Season 1 starts
The plan is set. Thirteen weeks plus a build week, eight projects, three sessions a week. The printer gets assembled on 1 September and the first thing I do with it is print a cube that's supposed to be exactly 20 mm — and then find out whether it is.
I took a 30-question diagnostic to work out where to start. 15 out of 30. The split was more useful than the score:
| Recall — facts about F1 | 1 / 8 |
| Mechanism — why things work | 11 / 15 |
| Quantitative — reasoning with numbers | 3 / 7 |
So I can work out why something behaves the way it does, but I don't retain the terminology and I haven't been putting numbers on things. Materials and CAD came out strongest. Aerodynamics came out worst — 1 out of 6, which is awkward, because the whole back half of this season is aerodynamics.
That's the plan then: go fast through the making, slow down on the aero, and finish every single session with one calculation I do myself.