{"id":853585,"date":"2026-08-11T01:16:20","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T01:16:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/853585\/"},"modified":"2026-08-11T01:16:20","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T01:16:20","slug":"how-two-socal-engineers-made-their-way-to-formula-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/853585\/","title":{"rendered":"How Two SoCal Engineers Made Their Way to Formula 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you don\u2019t have the dream to begin with, you\u2019ll never achieve it.<\/p>\n

Prescott Campbell and Rami Edirisinghe both grew up in Southern California\u2014the birthplace of hot rodding, custom cars, lowriding, drag racing, desert racing, and there were even some Indy cars and Grand Prix cars built there\u2014but it could easily seem a million miles away from the high-tech carbon-fiber glamour and Euro-sophistication of Formula 1.<\/p>\n

That didn\u2019t stop either one of them from pursuing their dreams of working in the most sophisticated form of racing outside of NASA.<\/p>\n

Formula 1 takes just about the whole month of August off\u2014July 27 to August 23. So during that time both of them came home to Southern California. SAE\u2019s Dean Case knew about them\u2014he knows about everyone in motorsports\u2014so he asked if they\u2019d address the monthly SAE SoCal meeting, held at the extensive collection of the Lions Automobilia Foundation in Rancho Dominguez.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey graciously accepted,\u201d Case said.<\/p>\n

\"F1NurPhoto\/\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Williams driver Carlos Sainz at the Hungaroring July 31.<\/p>\n

Indeed, despite having among the coolest jobs in all of engineering, they were polite and friendly to all during their visit to Lions. Here\u2019s what we learned.<\/p>\n

Rami Edirisinghe is Systems Simulation Engineer focusing on powertrain cooling and mechanical systems. He got his bachelor\u2019s from Georgia Tech where he was on the Georgia Tech \u201cWreck Racing\u201d team competing in the Grassroots Motorsports $2,000 Challenge.<\/p>\n

Prescott Campbell\u2019s title at Williams is Graduate Structural Engineer. He got a bachelor\u2019s in motorsport engineering from Oxford Brookes University, where he was a Formula Student EV team lead (Formula Student is the European version of Formula SAE). He\u2019s also the 2019 Lucas Oil Formula Car champion and a former USF2000 driver.<\/p>\n

\u201cHis path to F1 is a great example of how careers in motorsport aren\u2019t always linear.\u201d <\/p>\n

SoCal SAE secretary Emily Sharp introduced Edirisinghe first.<\/p>\n

\u201cHis path to F1 is a great example of how careers in motorsport aren\u2019t always linear,\u201d she said, using a very engineering term.<\/p>\n

After studying at Georgia Tech, working as an R&D engineer at Advanced Clutch Technology, and volunteering with Grassroots Racing programs, Rami earned his master\u2019s degree at Cal State Fullerton, where he specialized in thermal fluids.<\/p>\n

\u201cGo Titans,\u201d Sharp said.<\/p>\n

\"F1NurPhoto\/\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Both the Williams cars you see here have work by Prescott and Edirisinghe.<\/p>\n

But he started his presentation, not with the surface tension research he\u2019s done for the F1 car, but with the 1975 BMW 2002 he\u2019s had since he was 16.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve decided to do a very sacrilegious thing and replace the BMW engine with a Honda K24, very polarizing.\u201d<\/p>\n

You have to think outside the box if you want to get to F1.<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t do Formula SAE at Georgia Tech, instead concentrating on something called \u201cWreck Racing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWreck Racing is part of the Grassroots Motorsports $2,000 Challenge. You can do practically anything you want within some safety guidelines, but the $2,000 limit is a hard cap.\u201d<\/p>\n

The team chose a Mazda Miata and swapped in a Lexus 1UZ-FE, a 4.0-liter, 32-valve, quad-cam all-aluminum V8 that offered forged internals and extreme reliability.<\/p>\n

