DIDSBURY – Toboggan racing may seem like kid stuff but for university engineering students – it's pretty serious. Jacob Strautman, who hails from Didsbury, competed in the 2018 Great Northern Concrete Toboggan Race (GNCTR) as part of the University of Calgary team that ended up second overall.
The competition took place in Waterloo, Ont. near the end of January and featured 19 teams from universities all across Canada and one from the United States.
Strautman, who is in his final year of civil engineering at U of C, told the Gazette that competing in the event was a great experience.
"I had tried out before to make the team but had never made it," said Strautman. "This year I made it and got to go on the trip."
The event is all about building a concrete-based toboggan as a team and then racing it in Waterloo, said Strautman.
"It's all about project development and building the sled," he said. "There is a concrete team, a superstructure team, and a logistics team. Whoever contributes the most to those gets to go on the trip. There's also a large spirit aspect to it."
Strautman worked on the concrete floor work. He said that one of the design scopes is that the running surface of the toboggan must be made out of concrete. The toboggan was built in Calgary and trucked to Waterloo to race.
"I was mostly building the concrete part of it," he said. "There was another team that built the roll cage and the steering and braking systems. It was hauled there in a large technical exhibit and then the exhibit opens up and we have our sled on display with all our concrete mix design and our superstructure design."
Strautman said the competition itself went very well.
"The first three days were a lot of student involvement and spirit challenges and such," he said. "Another day we had our technical exhibit on display where we explain to industry people how it works and what our justification behind the design criteria is. The final day is the actual race day."
The toboggans race down a hill at a tube park in three different categories: speed, slalom and king of the hill. Trautman's U of C team finished first in the speed race with a time of over 50 km/h.
"We did the first two, but we had a bit of a mishap with our slab design," he said. "We couldn't make it all the way down the hill in our second run (slalom). We got our sled fixed up in time for the third race (king of the hill). We raced against the University of Toronto and one of our components broke again so we lost."
Despite the two setbacks, the U of C toboggan ended up in second place in the competition with only the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT), also of Calgary, finishing ahead.
"We ended up second overall for the entire competition," he said. "It's not just based on race criteria, it's also based on technical points for your design and spirit points for how involved your team is. So we got decent success in the races but great success overall. It was quite an experience. It really reminded me of doing design competitions in middle school. I learned basically how to do hands-on floor work and concrete mix design. I think that'll really help me in the future."
