Over 250 primary and secondary school students from across Cornwall raced their own rocket cars inspired by the Bloodhound project, a supersonic car which will attempt to set a world land speed record.

Hosted by Nexus as part of the Bloodhound Super Sonic Car Project (SSC), the competition “looks to the future of Cornwall to inspire our next generation of scientists and engineers.”

“As a Bloodhound Hub in Cornwall, we provided rocket car workshops to make the cars, and then hosted the racing over two days at Nexus,” said Dr Jo Foster, director of Nexus and the Gifted STEM Programme. “It’s vitally important to inspire our young people to be motivated to enjoy and study science, technology and maths subjects at school and it is projects like this which capture the imagination and spark excitement.”

Nexus was supported by a team of four volunteer ‘Raceteers’ who received training from Bloodhound SSC. Nexus staff and the Raceteers worked with students for six weeks, setting the challenge of creating a rocket car from scratch, using a basic piece of foam and four wheels, before being fitted with grade two rocket engines.

The first day of racing saw students from Troon, St Buryan, Gorran School, Connor Downs and Rosemellin sending their cars down the Nexus track. The second day saw Crowan, St Erth, Ladock, Veryan, Penponds, and one car from Rosemellin joining for the Primary races, as well as St Ives School competing for a place on the Secondary Regional competition.

“Both days were amazing, with fantastic support from our Raceteers," said Dr Foster. "We had some really fast times with several cars achieving speeds over 30mph, we also had a few misfires which certainly added to the excitement. We now have our winning teams who will be going through to the next round.”

In the primary heats, the fastest car was Team Ravenclaw from Rosemellin School, which clocked 39.8mph, and in second place was St Buryan School's Bolt with 39.66mph.

In the secondary heats there was an excellent showing from a number of CSIA, St Ives and Nexus teams. The top five places were taken by Nexus teams, which also took four of the top ten places on the national leaderboard.

The teams going through to the regionals are RLCS, with a speed of 40.97mph; and the Pyro Penguins with a “blistering” 43.10mph.