Student motor vehicle technicians at K College have unveiled a Caterham Sports Car and trike that they’ve been working on to qualify at the North Farm campus in Tunbridge Wells.

Two teams of motor vehicle students took up the challenge of making either a £15,000 kit car supplied by Caterham Motors, OR a vehicle made entirely of what they could find from what they could find from whatever resources they had in their workshop.

Their lecturer said it was tough to decide which project gave the students the most challenging experience – and the students agreed!



Carl Jones, who worked on the trike, said: ‘There was no instruction manual that we could follow, we had to work it out for ourselves and think outside the box. We worked well as a team and all found we had strengths in different areas so we found out what we would want to do more of as our careers progress.’

Ben Harwood, who worked on the kit car, said: ‘This was a cracking project and we’ll probably never have the chance to do something like this again in our lives. We made an affordable performance car.’



Rob Stephenson, who was also on the kit car team, said: ‘How many people can say we built a car! We were novices going into it but it was a great learning experience. If we hadn’t had problems, it wouldn’t have been so interesting. Working with cars is about problem solving and that was half the fun of it.’

The team working on the kit car did have an instruction manual from Caterham Cars but they pointed out, it was a generic book that covered all the kit cars they make, not the specific type given to the students so they had to learn by trial and error as they built it.

The students came up with the idea of making a kit car but had to get K College to approve buying the £13,000 kit. It arrived in cardboard boxes and thousands of individual pieces, with screws and bolts, that the students then worked on for their B Tec qualifications.

The car, worth £15,000 now that it is built, will be returned to Caterham Cars in exchange for a new kit that the next team of students can choose to work on next year.



Meanwhile it is up to the students who built the trike to decide what happens to it next. Motor vehicle manager at K College, Nick Aldridge, said: ‘They really worked at this, and never gave up. It’s definitely too good to scrap – there’s no reason why it wouldn’t pass a road worthiness test, and be able to be driven on the road legally in future.’

Principal of K College, Bill Fearon, watched the students present their findings and inspected both vehicles. He told the teams: ‘You have each produced work that K College can be proud of, and that will inspire students in future. Both projects were very different, but each team obviously learned from their unique experiences.’