop your career.

[James Cannon – Severn Valley Motorsport]

To be fair I think it’s a great idea for people that are pushed for time and can’t get to a college or struggle to travel and I think it will help people to get involved with the motorsport industry, especially if they’ve got the degree behind them. With the placement being involved as well I think it’s better that they’re getting some hands-on experience as obviously all of it is not just down to the computer. But I think it’s a great idea.

[Tom Baker – Bute Motorsport]

Being online, it allows people to learn in their own time, whilst still having a job, whether that’s in motorsport or whether they have aspirations of getting into motorsport, so it’s a really superb idea that allows people to get the qualifications they need to progress in the industry.

[Kevin Riley – National Motorsport Academy]

We’ve got great plans for this year, having now done a deal with Lotus. So, we’ve acquired what was once the Lotus Le Mans team kit, their race car a Navora, which is one of only two in the world and all of their spare equipment. So this will be used to build another car, a Lotus, which we want to promote as having been built by our students. Once we start winning, with a student-built Lotus, that’ll be good for us, for our courses, for our students and for Lotus.

[Kevin Riley – National Motorsport Academy]

Graduate career opportunities

The most important thing when one of our students have finished their studies, is a job. So, one of the things that we will be doing, more than, I suppose, most universities, is exactly that, finding placements, finding jobs, making sure that the process of joining us and leaving us is seamless.

Join our team at the National Motorsport Academy

This is its first year and the first time ever that motorsport engineering has gone online. We’re opening access to a much greater range of people of all ages that would otherwise be the case if you only had the choice of going to a university campus.

Visit us online

http://motorsport.nda.ac.uk