Australia has performed strongly at the F1 in Schools World Champions in Kuala Lumpur, taking out the top title and a host of other awards.
Team Hyperdrive, four 15-17 year old boys from Trinity Grammar School in Melbourne, won the World Champions trophy, beating 50 other teams from 27 countries. They also collected the Williams Racing supported Best Engineered Car Award and were nominated for the McLaren Honda supported Research and Development Award.
Team manager Hugh Bowman said they were ecstatic to have won after a lot of hard work.
"We’ve always done everything to a really high standard and great engineering and I think that was the key to our success," he said, adding his ambition was to get into the real Formula One.
"“The goal is definitely F1 – the next Toto Wolff or Christian Horner for me," he said.
The most challenging aspect of the design was the aerodynamics, said Bowman.
“David Greig 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.”
As well as Bowman and Greig, Hyperdrive included Alec Alder and Kyle Winkler. The team received engineering and technical support from Swinburne University.
Runners-up were Aurora, an Australian-German collaboration, which also took out the Pit Display Award and the Best International Collaboration. Two other Australian teams picked up awards. Envisity won the Team Sponsorship and Marketing Award, while Golden Diversity took out the Outstanding Sportsmanship Award.
Formula 1 CEO, Chase Carey, presented the trophy to the Hyperdrive boys saying he was blown away by the passion, intelligence, creativity, and maturity of the participants.
"It is particularly important that F1 in Schools’ focus is STEM education as it is an area that is really lacking in so many places in the world," Carey said.
"For Formula 1 this is such a natural place for us to align, we’re a unique sport which combines great sporting competition with state of the art technology and it is great opportunity for us to take the sport and bring it to people of your age in real-life application. My only wish is that you continue with the path you’re taking."
[Australian flags prominent on the winners podium at the F1 in Schools World Championsips. Photo: F1 in Schools]