Joining six other students who have also won an IEA placement in recent weeks from other regions around the world, 23-year-old Jacob Debono from the University of Wollongong will begin a 12-month placement in the United Kingdom starting from next month.
His term will be split between Renault-Nissan luxury arm Infiniti’s European Technical Centre in Cranfield, Bedfordshire, and the Renault Sport Formula One Team in Enstone, Oxfordshire.
Following in the footsteps of fellow Aussie Jaden Partridge who nabbed the Asia/Pacific contest last year, Mr Debono will have a chance to work alongside, and learn first-hand from engineers in both locales, gaining a salary, company car, accommodation and travel.
Winners are grinners: From left, Nico Hulkenberg, Jacob Debono and Infiniti Global Motorsport director Tommaso Volpe at the Infiniti engineering challenge in Hong Kong.
Described as a “career opportunity of a lifetime”, he will join the six other winners from Canada, China, Europe, Mexico, The Middle East and the United States.
“To be able to spend a year working with both an automotive manufacturer and an F1 Team is absolutely invaluable experience,” Mr Debono said. “I’m still letting it all sink in, but I feel very privileged to be here and it’s an opportunity I mustn’t take for granted.”
More than 12,000 engineering student hopefuls from 41 countries applied for the 2017/8 intake, which opened in January via an online portal from Infiniti’s global website. This year’s IEA competition was by far the most heavily subscribed in the four years since the program commenced, nearly tripling the 2016 response.
The process to find the best engineering students is conducted in two phases, with just 10 applicants from each region selected to undertake a series of demanding challenges over two days to test their skills in areas such as problem-solving ingenuity, communication, co-operation and competition.
The Asia/Oceania event was the final of the seven heats held over the last four months for this year, and took place at Infiniti’s global headquarters in Hong Kong.
According to Infiniti Motorsport global director Tommaso Volpe, the idea of dividing the globe into regions is to give every applicant a chance regardless of nationality or location to compete on equal terms in a contest not offered by any other manufacturer.
“It brings diversity to Formula One in terms of global talent,” he told GoAuto. “We are a global brand, after all, so we need to regionalise this in order to guarantee that diversity.
“We take seven young engineering students and we recruit them for seven regions… and it is a really unique project because engineering students would have otherwise had no other opportunity to gain a placement in automotive or F1.
“Plus, it is very unique because even though Formula One is very global, it is also a very local industry and a very European-based industry with very few exceptions.
“And over two days we invite the 10 best from each of the seven regions, and in two day we put them under pressure with several challengers. Some of them are fun, some are very tough… and (include) interviews, technical testing, car-model building and racing… so in a way to simulate the engineering job (out in the real world).
“Just to be sure we find the best of the best.”
To ensure that future applicants do not gain any advantage, the challenges change with each successive season.
The other Australian student finalists representing Asia/Pacific were Alan Babaei (23) from Australian National University, Desaka Kottegoda (22) from University of New South Wales, Michael De Palo (25) from the University of Technology in Sydney, Nikki Staltari (23) from Curtin University of Technology and Jeremiah Morton (21) from the University of Adelaide.
By Byron Mathioudakis in Hong Kong
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