City Pride School blazes the ‘F1 Track’

Pune: From designing a miniature F1-Car to manufacturing it out of the official F1 Model Block using CAD/CAM design tools to racing it on the track alongwith the determination to have the best designed car and setting up own pit-booths. This is what the two teams of City Pride School, Pradhikaran accomplished as they finished with flying colors and came out with an impressive performance in the F1 in Schools West India Regional Finals which took place at Billabong High International School, Thane recently.

The event witnessed 18 teams from a crowd of more than 300 students making it to the National Finals which will be held in Delhi. The schools were judged on their car designs and overall presentations. It was the second regionals of F1 in Schools India Season 2 by Time of Sports.

Two teams of City Pride School took part in the event—Smokin’ Axles (Std 8) and Phoenix Drive ( Std 9). With a host of awards, students of City Pride are now gearing up for the national finals.

Members of both the teams shared their experience and preparations with Sakal Times.

Ankit from Smokin Axles said “When we reached the venue it was all tense there. All the schools were ready to give their best including us. We learned a lot, be it during the preparation as well as the main event. While getting prepared, we learned the basics of aerodynamics when designing our car. During the competition we learnt self dependence and verbal attitude.”

“Being the Resource Manager of our team, I calculated the budget required by my team to give our best in front of the judges. Then the other step that the team had taken was to work together in every task,” he added.

Harshdeep Kakade who was the Sponsorship Manager said “From this event we understood the importance of luck as well as efforts. The most important thing was teamwork. We tried our best to not fight with our team mates and respect each other’s suggestions. I did not know anything about F1 before this event. It was all about cars, so I took part and at last we won it.”

“Now the biggest challenge is preparing for the national finals which will include funds which is getting sponsorship, where my role is the most important and I am working on it. We will try our best to recover from all our shortcomings,” Kakade said.

Sanket Burute, another team member added “There are many things that we learnt starting from creativity to business. Going for sponsorship helped us to learn a lot about how one must communicate with each other. We also learnt about etiquette and manners. During the design session, we learnt how to design and manufacture our 3D shaped designs. Making and designing our portfolio helped us to test our creativity and knowledge we had about our car.”

The members of Phoenix Drive were also all excited and are bracing themselves for further challenges.
Arnav Kumbhar, Sponsorship Manager, Phoenix Drive said “The F1 In Schools is a great rostrum for teenagers like us to boost our confidence to sky-high levels. I also started following Formula 1 to get to know about the extraordinary features of the expeditious cars and try to integrate some of them into our car and contribute my bit in the design of the car. The event taught us paramount lessons of our life including teamwork and sportsmanship spirit. My interest in the field of Formula 1 has expanded by leaps and folds.”

Baibhab Mishra, Team Manager, Phoenix Drive said “We all have learned, both as an individual and a team; working efficiently and within deadlines, managing the team under pressure and racing against time. The most memorable moment during the event was when our Pit Booth was completed, it had taken 60 minutes of hard work along with 3 months of intensive planning for the same and after it was completed, it was nothing less than a masterpiece, And the cherry on top of the cake was when we got an award for the same.”

Manasi Nikam, the Design Engineer chipped in “The preparations are on for the national final, so now we are working on the ways in which we make our car ‘Firebird’ even more aerodynamic and light weight.”

AWARDS WON
BY SMOKIN’ AXLES:
1. Regional FINALS - 2ND Runner award
2. Scrutineering Award
3. Knockout Championship Award
4. Best Engineered car

BY PHOENIX DRIVE:
1. Pit Display Award &Team sponsorship and marketing award.

F1 in Schools factfile

• F1 in Schools is the only global multi-disciplinary challenge in which teams of students aged 9 to 19 deploy CAD/CAM software to collaborate, design, analyse, manufacture, test, and then race miniature compressed air powered cars made from F1 model block.
• Teams must raise sponsorship and manage budgets to fund research, travel and accommodation.
• The challenge inspires students to use IT to learn about physics, aerodynamics, design, manufacture, branding, graphics, sponsorship, marketing, leadership/teamwork, media skills and financial strategy, and apply them in a practical, imaginative, competitive exciting way.

EVENT RUN UP

• The students were trained well in Autodesk Fusion 360 software and were guided in finalising the model. Then they got the car manufactured in CNC machine and some parts like nose cone and wings were 3D printed.
• The students made their engineering and design portfolio to maintain a record of the work done by them.
• There was a deadline for each online submission as there is in corporate projects.
• Apart from this technical aspect, the students promoted their teams on social media like Facebook, Twitter , Instagram etc. The students also needed to raise sponsorship for their teams to minimize the expenses incurred during the course of the challenge.
• Designing flex for the pitbooth and how to display the car was another creative task assigned to the students.