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SINGAPORE: A group of students from the Institute of Technical Education (ITE) helped build the car that has been winning at the Asia Pacific Rally Championship (APRC).
Defending champion Cody Crocker drives the first assembled-in-Singapore Motor Image Subaru WRX STI.
The final leg will only be held in China in November, but Cody has gathered enough points to clinch his second APRC title.
Back in Singapore, at the Subaru Hub in Toa Payoh where the car was assembled, there is a great sense of achievement, especially for the ITE students who helped build the car Cody drives.
"I'm proud! Because we're just apprentices here doing these cars. We're not professionals yet. But we work together with professionals from New Zealand and Japan. They taught us how to do this car," said Mathan Haridass, ITE automotive technology on-the-job trainee attached to Motor Image Enterprise's Subaru Academy.
While other students on the ITE's industry-based training scheme only get to service the cars at their approved training centres, those apprentice at the Subaru Academy get to service and build sports cars.
Since Motor Image started assembling its own Subaru WRX STI Group N rally cars late last year, the students have helped build six rally cars.
Their supervisor said these student trainees are as good as any trained technician in the industry, and some even got to go to the APRC rallies in Johor and Indonesia, working alongside international automotive experts.
The student trainees also experienced the race against time to restore the machines to tip-top condition when their rally car pulled in for a quick servicing stopover.
Gregory Lim, head of Automotive Technology at ITE College West, said "The curriculum at ITE is very industry driven, so we work very closely with the representatives of the automotive industry to ensure that our curriculum is up-to-date, it's relevant and it meets the needs of the industry. We see emerging trends like F1 and motor sports. This will bring vibrancy to the industry."
"What Motor Image is doing is indeed a role model. We would like very much the industry to do what Motor Image is doing now - going beyond what ITE has to offer. We offer a very comprehensive broad based training. But it's good for companies like Motor Image to then offer additional opportunities for their trainees to grow in areas of motor sports like what we're seeing here," he added.
Glenn Tan, group chief executive of Motor Image Singapore agreed, "We were exploring the whole idea of using ITE students and I think the whole concept of getting them to have hands-on experience... They've contributed significantly to this project and with Singapore pushing on with motor sports, it's a good training ground for them so that when they graduate they'll be ready with specialised engineering skills."
"What's most important is that in motor sport, as you've seen, speed and reliability of the car are very important. So the precision of the work done, getting it right the first time, and the speed at which they do it is very important. So all these will contribute to the kind of standard to show that Singapore technicians can do it!" - CNA/ac
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