Hydron

My high school engineering team - F1 in Schools 2022 World Champions

Founding member, engineer & digital media · Hydron · 2019–2022 · F1 in Schools World Champions

Hydron was my high school engineering team that I co-started and helped build up into the 2022 F1 in Schools World Champions. Over our three years as a team, we became two-time Victorian state champions, the Australian National Champions, as well as the most awarded team in Australia’s domestic competition history. At the world finals, we beat 52 teams from 25 countries to become the world champions, winning both the Fastest Car and Best Engineered Car awards in doing so.

Hydron car (left of image) lining up at start of track

My role on the team spanned both engineering and enterprise; I led the team as the team manager for all our domestic campaigns before handing over the role going into my final year of high school, developed team graphics and digital media, and drafted sponsorship strategies. My engineering work underpinned a large part of our technical result, building, for the world championship campaign, a numerical simulation to determine engineering priorities, designing physical test rigs that measured and refined part and process selections, and owning the high-performance wheel system that served our performance goals.

My render of Hydron's world finals car (left) and my photo re-creation (right)

What is F1 in Schools?

F1 in Schools (rebranded STEM Racing in 2024) is the world's largest secondary-school engineering competition, endorsed by Formula 1. Teams of 3–6 students design and CNC-manufacture a miniature CO2 canister powered F1-style dragster using professional CAD/CAM and CAE tools; the cars are tethered to a nylon line and timed down a 20-metre track, capable of hitting over 80 km/h in a third of a second. Teams are judged on engineering, enterprise, project management, and a verbal presentation, progressing from regional to national to World Finals. The competition has engaged more than 1.8 million students across 64 countries.

The final six Hydron members on the podium in Silverstone

My engineering contribution

F1 in Schools is widely treated as an aerodynamics contest; it looks impressive and it's marketed that way as a competition. I was skeptical however: on something this small, fast, and open-wheeled, the airflow is so turbulent that aero returns fall off quickly, and high-school student CFD definitely is not accurate enough to trust. One of my main contributions to our world finals engineering campaign was to tighten the scope of our engineering, reeling in the experience we gained from innovative domestic campaigns which we’ve often used as a testing ground for novel designs, to something we know is a fast robust design. To quantify this process and to test my performance hypothesis, I built a numerical simulation to test the performance hypothesis directly. It found that car mass and mechanical losses dominated car performance over aerodynamics. From there, the wheel system I built helped to improve car performance, and a consistent quality control system enabled us to hit our mass target while being one of less than 10 teams to be fully compliant with technical regulations. The result spoke for itself: Fastest Car, Best Engineered Car, and World Champions.

An output of my Python numerical race model, showing simulated key physical parameters over the length of track

My contributions:

First-principles numerical derivation & simulation (Python) - modelling a system from physics up to guide real engineering decisions (Mathematical Race Model)