Mount View High School is celebrating its best result ever at the F1 in Schools technology challenge.
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The school’s team, Revolution Racing, placed fourth overall in the professional division at the national championships in Adelaide last week.
The competition involves designing and manufacturing a miniature Formula One car to race down a 20-metre track.
Teams are also judged on their specifications, engineering, portfolio, marketing and verbal presentation.
Revolution Racing has competed at national level twice before, placing sixth both times.
They qualified for the national competition after winning the state championships in November.
The team members – Daniel Lambkin, Liam Whiteley, Jack Stephenson and Connor Minchinton – agreed that taking part in the competition has benefited their studies.
Daniel said he has taken the skills learnt in F1 in Schools and applying it his school subjects including engineering studies and graphics technology, while Jack said it helped him with his time management skills.
Liam said the competition has reinforced their self-belief: “If you have a dream and you work hard, you can achieve anything and there was a huge level of satisfaction in our achievements,” he said.
The competition also produced some memorable moments, including seeing their car record the second-fastest time.
”Even though we had a time penalty on our car for having the canister 0.25mm too low to the track, the car still performed exceptionally well and managed to overcome the penalty time and outstrip everyone else,” Jack said.
Supervising teacher Mark Bassett said he was proud to see the students step up and perform so well when competing against some of the top private schools in Australia.
The difference between first and fourth place was only 33.1 points, but there were 260 points between fourth and tenth, so the Mount View team was close to the top.
Golden Diversity from Queechy High School in Tasmania were the winners, with Hyperdrive from Trinity Grammar (Victoria) second and Instant Transmission (also from Queechy High) in third place.
The winners will represent Australia at the F1 in Schools world finals in Singapore in September.
Check out Revolution Racing’s presentation in the video below.
