STEMx: Powering the Future of F1 with Young Innovators

Oracle Red Bull Racing has always placed people power at the centre of its passion for racing and across its two decades on the grid, it has developed a strong reputation for promoting from within and building the careers of some of the sport’s most successful technical personnel.

However, the ability to push the boundaries and create race and title-winning machinery relies on harnessing the brightest minds and all too often the stream of talent slows to a trickle as school children and students with outstanding potential are deflected from engineering-based careers due to lack of encouragement, under-exposure to the career options available and other factors.

To change that, Oracle Red Bull Racing in Specialist Partnership with Milton Keynes College Group have created STEMx, a programme that seeks to encourage all students to pursue science, technology, engineering and maths-oriented careers, with a particular focus on under-represented groups.

Created as part of the team’s Drive for Change strategy and targeted at children aged from 9 -14, STEMx will provide a mobile, interactive, and experiential learning experience in schools and online via a six-week programme, all aligning to national curriculum. With accessibility and innovation at its core, the programme has been designed to not only maximise reach through its online presence and via a mobile pop-up unit, but also so that it can be customised for each age group to tie in essential aspects and core skills of each specific key stage curriculum.

To mark the launch of STEMx, the team invited more than 40 school children to the Red Bull Technology Campus to participate in STEM focused F1 activities including coding, tyre changes, reaction games, and Lego building.

The children’s immersion in F1-related tech finished with a mini podium to celebrate the top scorers in the F1 track activity, after which the children received a goodie bag containing team swag including a sprinkling of signed caps.

Launching STEMx, Oracle Red Bull Racing Team Principal and CEO Christian Horner said: “As a team, we feel strongly that the talent pool we are recruiting from should better reflect the diversity of wider society but to achieve this, we must disrupt the STEM talent pipeline from grassroots level. That’s what STEMx is all about – reaching as many potential engineers as possible through a programme that is flexible, multi-faceted and which, most importantly, is mobile. STEMx can go to them, no matter where they may be. We always say that people are our most important asset, and our aim is to inspire young people to pursue STEM subjects at school and to eventually translate that passion into successful careers, hopefully within F1 and at Red Bull Technology.”