Six second year students from Scoil Mhuire Gan Smal, Blarney, will travel to Dublin next week to compete in the F1 in Schools technology competition. This is a project the group has been working on since last September and will culminate in them racing their scale 1:20 F1 car on the national stage. They have faced many challenges along the way whilst completing different parts of the project.
Team Proton Racing marketing and media team members Jamie Falvey and Chris Murphy explained, “We are really looking forward to the F1 competition day in Dublin as we will get to show off all our hard work throughout the year.
“At the beginning six of us got together and we had to decide our roles. Our team manager Cormac Vaughan was very good at getting us organised and making sure we met our deadlines, and we would arrange to meet up at lunchtime once a week to monitor our progress and set new deadlines and goals.
“An essential task for our team was obviously the research and design of our car shape to ensure maximum speed. Our two design engineers Megan Flynn and Nessa Crowley have been excellent at this as they are both skilled at using the Solidworks drawing program. At the beginning they had to research the aerodynamics the car will need when travelling along the 20m long track in less than two seconds. With this information they then set about designing the curvature and size of the car. A few tweaks and improvements were added along the way before testing showed the girls the car would perform as they wish.
“Working very closely with the design team is Harris Ridzuan. Harris is very creative and his ability to sketch out the girls ideas brought the whole car together. He also worked on the identity of the team from the colour scheme to designing the team logo.
“The marketing and media side of the project was our main duty throughout the project. We firstly had to plan out a budget needed to get our team together. Chris then put together a leaflet and package that all team members helped give to possible sponsors. At the same time Jamie worked on setting up social media pages for Team Proton Racing and, as a team, we published our own website a month ago. These online platforms allowed us to interact with others as well as giving our sponsors exposure. “We would like to offer a huge thanks to our three main sponsors; Kinematik, Danone and also Costcutter Grenagh. “Without the help of these companies, and also different suppliers we have used, it would have been impossible for us to compete.”