Along the way there was innovation involved.<\/p>\n

\"Group<\/p>\n

Rami Edirisinghe<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted a manual transmission. We couldn\u2019t afford it, so we thought, what could we do? We ended up building a microcontroller that basically shifted the automatic transmission, because the grassroots race is only an autocross, and you only use second and third gear, followed by a drag race. This worked for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Further innovation came the next year when the team dropped a 2JZ into an MG Midget.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs you can see, (the car) is quite small because, after you put (the straight six 2JZ) and then the GM transmission and the Ford 8.8 (rear end), there\u2019s actually not a lot of room in between them. But the biggest issue we ran into was, at this point, I think we had $50 left in the budget, and we had to somehow shorten a drive shaft and balance it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cRather, it\u2019s more about how you look at your problems and how you approach your problems and how you go back to your fundamentals.\u201d<\/p>\n

They realized that the forward side of the driveshaft was 2.75 inches in diameter, and they came up with the idea of building concentric rings, using that to center the piece, and then welding it.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo that actually managed for us. But this is the thing: a good engineer knows how to look at problems, and it\u2019s not necessarily always about what simulation tools you know and what kind of problems you\u2019re looking at. Rather, it\u2019s more about how you look at your problems and how you approach your problems and how you go back to your fundamentals. And this is one thing I really learned a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Images<\/p>\n

Rami Edirisinghe<\/p>\n

\u201cBut the other heartbreaking thing you learn is that motorsports is quite cruel. So as you can see at the end, we spent all this time building this amazing car. We have half the team out there at the competition, and then the rear axle mount decides to fail, taking the transmission out with it. So that\u2019s motorsports. Get used to it.\u201d
So, he says, they wound up switching power plants. By that he means the team attached straps to the car and pulled it through the slalom and drag strip.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo effectively we did not DNF. We were the slowest team, but we won the spirit of the event award. I think that\u2019s another great thing about motorsports. You can work really hard. You can have the best ideas, but sometimes you will not win. But you keep on trying.\u201d<\/p>\n

When he was working at ACT clutches, he signed on at Jager Racing. He sent Mark Jager an email.<\/p>\n

\u201cHey, I\u2019m just looking to volunteer for some more sports opportunities. I work at ACT. I work close by. I have experience in these different areas, and I also am interested in aerodynamics. And for some reason, all he saw was \u2018aerodynamics,\u2019 and then I became the aero guy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"RaceJager Racing<\/p>\n

The Jager Racing STi<\/p>\n

He started doing pressure measurements on the hood, moved to computational fluid dynamics, then he arranged a deal with AEM to do data logging, then invented a rolling road to test aerodynamics on the car, including a vacuum that sucked the belt of the rolling road to the \u201cground\u201d because it kept getting sucked up by the aerodynamics.<\/p>\n

And from there he graduated and applied to Williams as an aerodynamicist.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd to my surprise, the the HR department comes back to me and says, \u2018You know, Rami, you\u2019re not really qualified for this aero role, but we see you have all this heat transfer experience.\u2019 And I was like, \u2018Yes.\u2019 And they were saying, \u2018Well, we\u2019re actually looking for a heat transfer person.\u2019 I didn\u2019t even know you could do heat transfer in F1. I mean, it\u2019s probably obvious, but I just was so hard focused on aero that I never thought that heat transfer could be a thing. So that\u2019s how I got into F1.\u201d<\/p>\n

And what has he learned so far?<\/p>\n

\"VariousPrescott Campbell<\/p>\n

Prescott Campbell started out racing open wheel winged cars.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you build a race car, you often have tradeoffs. You can make the best cooling system ever, so you can reject the most amount of heat; you can best make the best aero possible, the most downforce, least drag; you make the lightest car possible; but if you optimize for just each one of those things, you won\u2019t get the fastest car. The fastest car is from the team that knows which trade is the best to make, and that sometimes varies from track to track. So that\u2019s what our group is about.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prescott Campbell, meanwhile, had all the engineering learning curves and added a start of a career as an open-wheel driver.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fastest car is from the team that knows which trade is the best to make, and that sometimes varies from track to track.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI was very fortunate at a young age to know exactly where I wanted to end up in my career. I had a dream, I had a goal.\u201d<\/p>\n

And he was genetically predisposed to be a race engineer.<\/p>\n

\u201cBoth my parents were engineers, so I was naturally interested in it from them, and I loved motorsport thanks to my dad. So I knew I wanted to get to Formula 1 as an engineer of some kind, and because of that, I could think very early on from when I was about 14 years old, \u2018How do I start right now to get some advantage over all the other candidates?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"APrescott Campbell<\/p>\n

