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My Lola experience: Toby Reynolds

I am a year eleven student at Cottenham Village College and I was given the opportunity to work at Lola for my two-week placement. Each year there is a two-week work experience course for the year eleven students and my time had come.

I had a list of pre-chosen companies by the school, which I could complete my course with. None of these companies specialised in anything that I am interested in so I started to scan around the county for companies that I would enjoy working with and companies which I would benefit from.

My father’s friend had a contact within Lola and we made an approach. Lola agreed to take me on as a work experience student for my two-week course. The school then had to be informed of the placement opportunity and the relevant forms were filled in and passed between Lola and the school’s career advisor.

The first day of work experience was upon me and I was unsure, even apprehensive, in terms of what to expect when I arrived at Lola. When I walked into reception I waited for my contact, Mr Adrian Wylde, to meet me and give me a tour of the buildings and a health and safety induction.

On the second day I met John Best, a CAD engineer in the composite section of Lola. I spent the whole day with him learning about the programme the guys use to design parts for cars, requested parts for companies and so much more! This demonstrated to me that Lola is not predominantly to do with cars but offer a wide variety of services to the industry.

John then set about providing me with a job to do. Lola has an interesting and unique way of showing the students around all the departments within the premises.

The project starts by designing a 3D rectangle with my name pocketed into it. This was achieved by using the 3D CAD software, CATIA. From the design, a mould is produced using one of the 5 Axis machines that Lola have. After this, six layers of carbon fibre production material then gets inserted into the mould and pushed into the pocketed letters and corners.

Once the final layer was applied, the mould was put into a sealed bad and a vacuum pump was applied thus removing the air from the bag.The mould was then placed in an autoclave (Big pressurised oven) for a couple of hours to harden off the material.

Once the mould was out of the autoclave the finished product had to be ‘cracked out’ of the mould.
When the carbon fibre nameplate had been cracked out, it had to be polished down using compound and T-Cut to gain a glossy finish rather than the matt finish that it inherited from the mould.
The journey to make my nameplate consisted of: 

• CAD Office with John, Ant and Steve.
• 5 Axis Area with Colin and Michael
• Inspection area with Chris on the Zeiss Stiefelmayer which is a measuring machine that tests tolerances of machined parts.
• Pattern shop / Production area with Toby, Gary, Benny, Tom and Spencer. At the times where I could not work on my name plate, Adrian Wylde (H&S Officer) and Brett Pedlar (Maintenance) organised things for me to do such as mapping out the ground floor of the office block and reception area to go on file using a laser measuring tool.
  Adrian also allowed me to help construct the real size BAE – Systems Mantis unmanned reconnaissance aircraft mock up in the yard area outside the wind tunnel.
  I was also allowed inside the wind tunnel area with the team who were testing next year’s (2010) Lola LMP-1 race car.

The most enjoyable experience was – Helping out in the wind tunnel with next year’s car.
Other experiences that came close included: 

• Being in the office with John designing the Name Plate.
• Working with Spencer, Michael and Alan on the BAE – Systems Mantis.
• Working at Lola for the two weeks also given me an insight into how a race car is born and the role motorsport plays within a company.

I met many employees throughout my journey round the departments at Lola and would like to thank them very much.

I would also like to thank Lola on the whole for providing me with a rich and very enjoyable work experience placement.

For more on Toby Reynolds the successful karter please click here - www.tobyreynoldsracing.com