CHENNAI: When you hear the words ‘racing’ and ‘college students’ in the same sentence, you would picture youngsters over-speeding with little concern for the law. But NFS (Need for speed) Aqua 2017, a RC boat racing event organised recently by the students of VIT University, is completely safe and legal. As a part of the college’s Techno fest 2017, it was one of the biggest events with 27 teams. It was conceptualised by Kumaramanivel and Arvindh, both students of department of electrical engineering at the university. Kumaramanivel, Arvindh and a few others had participated in the aeromodeling competition held at NIT in March 2017 and that inspired them to host a RC boat race event. “We kept this event open for all. The audience and operators were kept at a safe distance to avoid accidents.
We constructed the arena after a lot of discussion. For instance, we were concerned about having no access to a swimming pool. But we were able to find some metal bars behind Kumaramanivel’s house and decided to construct our own arena by using the bars as a framework for a plastic sheet to hold the water in,” explains Aravindh.Teams were supposed to have a minimum of three members and boats were expected to be made from scratch without using 3D printing. Dimensions had to be 30 centimeters long and 20 centimeters wide. The hull could be of any type. Both brush motors or brushless motors could be used. The transmitters used a radio frequency of 2.4 Ghz and had a range of upto 1 km...enough to cover the arena which measures 6.4 metres long, 3.4 metres wide and 30 centimeters deep.
The participating teams came from various colleges from Chennai and Coimbatore. Each team’s boat was clocked and the 40% of the total participants that took the least time advanced to the second round. The event comprised of prelims and finals. Muralidharan P of Tagore Engineering College, Chennai, won the first place, and second place went to K Ragul of Sri Krishna Engineering College, Coimbatore.
RC racing is not new to the city. There are a couple RC racing arenas in the city like Raceway 112 and Take diversion. “RC racing is fun and safe and also a great stress buster which can be enjoyed by everyone in the family. They provide RC cars for hire and also encourage customers to bring their own RC cars to race,” says an employee at Raceway 112 on ECR.
Take Diversion frequently organises championship tournaments for professional RC racers across the country. Chennai alone has over 60 professional RC racers who participate in them, says Karthik Ram, founder. “We have our own annual rolling trophy RC championship called ‘Reverb’, the last of which was held in May this year. We also take RC racing to corporate and college events. It’s just one of the many fun activities we provide here,” he adds.
Keerthivavasan, Team Poseidon from PSG College, Coimbatore, says, “I was always interested in RC boats and chanced upon this event on Facebook. I immediately teamed up with my friends and prepared our 1,000kv DC Brushless motor boat, ‘Poseidon’ for the race.”
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