Formula1 in Schools STEM South West Regional Competition

Recently Clifton College participated in the ‘Formula1 in Schools’ South West Regional competition. This is a joint engineering and enterprise venture whereby pupils design, build and test a model F1 car as well as create their own company brand.

Ella, Eric, David, Conor, Nicole and Anastasia formed a team called ‘Anemos’. They made their car using a program called SolidWorks, and fed this into the department’s new router, to cut their aerodynamic design from a foam block.

To fund their project the group raised money through cake and artwork sales, and they also looked into sponsorship from local, national and international companies.

Anemos was awarded a prize for the ‘Best Research and Development’; the judges were impressed by the students’ idea of using smoke and a hair dryer to simulate the effects of an air tunnel in order to observe how air flowed over the car body.

Although, unfortunately, the team didn’t make it through to the national finals, the pupils enjoyed making the F1 car, propelling it down a track and developed many useful transferable skills along the way!

Next year, we hope to have even more teams enter for this regional final and for the STEM project to grow in size and complexity.