Final project: the race

One live race in the exam period, the cohort as the grid, on a draw everybody shares — marked on conduct and not on where you finish

Due: 11 June 2027 · Weight: 10%

The brief#

Your finishing position is worth nothing.

We mark what you did, not what happened.

One race, run once, in the exam period. The whole cohort is on the grid at the same time, in the forty-seat pit wall room, each student reading their own screens and making their own calls. You are not racing scripts. The car ahead is another student’s, and they are deciding about you while you are deciding about them.

The draw, the call, the wall#

The draw is the cohort’s stochastic events, drawn once before anybody races. The lap the safety car comes out — the period where the field is neutralised behind a lead car and nobody may overtake — is the same lap for everyone, and the rain arrives at the same minute for everyone. Nobody meets a safety car another student never saw.

A call is a decision made during the race: box now or box later, and what goes on the car.

The wall is the display you submitted with your instrument, running on the room’s screens. It records each call, its timestamp, and the recommendation standing at that timestamp. For a departure, the same record preserves the actionable-limit citation and the evidence available then showing that its clear, observable condition applied.

What the ten per cent measures#

Conduct, and nothing else. The finishing position enters no calculation.

Follow your instrument and you are fine. Leave it under an actionable limit you wrote down before the race, with contemporaneous evidence that its observable condition applied, and you are fine. A general limitation remains worth stating, but it cannot excuse a live departure when no condition can be recognised at the call. Override the instrument without both pieces and you can lose conduct marks, including in a race you won.

The Faculty is aware this is unusual. It is also aware that a student who boxed early against their own instrument and finished second has demonstrated nothing except that the safety car came out. Students who consider this unfair are invited to propose how they would otherwise be distinguished from students who were lucky.

What happens in the session#

You arrive with the instrument you already submitted. The room is the same room for everyone, and the environment does not change between students. The screens and the seat are the same, and so is the draw, so what varies between two students is what they did with them.

The race produces one log per student. That log is the submission — there is nothing to write up afterwards and nothing to add to it later. The argument about the calls belongs in the defence, which is due after this. An honest, rigorous analysis of an unsupported departure can still earn defence marks. It does not rewrite the race log or retrospectively justify the departure.