Last Blast 2020

By Liv Thompson and Lara Nevett | Posted: Monday November 30, 2020

Last Blast was the CO2 car racing event that happened on Sunday the 6th of December, between 1pm and 4pm. Over fifty carved, sanded and painted blocks of balsa wood were fired across a 20m race track going from Room 5 to Room 8 using the power of Carbon Dioxide.

The students in the CO2 cars group had been working on their cars for just over a term and it all came down to this race day. The Year 7’s made dragsters. They are smaller, lighter cars that make it across the track in one second or less. The Year 8 group made scale model cars, so theirs were bigger, heavier, and slower with most completing the track in around one to two seconds.

On the bottom of each car are two small screw hooks that the nylon wire runs through and a hole at the back of the car to put the Co2 canister in. The track was 20 meters long and is made of two nylon wires that connect to two blocks of wood at each end of the track. The cars travel way too fast for people to accurately time it, so they used touch pads instead. The times go straight to a computer which then puts the results on which gets copied onto a laptop, and then projected onto Room 6’s TV. Each car got to race three times in total so over one hundred and fifty races on that track in three hours. 

There were five winners: first, second and third in Year 7 and first in Year 8, as well as a people’s choice. Everyone who came to watch got the opportunity to vote for the car (dragster or scale model) they thought looked the part.

RESULTS - 

Fastest car - Riley Winder - Average time over 20m- 0.836 seconds 

2nd Place - Riley Adams - Average time over 20m- 0.863 seconds 

3rd Place - Murtaza Shafiyee - Average time over 20m- 0.868 seconds 

 Fastest Scale Car - Josh Harnett - Average time over 20m- 1.748 seconds 

People's Choice - Ella Keats

By Liv Thompson and Lara Nevett (Room 13)