Saudi researchers partner with McLaren Racing to boost F1 car

JEDDAH: When the second-ever Saudi Arabian Grand Prix powers off from the start line under Jeddah’s skies on Sunday night, a select group of local students will have their eyes fixed firmly on the orange McLaren cars of Lando Norris and Daniel Ricciardo.

The duo may not have had the best of starts in the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix last week, but as they look to get back to the form that saw them finish fourth in the Constructors’ Championship last year, they will be able to count on the support of students from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Jeddah.

Since 2018, KAUST and McLaren Racing have partnered to develop research and development projects with a long-term focus to improve on track performance, and importantly, develop and promote the team’s sustainability and diversity through STEM, or science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

“It’s a partnership focused on science and technology, because that’s what KAUST is all about,” said the university’s vice president for research, Prof. Donal Bradley. “It’s about an opportunity from the KAUST side, to work in an extreme environment.”

“Formula One racing pushes things to the extreme, it pushes engineering challenges to the extreme,” he said. “And so, as a research-focused university, having access to extreme environments is something that’s exciting, and provides great opportunity to do new things to really challenge yourself as to whether you’re capable of providing useful information and understanding.

“We work on other extreme environments, so (there are) extreme environments in the Red Sea, for instance. So you know, the heat and the salinity and the depths of the ocean produces some very interesting problems to look at, in the