Winged machine engineered to fly

Zero to 100km in just 3.5 seconds.

New Zealand hand-built ingenuity is taking on the racing world - again. This Formula One-style race car was engineered by students at the University of Auckland, and is heading to Germany. But it won't be competing in a traditional race.

Each year the International Society of Automotive Engineers invites university students to construct a small, F1-style race car.

It hosts a race for the cars and judges the engineering in terms of construction and performance - and even financial planning.

The Auckland University team has entered the Australasian competition before, but has never competed further afield.

This year it will, after the car was picked to enter the European competition. Team leader Craig Shannon says the invitation came because the design was innovative.

"It's much more a motor sport design than a refined go-kart with suspension."

It's certainly an eye-catcher. Weighing just 230kg, it's powered by a supercharged Yamaha R6 motorcycle engine that can take it from zero to 100km/h in just 3.5 seconds - quicker than a Porsche 911T.

More impressive, perhaps, is that when it reaches 160km/h, the downforce exerted by those wings is equivalent to 230kg - which means with a bit more speed to offset driver weight, in theory it could drive upside down.

"And you wouldn't need to go that much faster," says Shannon, "as we've added some more wings to the front since those tests were done at the university wind tunnel."

So is the sky the limit? No, says the 21-year-old student. The competition does limit physical dimensions and engine size, with latitude around those rules.

He believes Auckland's design is different to anything tried before, "and we want to prove it can compete with the best in Europe".

If hard work has anything to do with it, the team will do well.

By the time the August 3-7 test in Germany arrives, the original team members will have spent over 7000 hours working on the car.

The project focuses on creating a car that is production-ready.

Shannon says: "The idea is to produce a prototype to pitch to a manufacturer against a whole load of people who have done the same thing.

"So you have to show not only that the car's aerodynamic, that it corners and so forth.

"You also have to prove the engineering is sound, you could mass-produce it for US$25,000 [$40,000], and you have to have a business plan on how to go about producing your car."

So Shannon has spent a lot of his time chasing down sponsors, organising deadlines and budgets - "which isn't engineering in the true sense, but it's part of learning the project".

Whether they've done enough will be tested at the Formula One track at Hockenheim, when 40 entries from 11 countries will pit their engineering skills against each other just a week before the F1 circus moves in.