Some of Australia's brightest students are preparing themselves for the national finals of the F1 in Schools program as Australia looks to defend its title as world champions.
The F1 in Schools Technology Challenge has identified 18 schools as having children who have learned STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects to the point that they can converse directly with professional engineers on the same level.
The student engineers/race teams, have made it through a series of rigorous elimination events to now represent their states and territory at the next F1 in Schools National Finals in Adelaide.
This event will decide the next senior and junior National Champions who will form Team Australia at the next World Finals of this competition.
At the two day National Finals the teams will be judged by professional engineers, business people and educators on engineering knowledge, innovation, collaboration with industry, verbal presentations, 20-page technical folios and car speed.
F1 in Schools is the world's largest STEM competition involving 17,000 high schools and 9,000,000 students from 31 nations.
The students have learnt how to use space age software - as used by aerospace and automotive companies, manufacturing machines, smoke and wind test tunnels to design and build miniature F1 cars that reach speeds of 80km/h in under 2 seconds.
Despite their youth those involved come up with outstanding innovations which even astound professional engineers - for example, this year the World Champions from Tasmania developed racing wheels from a new low friction material which caught the eye of Formula One engineers at the Singapore Grand Prix and they want to make use of this concept!
F1 in Schools was introduced to Australia by the not for profit organisation Re-Engineering Australia Foundation in 2004 and involves more than 35,000 students every week in schools all over the nation.
Australia is the most successful nation participating in the competition having been on the podium more times than anyone else, and winning the prestigious Best Engineered Design Award six of the last seven times.
The National Sponsor of the REA Foundation is the Defence Materiel Organisation.