Year 3 students at St Francis Primary School Lockleys have designed and built a ‘future’ McLaren drift car, in a project designed to encourage the use of the students’ science, maths and design skills.
McLaren Automotive is a global automotive brand that creates luxury, high-performance supercars.
Every vehicle is hand-assembled at the McLaren Production Centre in Surrey, England.
Over the past 10 weeks, the students researched, designed and engineered the project from sketches to an impressive model, learning valuable processes and skills along the way.
Throughout their design process, the students received support from the designer of its real-life counterpart as part of McLaren’s efforts to inspire more young people to become scientists, engineers and designers.
The car they named “Tiger Stripe” is a 2-metre concept car designed and built based on the track-focussed McLaren Senna GTR and is designed to be a drift car of the future.
In celebration of the project, the drift car was unveiled at the school with a special video message from Rob Melville, Design Director at McLaren Automotive.
“You are all future stars of whatever you choose to go in to for your careers, just remember always be brave”, he told the students.
“It’s about being innovative; it’s about challenging your mindset and pushing the boundaries”.
“Great design tells a great story. The “Tiger Stripe” project embodies the spirit of McLaren. It’s cool, fast and utilises technology to create a vehicle that is striving for technological perfection. I was very impressed with the students’ attention to detail, from the concept and research stage, to the final execution.
“Projects like this are so important because design is a tangible expression of how art and science combine to produce innovative ideas of the future. It was a privilege to see the hard work that the St Francis students put into designing a future McLaren”, said Rob.
George Biggs, Managing Director of Asia Pacific and China, McLaren Automotive said it is great to see the students’ enthusiasm and excitement for the project.
“This is a brilliant project and I’m sure this had been a memorable experience for them. We constantly innovate to find new ways to develop our products at McLaren, because nothing new comes from old ways of thinking. May this project inspire a next generation of engineers and designers.”
The project, which was developed by the school’s classroom teachers Tim Dennis and Mark Bowman, occurred in response to the student’s delight in a local McLaren being driven nearby.
“Kids love cars and one day we were in the classroom and a number of students told me about a gorgeous white McLaren supercar that they had seen driving around the local area. We chose to harness this enthusiasm and created our own learning programme that saw students working in teams to research the industry, decide on key features, develop the design and then finally engineer the final complete model” said Tim.
“This included outlining the drift car’s specification and even learning about aerodynamics. It has been fantastic to get McLaren Automotive’s support to help bring this to life for the students. Being able to show them Rob’s video was inspiring”.
A spoiler, bonnet vents, aerodynamic roof shape and tailfin were added to “Tiger Stripe” to reduce lift and assist the supercar in becoming the ultimate drifting machine.
Students have also added orange wheels which look like fire as the car drives and a stripe which gives “Tiger Stripe” its name and, according to the students, “a cooler” pedigree.
The interior was also improved upon by students with a teddy bear fabric utilised for comfort.
According to the students, their limited-edition drift car will be priced at $2 million dollars Australian.
For some time, Catholic Education South Australia has been lobbying to obtain better access to school buses for children attending Catholic schools in regional South Australia.
