Manitoba students win F1 in Schools competition

Four students from Crocus Plains Regional Secondary School in Brandon, Man., have won the 2010 F1 in Schools national championship and will represent Canada at the world finals in Abu Dhabi in September, 2011.

For those of you who aren’t aware of the F1 in Schools program, but are curious, here’s a link to Nika Rolczewski’s excellent story in last Saturday’s Toronto Star Wheels section. In a nutshell, though, it’s a world-wide program funded by the existing Grand Prix teams in which students between the ages of 11 and 18 research, design, build and race F1 model cars in order to raise the profile of automotive engineering.

The top international team wins the Bernie Ecclestone Trophy and he always shows up to present it. Last September in London, where the 2009 worlds were held, he took Lewis Hamilton along with him, which was a big thrill for the kids.

Members of the winning team – nicknamed the Golden Geckos – are Dustin Sparrow and Bret Coey (they are co-design engineers), Tyler Enns (resource manager and manufacturing engineer) and Ashley Scott (team manager and graphics designer). They beat out five other finalists in the national competition held Wednesday at the Ontario Science Centre.

Second place was won by students from Dr. Norman Bethune C.I. in Scarborough (Crystal Gao, Joanna Ni, Meagan Lin, Kellen Qi, David Zhang and Lily Tran) while third-place honours went to Woburn C.I., also in Scarborough (Geethanjali Selvam, Sushani Singh, Antonia Szeto, Zarana Bavashi, Devanshi Shah and Mazlina Khan).

Other awards went to students from West Hill Secondary School in Owen Sound, Sir Robert Borden High School from Ottawa and the Scarborough Academy of Technological, Environmental and Computer Education (which is part of W.A. Porter Collegiate).

The Manitoba students were the big winners, however, collecting citations for best-engineered car, best team marketing and the judges’ choice award in addition to finishing first overall.

Now, because this is an auto racing blog, the question is: who built the fastest car? It’s all very well to be good at design and marketing and so-on but the true test comes on the race track.

The winners there? The Woburn C.I. team, whose racer rocketed (these creations are propelled by CO2 cartridges) from starting line to the finish line 20 metres away in 1.079 seconds – which would have put them third fastest at last September’s worlds.

Lewis Hamilton would have been impressed.

Comments

[racingmaniac]

Good for them, really. But much of the attention for this competition is from the "F1" association. While it encourages high schooler for stepping into an engineering path, I think it does little of substance. Canadian schools have done well in other, higher level(collegiate) of engineering competition such as Formula SAE, with schools like ETS of Montreal, U of Toronto and U of Waterloo have had various levels of success in international stage in a competition now encompassing 300+ schools world wide in all continent. And gets little in terms of attention. Which is a shame really since students actually makes real race cars and drive them to compete, and much of the Canadian teams are reliant of industry sponsors as opposed to some of their US counterparts where heavier faculty funding help runs a rather expensive operation(new car every 12 month from scratch, international travel, short lead-time one-off parts, lots of carbon fiber...etc).

[DJL]

I think these kinds of contests are great and my congratulations to the winners.

@racingmaniac While I think that the college/university competitions are wonderful, and I agree that the teams from Canadian universities deserve more attention, I think you're missing the point of these secondary school compettions. The main purpose of these secondary school level science competitions is not to push the envelope of engineering development, but simply to encourage secondary school students to consider studying science or engineering in university.

[Fun Racing]

It was a lot of fun designing and building all these cars and get to know the different aspects of engineering through a new method...The name in the third place winning in F1 In Schools is spelled wrong it was Zarana Bavishi.