Cairo University Racing Team has won the Most Challenging Team award after being the first team from the university to enter and compete at the Formula Student competition in Germany, the team announced on their official Facebook page .
The team said they received the award for "showing extraordinary efforts during the competition." In addition to winning the Most Callenging Team award, the team took the 28th place among the 72 competing teams in the Business Plan Presentation category.
The Formula Student competition is an international engineering student competition in which student teams from around the world build race cars and compete with them in different categories that evaluate their design, efficiency and cost.
The Most Challenging Team award, as its name suggests, is given to the team that faces the most obstacles and hardships during the competition, which the engineering students experienced a lot of.
Team member Abd El-Rahman Hany said in an interview on Egyptian TV channel Nile News that the challenges started with the research required for designing the race car, as the team could not only rely on what they study at university but had to divide themselves into teams to study different parts of the car.
The team also faced challenges in funding for their project, as they assembled a fundraising team and formulated a plan to target companies that could be open to funding student projects.
"A project like Formula Student is a huge project, which means funding an entire project to design a car can reach about half a million Egyptian pounds," said team leader Ahmed Rezk.
"It's a complete project, in which I learn how to design a car, how to market my car, how to find money to get the car's materials and how to convince the faculty to give the team a workshop to work in," added Rezk.
But perhaps the biggest challenge the team faced was when the time came to ship their car to Germany, which they believe is the main reason they won the award.
"Most of the participating teams are from Europe, so people are able to ship their cars in a finished state, but for us, because of the shipping costs and expenses, we had to dismantle the car and ship it in parts," Hany said.
"We built it again at the camp. During the time that everyone else was resting and enjoying the last moments before the competition, we were working. That's what got us the attention."
Despite the hardships, the team has expressed a desire to continue competing in the coming years, as Hany said that they consider their experience in Germany the groundwork for future successes.