Infiniti Engineering Academy picks a winner
U of C student tops field of Canadian finalists in F1 technical competition
MONTREAL QUEBEC— Matthew Kemp, a 20-year-old secondyear engineering student at the University of Calgary, has been chosen as the Canadian winner of the Infiniti Engineering Academy competition, which took place in Montreal just prior to last weekend's Canadian Grand Prix.
Starting in January 2020, Kemp will spend six months at Renault's Formula One facility in Enstone, U.K., and six months at Infiniti’s European Technical Center in Cranfield, U.K.
These students aren't just dog's bodies either — they are thrown right into the engineering of both the Formula One cars and Infiniti’s production models.
The Academy also presents a rare opening for a newcomer looking for a career in Formula One. The 2017 Canadian winner, Matthew Crossan from London, Ont., was hired last December on a full-time basis as a simulation development engineer for the Renault Formula One team.
Competitions for these prized placements take place in seven different regions around the world.
Over 12,000 applications were received this year, some 450 from Canada alone.
These were boiled down to the ten students who competed in Montreal.
The tests include written exams, a series of workshops and a psychological test devised by Prof. Julia Minson of Harvard University to test the applicants’ problem-solving capability.
The applicants were grouped into two teams of five; each team had to assemble a model drag racing car, which went side by side in a best of five competition.
It wasn't exclusively the actual results of the tests or the races that counted; the judges were also looking at how the combatants worked within their teams to solve the problems.
After the first day, the field was narrowed down to three finalists: Kemp, Derrick Tan from Waterloo University and Luke Gregoris from the University of Western Ontario in London.
The last exercise was kept a secret from the finalists until the last minute. Right in the pit lane for the Renault Formula One team at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, each was presented with a bunch of parts — tubes, nuts and bolts — and were told it was an exhaust manifold for a Formula One race car. They had 20 minutes to figure out how to assemble it. No instructions; just do it. Kemp actually came closest to finishing it, although he did have two screws and nuts left over ...
As I have for each of the past competitions, I was honoured to be a member of a panel of journalists who interviewed the applicants in a press conference format; the objective here was to see how they reacted to the pressure of unexpected questions. They all did surprisingly well.
As always, the journalists formed our own opinions, and wrote down our choices for the winner.
As usual (ahem ), I picked the winner, as I have for each of the Academy's four years in Canada. Geez, they could make this process a lot shorter ...