Five students - Matt Cruickshank, Tom Crookes, Michael Heard, Matt Turner and Alex Womersley, all aged 17, are gearing up to compete in the World Championships of the F1inSchools Challenge mid-March.

The teenagers, together known as team Impulse F1, clinched the two-day F1inSchools National Finals held at the Noosa State High School in December.

Ross Howard, head of the design and technology department at Barker College, says their win was the result of four years’ experience in the competition.

“They were thrilled but they probably felt more relief as the boys have come close to winning a number of years,” he says.

“The year before they actually lost by one point to a Melbourne team and they knew this was their last chance.” 64 students, from year seven and up, represented their states and territories in the F1 design, make and race program initiated by Re-Engineering Australia Forum.

An F1-style racer exceeding 100km/h

In the competition, students are tasked with designing a powered F1-style racer, which will exceed 100km/h, and then manufacturing the 30cm car from balsa, testing its aerodynamic abilities and competing.

The challenge features 11 categories involving technical and scientific knowledge, innovation, design, public speaking, marketing, collaboration with industry and car speed.

F1inSchools, implemented as part of the Australian Schools Innovation Design Challenge, is the REA Forum’s paramount engineering design and applied science technology challenge.

As part of the competition, REA Forum provides schools with three-dimensional CAD/CAM/CAE software called CATIA, which is valued at millions of dollars and used by thousands of professional engineers around the world.

The Impulse F1 team car was designed using a powerful classroom engineering solution - Dassault Systèmes CATIA, the same software used to design Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner and most Formula 1 cars.

The software enabled the students to design, assemble and test each idea before machining, using a Denford CNC Router.

Ross Howard says the F1 car’s interchangeable front aerofoil wing, manufactured using Concentric International's Rapid Prototyping facility in Brisbane, helped them claim the title - enabling the team to test a variety of aerofoil designs on the racetrack ahead of the competition.

Barker College combined that technology with Virtual Wind Tunnel software, a classroom-sized CNC machine and smoke and wind tunnels along with a computerised 20-metre race track. “The students have been using this technology to design, test and develop their own powered F1 racers which reach speeds nearing 100 kilometres per hour,” Ross Howard says.


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