Yorkshire Motorsport Festival to showcase engineering excellence, past, present and future

The Yorkshire Motorsport Festival has revealed the first of its newly-planned theme “Villages” for 2021 – The Palmer Foundation Engineering Village.

The Village will bring a hardcore motorsport trade element into the event. It will allow current British motorsport companies access to a large, targeted trade and competitor audience – at a live, national championship motorsport event – which the organisers believe is another first for the Festival.

The Palmer Foundation Village will also showcase opportunities for careers in engineering, motorsport and related industries.

The centrepiece displays of the Village will feature the products and expertise of a number of regional companies who have made – and continue to make – a major impact in motor sport. One of those featured will be Pilbeam Racing Designs, whose cars will be on display along with those of other companies that have made their mark on both the national and global motorsport stage.

Education and future career development will also be to the fore, as a number of Universities and Colleges, who offer speciality courses in both engineering and motorsport, will give an insight into possible career paths and opportunities through further education to become engineers or take up other roles in motorsport. The University of Bolton, Cranfield University, Harper Adams University and Askham Bryan Colleges, are already signed up and, in many cases, they will show off the Formula Student racers that play an important role in giving future behind-the-scenes talent an opportunity to develop.

This will be complemented by the activities of the Palmer Foundation itself, which is the naming partner for the inaugural engineering village.

The foundation was set up, earlier this year, by high-profile motor industry executive and engineer, Andy Palmer, to work with youths as they make their GCSE choices. It is particularly aimed at children from disadvantaged backgrounds and offers advice, counsel, and help with apprenticeships – often supplementing missing guidance from home, but nurturing the sort passion that Palmer himself had as a youth, which was allowed to develop through apprenticeship.

The Palmer Foundation Engineering Village will offer up to 50 UK motorsport and engineering companies the chance to interact with visitors to the Festival from stands that will be ranged around the central displays. Of particular relevance – given that the centrepiece of the Festival is the Wolfstones Speed Hillclimb – will be the display of Pilbeam Racing cars. Founder Mike Pilbeam’s company has been active in motorsport for more than forty years and his thriving engineering business was, at one stage, synonymous with producing winning cars in British Hillclimbing – examples of which will be on display, together with some of Pilbeam Racing Designs’ contemporary products.

“We are both proud and tremendously excited to launch the Palmer Foundation Engineering Village at the 2021 Yorkshire Motorsport Festival,” explains Festival joint MD, Michael McErlain. “The area is a hotbed of motorsport and having a feature dedicated to the trade and industry of the sport we love gives the Festival a further dimension. If the enthusiasm and support that we have received already is indicative of what is to come, we will have started something rather special here. Then to have someone like Andy Palmer becoming involved is a real coup for us – I am truly thrilled about it. His help is already proving incredibly valuable and his faith in the project as a whole speaks volumes for what we are looking to achieve.”