The journey continues

Welcome back!! It’s Maisie and Evie here from Eclipse. After a slight reshuffle in our roles following Regionals, we have decided to take charge of the blog on behalf of the team. Stay tuned for more updates from ourselves but keep an eye out for some special blogs/vlogs every now and again from other team members such as Javier, Tom and Isaac. 

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To start off, we would like to say a massive well done to all teams that competed in the 2021 virtual Regional finals; everyone did amazingly, especially in the circumstances provided to us all. We hope that, in some way or another, our blog may have inspired you along the way. We will continue to try our best to do this in the future. 

We are proud to be representing North London at this season's F1 in Schools UK National Finals and will be sharing our journey with you all once again. It was an honour to have been successful at Regionals with such brilliant competitors; winning 1st place overall, fastest car, best engineered car as well as fastest reaction time was not something we expected. Javier and Tom were especially pleased to have seen the car race faster than ever! On the right is a video of how the team received the news. ​

Our goals in the run up to Nationals are to try and inspire a younger generation of budding STEM enthusiasts, improve on all of our project elements, set-up the teams website, promote F1 in Schools, continue to run our return on investment scheme with sponsors, tweak the car design alongside working with our Platinum Sponsor, BAE SYSTEMS, and remember to have a bit of fun! 

Having a draft of all our portfolios ready for when we get back to school will save us a lot of time in the long run and although this does seem like a daunting task for the holidays, the short deadline doesn’t provide us with another option. This means that when we return to school we can make adjustments and have them out of the way relatively quickly. On top of this, Javier and Tom are going to have the final car design ready to be manufactured as soon as we get back to leave time for manufacturing inconsistencies. 

When we return to school we want to come back with a bang and make the most of our time, manufacturing the cars, getting the website up and running, finalising all of our portfolios and working on producing the verbal and pit display presentations. Getting all of this done in time will definitely be a challenge but we are up for it!

As a team, we can all agree that communication in the journey to Regionals was hard; placed in year group bubbles and only able to communicate through Zoom calls and messages. Despite this, there is hope in sight as COVID rules become less restrictive and Evie and Maisie move into Year 12. As well as talking with each other, we’d love to form stronger relationships with other teams in the community. If you would be interested in having a chat to get to know each other as a team, please just connect with us on social media at @eclipseqe. 

Thank you very much for reading, we hope you are excited to follow the next step of our journey. We wish you all the best of luck!!

Eclipse