There's a lot at stake, when 10 student engineers meet in Montreal on June 7 for the test of their lives.
They'll be trying to follow in the career footsteps of Gatineau's Felix Lamy, 21, who was awarded Canada's first internship in the Infiniti Engineering Academy last year and is now halfway through his 12-month tenure in the U.K.
There will be seven overall winners, one each from Canada, Asia, China, Europe, the Middle East, Mexico and the United States – pretty much wherever Infinitis are sold. They'll be put to work later this year for six months at Infiniti's European Technical Centre near Birmingham and for another six months at the Renault Sport research facility near Oxford.
Lamy has spent the past six months working with composite materials at the Renault Sport facility and is about to move on to the Infiniti centre.
"I expected complexity in an F1 team, but I didn't expect this level of complexity," he says. "It must be five times what I thought, at least. We are 500 people all working to a deadline to get a car ready. This isn't just about having smart people on a team – this is about having smart people who can work well together."
It's exciting working with motorsport, he says, but these days, production cars can be just as fulfilling.
Lamy at work with other international interns at the Renault Sport Research Facility in the U.K.
"It brings new challenges. It's a whole new way to working, and a different culture," he says. "Working on the road-car engineering side is probably, in 2017, more exciting than ever, because it's changing so quickly. We're talking about autonomous cars, electric cars, cars that can communicate together, cars that are not just about going from A to B but becoming sort of like your
iPhone, more of a part of your life."
For Infiniti, it's essential to encourage and foster research talent from the markets in which the cars are sold – not just the traditional sources of Europe, Japan and the United States.
"Nissan and Infiniti is a global corporation, and diversity is at the core of our business," says Tommaso Volpe, director for Infiniti Global Motorsport. "We always stress diversity – understanding different cultures, working with different cultures. For us, this is very important."
"Our products from the design centre go to 130 countries globally," adds Andy Todd, Infiniti's director of body and external engineering, "and an engineer needs to know what matters to a customer in Canada or a customer in Mexico, because they're fundamentally different. This is an opportunity to live with different cultures and share their experiences, and it's a great learning curve for everybody. It's not about reading it in a book, or teaching it. It's actually living it."
The seven successful interns are split into two teams, so four of them work with Infiniti while the other three work with Renault Sport, and then they swap places after six months. They're given a salary and provided with a house to live in, but they pay their own rent and for their own groceries. Their travel expenses are covered, and each team is also given an Infiniti Q30 as a shared company car.
Lamy says his parents encouraged him to pursue his passion for racing.
Lamy does not come from an automotive family; his father is a federal government economist and his mother is a primary-school teacher, while his older brother is a botanist. Both boys were encouraged to follow their passions, however, and so young Felix learned to weld and had built his own go-kart by the age of 13. He spent the past few summers working in the Montreal area as a Formula 1600 race mechanic for Exclusive Autosport.
"We were pushed to follow our passion, and do it well," he explains. "I found my passion in racing, and in being the engineer behind the car."
Lamy was awarded the internship after two days of testing last June, in which he had to help design a car, answer technical questions and impress a group of judges with his strength of character.
"It was a learning experience in itself," he says. "We worked in a team to get a small car built. You don't know the other four you're working with, and in one hour, you're building a car. You have to work with them. You learn a lot about yourself and how you work with others."
The written technical questions were tough: for example, if your car is fast in the corners at slow speeds, but oversteers at high speeds, what would you do?
"That one I knew!" he says. "It's to do with aero balance."
Just as important, though, was the mock news press conference with questions from media, and being able to communicate well with the other contestants and with the judges. One observer at the time said Lamy left them in no doubt whatsoever that given the chance, he would make every second of his year count, and was so excited, he nearly fell off his chair in the interview.
Lamy's advice for the contestants next week? "Plan ahead. I'm an engineer – it's what I do. When I turned up at the academy for the judging, I felt like all the boxes were ticked – all the boxes I could do were ticked. If you have a plan and you've done the right things, you're going to succeed."
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