He started in karting then advanced to engineering through robotics.<\/p>\n

Racers are competitive, after all. His high school, Corona del Mar High, had a robotics team, so he joined that.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur team\u2019s first year I became the CAD lead because I was the one willing to learn how to use SolidWorks. At the same time I was racing go karts and really doing it because I enjoyed it and I was learning a lot and it was challenging and I loved competitive sport.\u201d<\/p>\n

He wrangled an internship at a local company called AirWolf 3D while still in high school.<\/p>\n

\"Engineering<\/p>\n

Prescott Campbell<\/p>\n

\u201cThey had a plan to take a Dodge Hellcat to SEMA and CES. And what better way to appeal to small automotive businesses that are too scared to dip their foot into 3D printing than to show them that a 16-year-old can make parts for a real car that goes on display?\u201d<\/p>\n

So he spent his summer and junior year designing and producing 3D-printed parts for the Dodge Hellcat.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything I was learning as a 16-year-old, getting to grips with engineering, and then at SEMA in 2017, getting to present and speak to all these business owners to prove to them that 3D printing is a rapid iterative prototyping process that they can all benefit from, and it\u2019s something that\u2019s really accessible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Confident kid!<\/p>\n

When it came time to choose a college, he had heard a story about a student from Northern California named Trevor Green Smith who had gone to a university called Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom. That kid managed to come back and work as a performance engineer at Dale Coyne Racing. So he called him.<\/p>\n

\u201cI really just wanted help deciding: Is going all the way to the UK for something like this really worth it? Is that going to give me the best chance?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Dale<\/p>\n

Prescott Campbell<\/p>\n

From that call came an unpaid internship for the two weeks leading to the Indy 500 at Dale Coyne Racing working on Santino Ferrucci\u2019s car.<\/p>\n

First thing he did was build a 3D-printed driver cooling fan system to keep the drivers cool in the grid and in the pits when they\u2019re giving feedback. He almost got the job as the guy who hands the tires over the wall during pit stops, but wound up as the \u201cdead man\u201d on the fueling system.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can all think about why it might be called that.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a great experience.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut the main thing that I benefited over those two weeks was speaking to all the engineers in the paddock, just walking up to all the different teams and speaking to the different engineers there and asking them their opinion of what university they thought was best for me to study in was so valuable. It convinced me that Brookes was the place to go. There are people that I met that were in different teams that had studied there, people that wished they had studied there, and they\u2019re all telling me that I should go there.\u201d<\/p>\n

So he went. At the time, the Formula Student program at Brookes was making the transition from internal combustion to electric cars, which meant everyone was starting on the same level playing field.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe university didn\u2019t have an electrical engineering program, and so none of us knew what we were getting into.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Images<\/p>\n

Prescott Campbell<\/p>\n

While all that was going on, a driving opportunity arose when Cooper Tires hosted a scholarship shootout in the middle of his senior year.<\/p>\n

\u201cI went there not really having any expectations for myself, and ended up winning the thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

That gave him a full season in open-wheel cars at the end of his senior year. He was also racing the professional level of shifter karting in the US. But that year, in 2019, he had a bad accident, flew out of a go kart, broke his femur, and missed a few races. Devastating to some, not to Campbell. As soon as his leg healed, he got back in the race car.<\/p>\n

\u201cI podiumed (in the first race back) and won every single race that I could finish for the rest of the year. I managed to win the championship by a few points in the last race, so that was awesome, very rewarding experience, really good lesson in never giving up.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes I question whether breaking my leg was really what allowed me to win that championship that year. And if I had never done it, never had that additional challenge to overcome, would I have ever been able to become the driver I did by the end of that year.\u201d<\/p>\n

It created a conundrum.<\/p>\n

\"Headlines<\/p>\n

Prescott Campbell<\/p>\n

\u201cSo that was a great experience, but it also meant I was expecting to go to university and focus on an engineering path, and all of a sudden I had the scholarship to race cars in the United States, so I did the natural thing and decided to commute between the UK and the US every two weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was all ready to go to school and race full time in USF2000 when Covid hit. He was actually strapped into the car for the season-opener at St. Pete and they canceled the whole series.<\/p>\n

