Presidential Note

Dear Vonk reader,

We’re already well into 2024, and I’ve already well passed the period for holiday wishes, so I’ll leave them out. We can take some time to look back on an eventful previous year, but I’d rather look forward to the current. Because even though a lot has already happened in the past few weeks, this year still has many things in store.

Personally, I am looking forward most to the Batavierenrace coming May. Every year that I’ve participated so far has been a unique experience and especially this year I find something strangely appealing about running around wearing a full suit in the scorching summer heat. Although finding the time and energy to train is proving a lot more difficult than I had hoped. If you’re also participating this year, I would advise you to start with your practice running by now. Choose a target time you want to achieve for your distance and slowly build up to it. Not only is it very gratifying to officially set your personal best at the Bata, its also just healthy to keep sporting. In fact, also if you don’t participate in the Bata you can still go and set yourself a running target and achieve it! Maybe you’ll discover a passion for running and if not, you’ll only have gotten healthier.

Another race, or rather series of races that I’ve been looking forward to is the Formula 1 of this year. If you’ve not been following it, I’ll give a quick recap. Last year we saw a historic champion ship win by Verstappen with Red Bull, definitively ending the Mercedes dominance, who had made some major mistakes in engineering their car, while Red Bull had one of the best cars. Seeing this, all teams decided to copy the Red Bull car for this year, except for Red Bull, who decided to copy last years Mercedes. This might seem like a bad move, but Mercedes seemed to be on to a good idea, they just couldn’t make it work, however the engineers at Red Bull might have been able to solve it. Making this season very interesting.

Of course at Scintilla we’ve also recently been engineering cars for a competition, at the 2023 Scrapheap Challenge (held in 2024). It was very successful this year, with many interesting and creative tanks being build from the massive pile of scrap that was assembled by the committee.

Many more of such fun activities will be organised for the coming year, so whatever you’re looking forward to, I hope you will have a great time during it.

Dames en heren,

Op de koningin, op Scintilla!