Yesterday eleven teams from 10 Greater Manchester Schools competed in the finals of the Ultimate Car Challenge funded by LATEST2 and the EPSRC run by the School of Materials.
The teams included students from age 12 to 15 who had designed, engineered and tested their cars over the past few weeks so that they would be ready to compete against their rivals.
The students gave presentations on their cars and how they had come to their current designs, they raced them against the other teams and finally the cars were subject to a number of real-life engineering tests including corrosion, crash and crush tests.
A panel of judges from the University and graduate engineers from Jaguar Landrover oversaw the event and pronounced the team from Levenshulme School as the winner. They win £250 and a trip to the Jaguar Landrover factory.
As well as the competition, the students attending a talk from Andrew Thomas ‘More Magic then Harry Potter’ and the three graduate engineers from Jaguar Landrover gave a presentation to the students to explain what it is like to work as an engineer, and how they got to be where they are now.