“F1® in Schools” in running in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) since 2009. As per the official website of Yas Marina Circuit in Abu Dhabi, where this event is held every year, The Formula 1 ® STEM challenge is one of the biggest international competitions in the world, where teams of 3 to 6 students plan, research, design, analyze, manufacture and test a miniature ‘F1® car’ using CAD / CAM / CNC tools.

Shyaam, a student of British International School, Abu Dhabi and the Team Manager of “Pantherion” explains how he and his team members participated in the “F1 in Schools” competition in Abu Dhabi, UAE in 2023 National Finals.

Hello there! Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Shyaam, and I am delighted to have this opportunity to share a little about the competition we participated in Abu Dhabi in June 2023. I am the Team Manager and Lead Engineer of Pantherion and collectively worked with my team members:

We are all students from The British International School Abu Dhabi, and we, as Pantherion, participated in a competition endorsed by Formula 1 and ADNOC called “F1 in schools”. I, as team manager, oversaw that the things behind the scenes were ready and set for the day of the competition, like acquiring sponsors, getting posters, our cars, presentations, marketing, etc. These were various aspects of the event that were important to gain points in order to win. All of this would not have been possible without the help of our team members, and it was a group effort. From this event, we intended to expand our marketing, presentation, and engineering skills.

Our plan to essentially try and get a strong performance was to use the experience we had from last year (our first attempt in the competition) and use the feedback to improve the aspects that needed to be improved. This included our presentations, portfolios, and our pit display. The car itself was good, but we were still able to improve it further this year too. The main purpose was to achieve a car design that is the fastest. In terms of the engineering aspect, we needed to run CFD tests to improve the aerodynamics of the car.

For achieving all of the above, we were in look out for sponsors and technical guidance on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and during our search we met with Bell Energy and Bell Immersive in Abu Dhabi, who supported us by participating as dual sponsors for our event and helping us with CFD and visualization using Augmented Reality (AR) & Virtual Reality (VR). The use of CFD also helped us in increasing our score.

Team from Bell Energy and we conducted several simulations and tests considering multiple improvements and enhancements to ensure that our car flies across the track. We kept track of the CFD results of our different car models and variants

We used different methods to make our car faster, such as:

Bell Immersive guided us in developing a strong immersive experience using AR/VR and ipad apps that helped visitors understand the overall process in developing the car, the use of CFD etc. In terms of marketing and attracting visitors to view our pit display, we used a variety of things like a Virtual Reality headset and iPads We worked with Mr. Shrinivas, Mr. Arnav, Mr. Nikhil, and Mr. Mahendra, who have been very supportive and spent a lot of time helping us get the AR / VR set up and running! This really gave us those extra points and impressed the judges when they came to visit our pit display, as implementing technology was a key aspect that was in the rubric to get us points. This is why we made use of iPads and VR headsets. These not only gave us extra points for the use of technology but also helped us market our car to the visitors.

Now, in the competition itself, we registered ourselves, and we were given one (1) hour to set up our pit display. Right after that, we then had to race our cars. We were then given an awesome tour of the Yas Marina track and did a lap around it in a bus, and upon arrival back to our pit display, we had two judges view the pit display. We then gave our verbal presentation, which had also gone very well. After doing so, we then had to race our cars again for the second round.

2nd and 3rd place had tied with the number of points, but one of them had a faster car which put them in 2nd place, and 1st place only had eight more points than us! The points were out of 800, and we scored 654.2.

Our car was not the fastest in the competition, but it covered the 20 meter race track in 1.254 seconds. Next year we’ll take ideas and incorporate them based on research, along with several more CFD tests so that we can achieve the fastest car.