Introduction To The Team

Hello, all.

This blog will be featuring a significantly more warm, welcoming and frank introduction to what it is like in an F1 in Schools (2024) or STEM Racing (2025) team. I will be attempting to update these once a week, although some exceptions may come near exams or when the team is super-busy.

Starting off with a quick self-introduction.

I am Rona Sando, the project manager for the entire team, also responsible for communicating with people outside of the team, which would include you, who is reading this document.

Our team has 6 + 2 + 1 members, which altogether is 9, but consisting of 6 'full-time' members who all work very, very hard, and two support members, one of which is the person that made with website (Hi Eito) and another who is an absolute genius when it comes to painting, well, anything. Including the car.

We started off with absolutely nothing, meaning, I started off with no teammates.

I met Mori, our marketing manager, at a cram school, told him about the competition, and off he went. After a solid 2 weeks of no contact, and me partially giving up, he came back with 3 engineers. Actually, 3 very experienced and very intelligent engineers ( I was an engineer in my last team but they were like a whole new level)

After a couple of more members, and some shuffling of members, the team was made. (I will talk about the shuffling one day perhaps)

We have (present-tense) no place to work together as we span different schools and our schools for some reason do not like working with other schools (typical Japanese culture) so we work fully online. But even under these conditions up until this point we have made 28 prototypes, raised ¥2,500,000, formed multiple partnerships, a social media account, a website, plans to participate and actually maybe do some of our own events.

I have no idea where this journey will end, maybe a legendary success that will be spoken on forever, or a epic fail that only the members will remember. Either way, I hope this journey will help me and my teammates learn, and I hope our activities perhaps influence other students to join this competition and spread F1 in Schools / STEM Racing in Japan.

Rona Sando