Best showing yet for Concordia at the Great Northern Concrete Toboggan Race
Bruna Guarino Moraes is captain of Concordia’s Concrete Toboggan Team and VP Toboggan for the Concordia Society for Civil Engineering.
With the biggest team yet, expectations were high for Concordia heading into the 2020 Great Northern Concrete Toboggan Race (GNCTR) — and the group of 30 students more than delivered.
Concordia placed second overall out of 21 teams at the largest and longest annual engineering competition in Canada, which took place this year in Toronto from January 29 to February 2.
Each competing team designed and built a toboggan with reinforced concrete skis, steering and braking systems, and a superstructure that can hold five riders! Teams also chose a theme, and this year ours was Boggtor Seuss, The ConcoCat in the Hat.
For the first time in Concordia’s history, the team took the maximum amount of students to competition, tripling the number from last year. Our team was composed of civil, building and mechanical engineering students as well as fine arts students. And we have a 40/60 women to men ratio.
One of the main competition events is the Technical Exhibition, where each team can show off their toboggan, design and build process and theme. We earned top scores for our poster design and technical display design.
Race Day is the most anticipated, though, because that’s when each team gets to test their toboggan. The racing hill was the steepest it has ever been and only 11 of the 21 teams made it across the finish line, while six teams flipped during the course. We are glad to say that Concordia was able to perform all its runs successfully and safely.
All in all, we received the most outstanding results Concordia has ever seen. Out of the 21 competing teams, we earned:
- #2 Place OVERALL
- #1 Best Team Spirit
- #2 Best Toboggan Design
- #1 Braking Design
- #1 Reinforcement Design
- #2 Best Superstructure Design
- #3 Steering Design
- #3 Most Innovative Toboggan
- #1 Experimentation
- #3 Sustainability
- #3 Excellence in Safety
- #2 Best Performing Toboggan
- #2 King of the Hill
- #2 Fastest Run (top speed of 71 km/hr)
- #2 Braking Performance
- #1 Poster Design
- #1 Technical Display Design
The full results are available here.
Concordia’s performance has grown and improved significantly over the last three years. In 2018, the team had nine members and didn’t win any awards. Last year, with 10 members, the team placed seventh out of 21 competing teams and received a handful of awards and recognitions, including Most Sustainable Team, first in Top Speed, second in Best Performing Toboggan and third in King of the Hill.
The Concordia Concrete Toboggan Team gives students the opportunity to put into practice the theory learned in class, construct their own designs and then ride in the toboggan. It’s a group where we foster curiosity, sustainability, critical thinking and interdisciplinarity. But, most of all, it’s a group of friends, there to support and learn from each other.
We hope to have created a legacy this year for the toboggan team and hope it carries on in the years to come, through the dedication and excitement of the returning and new members.