At the same time he was set to continue his studies at Brookes, but the highly sought-after internships weren\u2019t going to work out that year.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo I withdrew from university for the year and ended up racing for those two seasons in the USF2000. And I also found an engineering job here in Southern California in El Segundo at a company called Fluid Logic.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was back to designing and making parts at a company called Fluid Logic. They provide driver hydration systems to IndyCar teams, endurance teams, IMSA teams, and Baja teams.<\/p>\n

\"FourPrescott Campbell<\/p>\n

Campbell\u2019s design is on the right.<\/p>\n

\u201cI started trying to use the 3D printer that I had onsite to prove to them that I could start making something that was useful to the company, and ended up prototyping the insulated canisters and the lid technology to allow that to feed into their system, and all of a sudden they could sell a complete package from the housing of the water, the pump, and then the driver\u2019s button. But it also meant that this company had a product that didn\u2019t have to have a silicon chip in it, and which they could sell for profit during the time of the silicon shortage during the COVID years.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo that was really rewarding.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Collage<\/p>\n

Prescott Campbell<\/p>\n

When Covid sort of dried up, he went back to school and was able to apply for a coveted \u201cplacement,\u201d what we might call an internship.<\/p>\n

\u201cWilliams was the first one to open after Covid. I applied. They were the first ones to interview. I interviewed for three positions: composite design, design of the wind tunnel model, and then structural engineering. I was given a choice of which one I was most interested in and structure stood out because it mixes between all the different members of the team. One season you could be responsible for something composite. The other season you could be responsible for something metallic. One season you could be responsible for the suspension component. The next, an aero component, or a cooling component. And I thought, \u2018This is the best way to get a well-rounded experience of an entire race vehicle as fast as possible as a young engineer.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

His first assignment was to design the rear uprights.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a very daunting thing because\u2014I love suspension\u2014and it was the bucket list responsibility I had that I wanted to have by the end of my career. Here I am walking in on the first day, and I get assigned something like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

His current assignment is the rear wing.<\/p>\n

Rami and Campbell achieved their dreams through tenacity and a willingness to roll with the career punches as they came. Being very smart helped, but success can come to anyone who is willing to keep at it. The main thing seems to be, keep after your dreams, no matter where they take you.<\/p>\n

\"GraduatesPrescott Campbell<\/p>\n

Hey, who are those two guys at left with Campbell?<\/p>\n

(You can watch the complete presentation on the SAE SoCal YouTube channel<\/a>. If you\u2019re in Southern California, the public is welcome to the September 15th SAE SoCal meeting<\/a> where they will discuss \u201cMid-Air Barrel Rolls: Solving Bespoke Engineering Challenges Helped with Vehicle Dynamics Simulations.\u201d If you saw The Man with the Golden Gun and Casino Royale, you saw a barrel roll.)<\/p>\n

\"Headshot<\/p>\n

Mark Vaughn grew up in a Ford family and spent many hours holding a trouble light over a straight-six miraculously fed by a single-barrel carburetor while his father cursed the Blue Oval, all its products and everyone who ever worked there. This was his introduction to objective automotive criticism. He started writing for City News Service in Los Angeles, then moved to Europe and became editor of a car magazine called, creatively, Auto. He decided Auto should cover Formula 1, sports prototypes and touring cars\u2014no one stopped him! From there he interviewed with Autoweek at the 1989 Frankfurt motor show and has been with us ever since.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you don\u2019t have the dream to begin with, you\u2019ll never achieve it. Prescott Campbell and Rami Edirisinghe…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":853586,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[49,48,2910,296819,784,578,576,577,237154,1642,296818,273948,82],"class_list":["post-853585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-content-type-feature","tag-contentid-9818967c-4af9-44d0-bb74-8da7d5c7f96e","tag-displaytype-standard-article","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-issyndicated-false","tag-locale-us","tag-shorttitle-how-two-socal-engineers-made-their-way-to-f1","tag-sponsored-false","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=853585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853585\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/853586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=853585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=853585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=853585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}