Chapter 3 · Engineering · Dec 2025 to Aug 2026

F1 in Schools

Technical Lead (Design, CFD and Simulation), F1 in Schools – STEM Racing. Research & Development Award at the Open National Finals, Chennai, August 2026.

Technical Lead (Design, CFD and Simulation) · F1 in Schools – STEM Racing · Dec 2025 to Aug 2026

I owned the car's geometry, the physics model behind it and final technical sign-off, in a six-person team.

CFD
OpenFOAM virtual wind tunnel, k-ω SST, compared with Ansys Discovery; final Cd 0.7075 from a 5.42 M-cell run on the Mach 7 Nationals car
Structure
CalculiX FEA for wheels, axles and chassis
CAD
Full parametric model, 40 STEP/STL/F3D files
Docs
Contributed to the team's three submitted portfolios: Design & Engineering, Enterprise, Project Management
Side-view line-integral-convolution flow over the car, coloured by velocity from 0 to 25 m/s; the wake behind the rear wing is slow and blue.
Fig. 1Line-integral-convolution flow over the car, side view. Mach 4.2, the Regionals car. Colour is velocity, 0 (blue) to 25 m/s (dark red); the colour bar is cropped from this plate.
Cd0.7075

The final drag coefficient, from a 5.42 M-cell OpenFOAM k-ω SST run on the assembled Mach 7 Nationals car. It feeds the Python race simulator, MRM 5, which is calibrated against three rival cars reconstructed from their published portfolios.

Predicted race time0.892–0.895 s
Peak velocity · peak thrust (raw model)27.55 m/s18.8 N
  1. Nine design iterations, Prototype 1 to the Mach 4.2 Regionals car. Scroll to step. The Nationals car, Mach 7, is not on this sheet.
01/09
Aug 2026

F1 in Schools – STEM Racing. At the Open National Finals in Chennai:

Research & Development Award

The build

Nine months from Prototype 1 to the Mach 7 Nationals car, in a six-member team. The car was tested in a wind tunnel the team built in the school ground yard and on a test channel laid out at school; the wheels were remade and weighed before the finals. Photographs are the team's own.

An early prototype car on a wooden test track
Prototype on the track. The first body, before the sidepods and the wings.
The manufactured black car with sponsor decals on a table
The manufactured car, photographed 1 Jul 2026.
The car photographed among lumps of ice for the portfolio
Portfolio shoot. The Mach 7 among ice.
A frame from the wheel test rig video: a wheel spinning on a rail by a window
Wheel test rig. Spin-down tests of the remade wheels, from the team's video.
A handwritten note of wheel weights: rear new 1.83, front new 1.56 to 1.57, front old 2.97, rear old 3.61
4 Aug 2026. The wheels remade and weighed before the finals: old rears 3.61 g, new 1.83 g.
A printed black PETG wheel with its bearing
A PETG wheel with its bearing, 0.8 mm at the thinnest, checked in CalculiX FEA.
Adithya at a laptop with a teammate looking on, the CAD open on screen
At the laptops. Working through the design with a teammate.
Adithya and a teammate in a machine shop, a CNC machine and a coordinate measuring machine behind them
The machine shop. With a teammate among the CNC machines.
A long wooden test channel laid on tables in the school hall
Test channel at school, August 2026.
Adithya in a respirator and gloves spray-painting the car on the ground
Spray painting the car in team kit, 7 Aug 2026.
Still from the nationals film: surface pressure on the assembled car, blue and red
Surface pressure on the assembled car, OpenFOAM, from the film made for the finals.
Screenshot of the OpenFOAM virtual wind tunnel with the car coloured by pressure
The virtual wind tunnel. k-ω SST, 5.42 million cells for the final run.
CFD render of a wheel on the ground plane, pressure contours from blue to red
A wheel in the tunnel. Pressure on the wheel and the ground plane, from the CFD.
Team members in black shirts at the competition venue beside the pit table
National Qualifiers, 3 Apr 2026.
The six-member team standing together outside in black jackets
Rogue Velocity. The six of us.