An Exciting New Partnership for Shambles
A new project supporting women in engineering and other Shambles news.
We’ve got a bunch of stuff to tell you about today including a new partnership project we’re working on, other projects in the pipeline, some upcoming events and more. Read on. It’s how it works.
We are extremely excited to announce a new partnership with Sekhmet Racing and UCL Racing | Mechanical Engineering to start work on a new documentary film and groundbreaking shadowing intern programme focusing on women in engineering.
Engineering is an area of STEM where female representation is still very low and it is even more so in the world of mechanical and motoring engineering.
When we spoke with the motorcycle champion Ana Carrasco for our Rapid Motion film last year, she talked to us about how challenging it was being a woman in a very male dominated sport and work environment.
Now, as long time Shambles fans will know, our lead producer Trent Burton has had a lifelong passion for, and involvement with, motorcycles and when it was announced last year that 2024 would see the first ever Women’s Motorcycle Road Racing Championship, it gave him an idea.
While this new championship will feature an all female grid of riders, including Ana herself, in the pit box and paddock, it’s still very male-centric.
So Trent shoved together his science, broadcast and motorcycle worlds again and we are extremely excited to announce today that we will be teaming up with one the championship teams, Sekhmet Racing (who, in the shape of Maddi Patterson, also have one of the very few female team principals in the paddock) to provide an amazing opportunity for some undergrad students. 6 female mechanical engineering students from our friends at UCL Racing and Mechanical Engineering will have an incredible hands on experience in a working world championship motorsport environment. They will be shadowing and assisting the team and its engineers and mechanics during three actual world championship race weekends in this inaugural season at the British, Italian and Spanish rounds of the series.
Sekhmet Racing is also a particularly exciting team to be working with in this sense as their lead rider, Mallory Dobbs from the US, is an engineer herself (when she’s not hurtling a motorcycle around a race track at over 140mph).
We of course will be documenting the whole thing for a wider online documentary looking at women in mechanical engineering writ large, sustainability of transport and motorsport and further issues around diversity in engineering. As part of this project we are also working with our friends at Digital Science who have a wealth of tools and data at their disposal so we can take an in depth look at the history of women in engineering roles and how things are changing for the better. The documentary will be presented by our good friend and Nine Lessons regular, Dr Suze Kundu from Digital Science.
We’ll keep you posted with all the latest news and behind the scenes info on the documentary, and introduce you to the six successful students selected as we progress through the season which starts in June. Make sure you’re subscribed to our Substack and Instagram.
“I’m always delighted when I can bring together my disparate worlds of motorcycle racing and science broadcasting. It’s doubly exciting that through this partnership we’re actually able to bring about positive change in the industry and provide some truly unique opportunities in STEM too.
Motorcycle racing still has an image problem that serves no small part in keeping too many extremely talented and women out of the paddock and so to be a small part in taking steps to correct that is fantastic. We've had a long relationship with UCL over the years and we’re delighted be teaming up with them once again, alongside Sekhmet Racing and their powerhouse leader Maddi.
That we get to make a documentary about it all for you to all enjoy is the icing on the cake. And we promise to keep our Shambolic tendencies to the screen rather than the track”.
Trent Burton, Cosmic Shambles Network producer
“Sekhmet Racing was founded with the vision of opening new doors in motorsport, creating roles and opportunities previously unimagined, with a strong focus on putting female talent in the spotlight. While motorsport is undoubtedly lucrative, its growth has often been stifled, with many positions seen as fixed or traditional.
Our collaboration with The Cosmic Shambles Network and the University College London Racing Department actively defies that notion. We are pioneering educational pathways in two-wheeled racing, cultivating a new wave of young engineers in an industry that has historically been wary of change - gaining hands on experience from those who have paved the way.
I am profoundly grateful to our educational partners for their unwavering support for this project and our team. Together, we are thrilled to offer a hands-on learning experience and real career opportunities for their students within our business. Let’s race!”
Maddi Patterson, Founder & Team Principal Sekhmet Racing
“UCL Racing (UCLR) is a group of 150+ students working tirelessly to develop new models, techniques, and applications that can drive progress and impact in domains as varied as rocketry and racing.
With UCLR being a student-led initiative, the members not only learn to apply the knowledge they gain throughout their degree, but they get to practice other professional skills that they are taught within the Integrated Engineering Programme (IEP) at UCL.
For me, as an academic who sees in the classroom a very low percentage of female undergraduate students in mechanical engineering, and as an advocate for Women in Engineering, I think that initiatives like this are key for women to gain visibility and being represented in certain professional sectors which still have a long way to go with diversity. This project with Cosmic Shambles, in which our UCLR students will be shadowing the technical teams in the pit box in three rounds for the Women’s World Motorcycle Championship, are not only life–changing, but our students will be able to experience how professional teams operate and learn from it; and it will provide them with challenges that will become brilliant examples to showcase their technical and personal capabilities.”
Dr Nelia Jurado Pontes, Associate Professor UCL Mechanical Engineering
Thanks for all your lovely comments on our latest episode of the Bibliomaniac series. If you’ve not watched it yet, you can do so for free on our YouTube channel. It’s a look at how Robin Ince became the book obsessive he is today, thanks to his equally book obsessed father who passed away last year.
As our new Substack continues to develop it will now also be the exclusive home to Dr Dean Burnett’s incredibly popular blog Brain Yapping. The first post is out now and Dean explains why Captain America is problematic (in a neuropsychiatric sense that is).
Robin’s Book Corner on Instagram has been chugging along as well with lots of recommendations in brand new shorts and reels including everything from essays about Marianne Faithfull to Beano annuals. Catch up on Instagram.
We are still hard at work on what we’re still just secretly calling ‘Shambles Doc 2’. In reality, its now Shambles Doc 3 because, and we know this will surprise you, it’s gotten out of hand…
The Nine Lessons documentary was meant to be a shorter online thing but, and we know this will surprise you, it’s gotten out of hand. So that will now be a full feature length film that is technically Shambles Doc 2. But we can’t be going back and renaming all the folders on the server so Shambles Doc 2 is still the other one that we haven’t really told you about yet.
Release date announcement and a special Patreon and Substack Paid Subscribers ONLY screening with live Q&A Panel for the Nine Lessons film (which isn’t Shambles Doc 2 but also it sort of is but categorically is also not) will be revealed soon.
We’re doing a special Origins of a Bibliomaniac event on June 12th at The Wansted Tap in London. There will be a screening of the film, then a live show from Robin Ince afterward. Not many tickets remain so be quick! Get them here.
And don’t forget the gigs at Latitude and Mostly Comedy either.
Almost all the stuff we make at Shambles is thanks to the brilliant support of our subscribers. You can sign up to our Patreon or the paid tier here on Substack to support us.