Watch teenagers debate braking distances with the rigour of a project team bidding for a major infrastructure contract, and you'll see why we're backing this initiative.

Working alongside the recently acquired Ridge company, Driven International, we are partnering with social enterprise Class of Your Own on their Design a Sustainable Racetrack challenge, supported by COYO’s technology partner Bentley Systems. We’re helping young people aged 13-17 to tackle the same questions our team handles: balancing performance with safety, creating something that serves a community, and doing it all while hitting net-zero targets. 

Real problems, real skills 

 The brief these teams are working on isn’t watered down. Students will pick vehicle specs, design modular buildings to net-zero standards, and, perhaps most importantly, justify how a piece of motorsport infrastructure can serve a community 365 days a year. 

 Each team covers eight disciplines – architecture, civil engineering, building services, digital modelling, environmental science, experience design, geospatial surveying, and project management. They’re learning to communicate across specialisms, manage constraints, and defend their decisions with evidence. 

The social value case  

Social value gets talked about a lot in our sector. Often, it’s something bolted on at the end. This challenge flips that.  

From the start of the challenge, students need to answer the question: when there’s no racing happening, who else could use this space and how?  

The requirement for 30% green space and biodiversity zones isn’t decoration. They’re learning that proper design works with the environment, not against it 

Ridge & Partners is proud to support the Sustainable Racetrack Challenge. Inspiring young people to think creatively about sustainability and the built environment is essential for shaping the future of our industry, and this initiative offers an exciting platform for the next generation of designers, engineers and surveyors to do exactly that.

 

Michael Wood, Associate Partner, Ridge and Partners

Why we are doing this   

CITB (Construction Industry Training Board) says we need 225,000 new workers by 2027. But it’s not just about numbers. We need people who get that infrastructure – whether it’s a race circuit, transport hub, or data centre –isn’t just an engineering puzzle. It’s a chance to make places better for the people who live there. 

This challenge shows students what the industry is. Not the hard hats and mud stereotype (though there’s still some of that), but the reality: solving complex problems, using digital tools, tackling sustainability challenges in teams, doing work that changes the physical world. 

Looking forward 

Not every student who enters this challenge will end up in our industry. That’s fine. But those who do will arrive with a fundamentally different understanding of what’s possible and what’s expected. 

They’ll have already worked in multi-disciplinary teams, used maths to drive design choices, thought about the carbon lifecycle, biodiversity net gain, and inclusive access as basic design requirements, not boxes to tick. 

If we’re serious about delivering the infrastructure this country needs, infrastructure that is sustainable, resilient, and socially valuable; then we need to start that conversation earlier. Not with careers fairs and glossy brochures, but with real problems and real design work. 

That’s what this challenge offers. And that’s why we’re behind it.