HABS Joins Land Rover Competition

We are Team Taurus, involved in an engineering competition run by Jaguar Land Rover. Comprising of graphic designer Dhillon Shah, electronic manager Maxim Vassiliev, manufacturer Krystjan Warner, CAD designer Aarnav Panda, and team leader Sajeev Ravichandran we aimed to make an impact in the automotive industry through use of our engineering and designing skills. 

We worked tirelessly to finish our project, however during regional finals, we experienced small technical issues and a failure in our electronic components; but, through fantastic track performances by all the team members, and expert knowledge of up-to-date 4×4 components, the judges were impressed and we secured a somewhat lucky wild card, permitting us to attend the National Finals.  

We knew we had a lot of work to do, fixing and updating every aspect of our car. Through Dhillon’s effort, we achieved partnerships with many large companies, resulting in a healthy sponsorship sum to fuel our improvements. Using a newly acquired 3D printer and the excellent CAD skills of Sajeev and Aarnav, we created innovative suspension and an all new chassis, to impress the next round of judges. Krystjan and Sajeev worked for endless hours on a new pit display, to advertise and summarise our team’s ethos and aims for the judges and visitors; we looked forward to the competition days. 

It finally arrived; with a good start to our morning, we approached the track with care. Unfortunately, communication between our car and our remote inexplicably cut, destroying any chances of securing points for driving for the first day. After a quick fix, we re-attempted the track on day 2. To our dismay, we struggled to climb the steepest section after getting stuck and our car was immobilised after the break of our rear servo and drivetrain.  

With pride of our effort, we returned to school having achieved 9th placing out of 25 teams. We look forward to entering again next year and hope to win a podium place on the Jaguar Land Rover stands. We wanted to say a huge thank you to Mr Teague (Junior and Senior) as well as Ms Harrison for making this trip possible and for helping us out during various stages of the competition.