A group of CEMAST students have joined forces to take part in The Greenpower Challenge and this weekend saw their project on the Goodwood Motor Circuit for the first time.

The Greenpower Challenge is a technology competition for schools and colleges in the UK. The unique, hands-on engineering challenge is designed for young people to work together to design, build, and race a single seat electric powered race car.

In the past this particular challenge has featured teams from Jaguar, Land Rover, Bentley, Peugeot-Citroen, Eton College, and now CEMAST!

With all teams using the same power supply and motor, and confined to strict design and safety regulations, the challenge faced by teams is how to engineer an endurance race winning car within these restrictions.

The CEMAST team features students from Automotive, Aerospace, Manufacturing, and Electrical, ensuring a wide range of knowledge and understanding is in place to engineer the best product possible. Each individual brings a different perspective to the table and everyone’s input has been vital to the designing and building of the race car.

The chassis of the car was kindly leant to us by local school, Bridgemary. We then faced the challenge of designing the look of the car, building the components to put it together, and finally prepping it to ensure its racing capability.

This weekend our students were able to see the fruits of their labour come to life on the Motor Circuit at Goodwood Race Course and the long hours of hard work began to pay off. With a quick run around the track to test the progress of the project, the team were excited to see the race car where it belongs – on the track.

Chris Seaton, Motor Vehicle Lecturer at CEMAST and project manager, said: “Developing the race car through from the beginning has been a fantastic experience for the students. Seeing their project that they’ve worked hard on come to life on the race track was an exciting moment, and we are looking forward to attending the main events later in the year once a few tweaks have been made.

I am very happy that I was able to bring this project to the college, as we have so many engineering based disciplines here at CEMAST, I always felt this would be a good fit.

Now we need to ‘just add lightness’, as Colin Chapman the founder of Lotus said, and fit a gearbox to make it go faster of course. We’ve had a great start though, considering at times we weren’t even sure if this day would come!”

Fareham College would like to say a big congratulations to all the students taking part, and we wish them good luck for the next stage of the project.