Racing to Success
July 17th, 2008
Move over Lewis Hamilton - two Tollbar Business & Enterprise College students are on your track!
Steven Daly and Ben Grainger won through to the National Finals of the Jaguar Cars Maths in Motion challenge at the Nation Car Heritage Centre at Warwick where they were up against 32 other teams from across the UK.
The competition is based on a Formula 1 programme and requires the use of maths skills to measure and tune the car engines before racing them.
On the journey down, pit team bosses Mr Teanby and Mrs Riden talked tactics to the students but these fell on deaf ears as due to a late return from an Army day and having to leave Grimsby so early!
The schools were welcomed by Les Ratcliffe from Jaguar Cars who outlined why Jaguar encourages students to take up a career in engineering and why maths was so important to them.
This was the first year that Tollbar had entered the event and Steven and Ben won all the Lincolnshire heats to go through to the finals.
Teams had only 90 minutes to use their mathematical skills to measure and scale the track plan on computer, set up their car and calculate their pitstop and fuel strategy.
They were also challenged to a treasure hunt at which the students excelled after finding the answer sheet on a trade stand! Also prior to the students’ race was a teacher’s race - sadly Mr Teanby’s effort limped in 15th place out of 33 which cheered Ben and Steven up a lot.
So it was on to the main event. After early trials, Tollbar’s results put them a disappointing 23rd on the grid and after two laps of the race their car was nowhere in sight. But halfway through the race they began to move through the rankings and with 10 laps left were catching the leaders. Then the signal came up that their car was low on fuel - but Steven and Ben had judged it to the last drop and made it to the line to finish in eighth place against the best in the country.
“This was an exceptional effort in Tollbar’s first year and if they had had a few more laps, the lads would have finished higher as they clearly had the fastest car on the track at that time,” Mr Teanby said. “But the best part was that, after the race, we realised that there was an outside chance of Tollbar being in the top three when the results were split into age groups if the standings went in our favour.”
They did, and Steven and Ben finished second in the Key Stage 3 race, winning trophies, a variety of Jaguar goodies and MP4 players. For Tollbar they won a High Definition digital camcorder with accessories, a box of scientific calculators and a four-in-one Epson printer.
The students are to be congratulated for being a credit to the school in behaviour and appearance and in doing so well.
Thanks also to Mr and Mrs Riden for also helping the day happen by getting up so early in the morning and to Mr Warnock who had a big influence on these students and helped them prepare for this challenge.
