Australia wins F1 in Schools

By Ian Porter on 18th October 2017 Personnel Articles F1, Hyperdrive, Trinity Grammar

AUSTRALIA continued its strong run of success in the global F1 in Schools competition, with Melbourne’s Trinity Grammar taking out the 2017 competition, marking the second time the school has triumphed in the international design and manufacture competition.

The event was held in conjunction with the recent Malaysian Formula 1 Grand Prix and was attended by Chase Carey, chief executive of the Formula 1 Group, which promotes the F1 world championship.

Competing under the name Hyperdrive, the four-student Trinity team not only won the overall competition, it also won the award for best engineered car. The Trinity team received engineering and technical assistance from Melbourne’s Swinburne University of Technology.

Hyperdrive had to beat 50 teams from 27 countries to become World Champion. It was the fifth Australian team to win the F1 in Schools competition in the 13 times it has been held so far.

It was also the ninth time an Australian team had won the Best Engineered Car award. In addition to the five outright wins, Australian teams have placed second overall five times and third overall on one occasion.

Hyperdrive team members were Alec Alder, Kyle Winkler, David Greig and Hugh Bowman. All four have been offered scholarships to the City University of London or to the University College of London.

The F1 in Schools competition is an international science, technology, engineering and mathematics competition. To win it, the Hyperdrive team had to engineer, manufacture and race a miniature Formula One car.

All teams have to start with an official F1 Model Block and use CAD/CAM (computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing) tools to produce their cars. The cars are powered by cartridges filled with carbon dioxide and they race over a 25-metre track.

Winners are grinners: Team Hyperdrive members from left, Hugh Bowman, Kyle Winkler, David Greig and Alec Alder.

Sophisticated timing gear is used to measure reaction times and race times, with points awarded accordingly. The cars are attached to the track by a nylon wire and the wheels of the cars must be in contact with the track at all times.

The world record of 0.916 seconds was set in 2016 by a car made by the Infinitude team from two schools in Adelaide – Brighton Secondary School and St Bede’s College. Infinitude finished second overall that year.

“Our greatest achievement is becoming World Champions, against millions of students globally,” Hyperdrive team manager Hugh Bowman said.

“But also winning the Best Engineered Car award on the global stage is a credit to Kyle and David’s work. It wouldn’t have been possible without Swinburne’s insight.”

There are five elements to the competition, involving the judging of the car’s specification and the engineering involved. The teams also have to prepare an enterprise portfolio, an engineering portfolio and a pit display, produce a video of a verbal presentation outlining the project and, finally, they have to race their cars.

Mr Bowman said the aerodynamics were the most challenging part of the design process.

“David was our aerodynamics engineer, running many computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations as well as a lot of research and testing on different shapes and design concepts,” he said.

“Continuous aerodynamic refinement and evolution was key to our development strategy to minimise drag and create efficiency.”

Mr Carey said he was impressed with the efforts of all the competitors.

“The passion, the intelligence, the creativity, the maturity that you guys have shown, it’s just incredible,” he told the competitors.

“If our future is in your hands, we’ve got a great future in this world. Speaking on behalf of Formula 1, we couldn’t be prouder of Formula 1 in Schools, it is our official education initiative.”

Hyperdrive was assisted by Swinburne senior lecturer Dr Ambarish Kalkarni, who put the team in touch with two PhD candidates, Nalin Randeniya and Andrew Danylec, in Swinburne’s department of mechanical engineering and Product Design Engineering.