Custom bearings help car win F1 in Schools World Final

The competition saw Pulse, a team of four students from Devonport High School for Boys in Plymouth, travel to Malaysia to battle against 24 other teams from 15 countries to claim the World Championship title. They also achieved the Fastest Car Award and claimed victory in the Knockout Challenge against the Australian team.

As team sponsors, Barden supplied custom manufactured bearings for the model racing car and fitted them at their Plymouth factory. The miniature type, hybrid ceramic bearings have a bore diameter of just 3.175mm and an outside diameter of 6.35mm. To help optimise the performance of the miniature Formula 1 car, a dry lubricated bearing cage and 1mm diameter ceramic balls were used to reduce friction and enable faster speeds to be attained.

Bearing installation

Trevor Morris, Product Engineering Manager at Barden, comments: "After doing so well getting to World Championships we wanted to ensure Pulse had every competitive advantage. We supplied them with bearings from our super precision miniature and instrument range, which are manufactured to extremely tight tolerances of less than 5 microns, and offered to fit the bearings at our factory to avoid any damage to the axles. The results speak for themselves!"

Barden has sponsored Pulse since the start of this challenge, supplying bearings for the original car used in the regional and national finals of the F1 in Schools challenge over 12 months ago. The challenge is a unique competition in which students aged between 11 and 18 from schools, colleges and youth groups use CAD/CAM software to design, analyse, manufacture, test and race a miniature F1 car made from balsa wood and powered by CO2 cylinders.

The four members of Pulse - John Ware, 16, Samuel Wood, 15, Andrew Lees, 16, and Thomas Simpson, 17 - used CAD to design the model, before converting the design using CAM software. The final design was then manufactured on a CNC machine.

Extensive testing was carried out, including wind tunnel testing as used by actual F1 cars. The Pulse model recorded the fastest time of the competition, running the track in 1.064 seconds to claim the coveted Bernie Ecclestone World Championship Trophy. The team were also the winners of BEng Automotive and Motor Sport Engineering scholarships at City University in London.

John Ware, Team Manager for Pulse, says: "It is a fantastic honour that we have been crowned as World Champions, and I am really glad that our hard work over the past two years to raise sponsorship and design and develop the car has paid off. We are all absolutely over the moon with the result, and still cannot quite believe that we have won."

Barden's track record

A market leader in the design and manufacture of super precision ball bearings for more than 60 years, Barden has supplied products to a range of extreme environment applications, including vacuum pumps and the aerospace industry. With a customer base that includes NASA, Schlumberger and a number of aerospace and defence companies, Barden boasts state-of-the-art production technology and a wealth of engineering expertise.

The Barden Corporation is a recognised market leader and a high percentage of its bearings are tailor-made for specific applications. The product range encompasses predominantly radial, single-row, super-precision, angular-contact and deep-groove ball bearings that meet and exceed ABEC 7/9 standards.