Lunar Racing Project
Schoolkids prepare car for British GT Series
When I went to school the nearest I got to motorsport was sticking chewing gum on the door handles of the teachers' cars. For some students at Weavers School in Wellingborough the action is a bit more exciting.
Whilst it's not an inner city school, it's a school with more than its fair share of inner city type problems, drugs etc. Teachers there have found a great focus for the students though in the form of race car preparation!
The 'Lunar Racing' project started just over a year ago with teacher Paul Kneeshaw overseeing it. They kicked off by preparing a Formula Ford car before getting involved with Jedi Racing. Owners of Jedi Racing, Frazer Corbyn and Rob Horsfield liked what they saw when they encountered the Lunar Racing project and invited Kneeshaw and his students to work with them in their workshop. Starting with a 600cc Jedi car they moved up to a 1000cc car in which Corbyn won the championship!
Now Corbyn and Horsfield are to race in the British GT Championship in the Elise Sport, complete with help from the students at Weavers. The car is the one raced by Lotus test driver Gavan Kershaw last year. It's got a new engine and Quaife six speed sequential gearbox and it underwent shakedown testing earlier this month.
Whilst the students won't be involved in pit work at the races, they will still be doing a lot of the pre-race prep and some will attend the races to help in other ways.
It's great to see motorsport involving people in this way. Let's hope the drivers can raise the project's profile further with some good results.
Links
Oh, and this is my first post
So hello all! The college in Thame - now part of Oxford and Cherwell College and one of the colleges making up the National College for Motorsport run further education courses (16+) in motorsport engineering.
Similar to this though, they also have IF students one day a week who get to use all the same facilities as the full time students and apprentices including the composites lab! What I would have given to have spent a day a week learning how to wet layup glass or use pre-preg carbon rather than building a battery tester or some such rubbish.
fto2tuscan said:As for this, I can see one reason straight away - how do you choose which one gets to drive what they've been working on?
why not focus them on something they could actually drive! like karts and what not... or ford rallye academy stuff.
Then again, there are things like formula schools and a few colleges involved in locost racing where one or more of the students end up racing...
-Weavers School is in the catchment of the National College for Motorsport, but they don't want anything to do with us as they don't want to get involved in racing cars. They send their students on work experiences at real teams, but I found that no teams would take my students.
-The aim of the project is to train mechanics. Since non of the students can afford to get a licence, let alone all the stuff needed (they can only just afford a school uniform), I also don't want to be the one to choose which student gets all the support. I've got 1200 kids wanting to race.
-We could do Karting, but they are not complicated enough and cost more to run than a Jedi.
-We could do Formula Schools, but my students were not interested in "f***ing radio controled cars". Also you don't become a car mechanic with Formula Schools so quickfit won't give you a job.
Hope this gives people a some answers. I'm doing my best and am always open to advice!
Paul
On a more selfish note - this is how I run my racecar. The 'mechanics' (
) are all recent graduate students that have joined our company - which gives them both practical experience and CPD towards engineering chartership. They appear to prefer this to working on a Rover production line for six months, or writing long reports for the sake of it 
Rich.
This is a great project. More of education should be applied skills rather than theory. Applying the skills creats a greater interest in the theory in my experience.
More info here:
www.greenpower.co.uk/
Jedi Racing Cars are owned by John Corbyn. The Team Jedi Racing set up is a joint project between Frazer Corbyn (John's son) and myself (Rob Horsfield), using the resources and expertise of Jedi Racing Cars.
Frazer won the Monoposto 1200 championship in 2002.
We hope the students learn as much as possible from their exposure to the team and are looking forward to a challenging first year in GT's and Formula Jedi.
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