At OpenBOM, we have a soft spot for Formula Student teams. They compress everything that makes product development hard into one academic year: a full vehicle, hundreds of parts, a rotating team of engineers, a hard competition deadline, and no room for wasted hours. Universities are increasingly turning to OpenBOM to help their teams manage that complexity, and the Warwick Racing story shows exactly why.
Our “motor head”, Steve Hess, had a conversation with Anthony Wang, who leads sponsorships for Warwick Racing, and Rohith John Victor, a member of the team at the University of Warwick, about how the team manages product data for its electric race car.
Watch the video
A Student Team Building an EV Faces the Same Data Problem as a Manufacturer
Warwick Racing is the University of Warwick’s Formula Student team. Its main goal is to design and build an electric powertrain race car to compete in Formula Student, the international engineering competition run in the UK by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) at Silverstone. The team runs as a student-led project, separate from the students’ degree programs, and is sponsored by WMG at the University of Warwick.
The team is moving in the right direction. Last year Warwick Racing finished 15th. This year the team climbed to 9th.
What I find interesting is that the challenge behind the car looks very familiar to anyone who has worked in a manufacturing company. An EV race car is a complex, multi-disciplinary product with hundreds of components, designed by a team working across several CAD tools. Someone needs to know what every part is, why it is there, and what state it is in. A team that loses track of that information loses time it simply doesn’t have.
Excel Tracks Parts but Cannot Show What Is Actually Happening
Like many engineering teams, Warwick Racing started with Excel. The spreadsheet was used to keep track of parts, how things were managed, and what each component was for.
That works until the design starts changing every day. A spreadsheet is a snapshot. It shows what someone typed in at some point, not what the team is actually working on right now. With OpenBOM, the team got the thing a static file cannot provide:
“Now that we have OpenBOM, we’ve really allowed it to actually get more live updates and see what’s actually being done.”
Manual CAD-to-BOM Entry Is a Job Nobody Should Have
Before OpenBOM, the bridge between CAD models and the bill of materials was a person. One junior engineer on the team had to manually add every single component from CAD into the BOM.
“You can imagine the car has hundreds of parts, right?”
This is the part of the story I think every engineering manager should pay attention to. Manual transfer is not only slow. It is also the kind of repetitive work where mistakes creep in, precisely because it is so repetitive. The team recognized both problems: the hours lost, and the risk that the BOM quietly drifts away from the design. With several CAD systems in play, the manual bridge only gets harder to maintain.
One Button Replaced Hours of Repetitive Data Entry
OpenBOM’s CAD integrations changed the workflow completely. Instead of rebuilding the BOM by hand, the team imports the structure directly from CAD into OpenBOM, regardless of which CAD tool a given engineer is working in.
“I really do like the CAD integration. It’s very smooth, simple. It’s literally one button and everything’s in there.”
According to the team, the import feature alone saved a lot of hours by eliminating time-consuming manual processes that could also go wrong. It also changed how the team finds information. Instead of hunting for parts across files and spreadsheets, engineers look in one place. The team estimates this cut the time spent looking for parts by 50 percent.
A Shared Workspace Only Works When the Whole Team Is In It
OpenBOM sponsors Warwick Racing with a Company subscription, and every team member works in it. That matters more than it might seem. A BOM tool that only a few people can access becomes another silo, and the rest of the team goes back to side spreadsheets. When everyone from design to sponsorships works from the same live data, the BOM becomes the team’s shared reference rather than one engineer’s responsibility.
Every Hour Saved on Data Is an Hour Spent on the Car
The most important outcome is not a feature. It is focus. A Formula Student team has a fixed amount of engineering time, and every hour spent copying part numbers is an hour not spent on the powertrain, the chassis, or testing.
“It’s really helped us out. It has really allowed us to focus on developing our cars.”
That is exactly what a BOM tool should do. It should disappear into the workflow and give engineers their time back.
Student Teams Are Learning Habits They Will Take into Industry
There is one more reason I love this story. The students on Warwick Racing will graduate and join automotive companies, EV startups, and manufacturers. The habits they build now, connecting CAD to a live BOM, keeping one source of truth, refusing to retype data, are the habits they will bring into their future teams. I would much rather see young engineers learn that product data can be connected and live than learn that “BOM management” means a spreadsheet and a patient junior engineer.
Congratulations to Anthony, Rohith, and the whole Warwick Racing team on the jump from 15th to 9th. We are proud to be part of the journey.
If your team is still copying parts from CAD into spreadsheets, I would love to show you a better way. Register for free to OpenBOM. If you are running a university or student engineering team, check out our Education and Non-Commercial subscription or contact us to talk about team sponsorship.
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