Every team has an origin story. Ours started with nothing more than a shared love for engineering, cars, and designing. Today, we’re proud to be Light Speed, a group of students chasing big dreams in STEM Racing.
How We Met
It all began at school. At the time, we were doing this club called DT club, where at lunch you could design and make whatever you wanted. We loved doing this, and we were trying to build our own RC Car. When suddenly, on our Daily Briefing, we saw this competition called F1 in Schools, and after looking at it for a bit, this fit perfectly into our characters! So we got to work.
Building the Team
We didn’t just throw names in a hat. We built our team carefully:
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Noah – Engineer, desiging the car. Also doing sponsorship.
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Gus – Doing graphic design and marketing, making websites and logos.
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Jerome – Project manager, worked on the Enterprise Portfolio.
- Alex – Driver of the Car.
This is what we started with last year. The very foundations of how this team became this team.
At first, we weren’t all that sure of what we were completely doing. We hadn’t had a session at Digital Jersey yet, and we didn’t even know about the Rules and Regs!
What Happened Next
Once we’d formed the team, and got grips of the competition, we spent our lunchtimes and free hours sketching out car ideas on scrap paper, managing the team, and designing. We had meetings where we didn’t even know what to talk about yet – but we knew we wanted to race.
In the later months, we fully learnt about the competition, as well as what other teams were doing. We found some clever secrets, and ourselves how to use them, and after a lot of trial and error, we produced our first digital model. It wasn’t perfect (far from it), but seeing our car on screen was the first moment it felt real.
We really enjoyed our Digital Jersey, as they gave us a great place to work and learn. We finally saw what a professional F1 in Schools team setup looked like. We took pages of notes, asked a million questions, and came back buzzing with ideas. That’s when we really started to understand what this competition was truly about, from designing, to engineering, and leaning how to market ourselves.
We managed to get a sponsor, PwC, to help fund a lot of the many expenses needed for the competition. This was amazing – it really felt like we were a step ahead of the game. Behind the scenes, we were also learning all the rules, refining designs, and making endless little improvements. We had to say goodbye to our driver, and swap him with Indy, with an amazingly fast reaction time – faster than our other driver. There were days we scrapped an entire idea and started again. There were debates, discussions, and those moments where nothing seemed to fit. But every single time, we got back up and kept going. Regionals were in a few months – we had to be ready.
Continuing on Blog 2 – Regionals.