School team win Formula One challenge

A team of top pupils at Heckmondwike Grammar School won a stage of a competition to recreate a Formula One car. They won the F1 Rookie Class, Fastest F1 Rookie Class, Team Identity Award and Best Engineered Rookie Class awards and have qualified for the national stage in London of a Formula One in Schools project.

Heckmondwike Grammar pupils won a stage of a Forumula One competition.

The team, called Delta Force, said: “We’re very excited to have won and we’re really looking forward to the Nationals. We didn’t think we’d win, so it’s been quite a surprise and shock. It will be great to have a chance to race our car at the finals, competing at the next level and seeing the other teams’ cars.”

The challenge is an educational programme by Formula One that gets children to put the skills they learn in the classroom into practice by designing, developing, manufacturing and racing a scale model Formular One car. Teams create a 21cm long scale model from balsa wood, which is powered by a compressed air cyclinder.

They then, in a series of stages, present their car to panel of judges, before racing it on a 20m test track – a distance which the cars cover in just over a second.

Andrew Denford, chairman and found of Formula One in Schools, said: “Judging the competition is never easy as all the teams are so good, but being judged is also a great challenge for the students and they all did extremely well with their presentations to the judges and coping with the pressure of racing their cars.”

Five other teams from Yorkshire and the Humber will join the Heckmondwike team in London to get one step closer to the national final, which will be held in Singapore later this year.