Alan Dao is the electronic and accessories whiz. Greg Channon likes the elbow grease of working on engines. Together, the team of Hayfield Secondary juniors are among the top amateur mechanics in the country.
"I've always been interested in how things work, taking apart stuff to learn about it," said Channon, of Kingstowne. The duo recently finished first in the state in the Ford/AAA Student Auto Skills National Quality Care Challenge. For that project, they cleaned up the bugs on a 2005 Ford Taurus in under 40 minutes. Now, they're moving on to the national finals, which take place June 25-28 in Washington, D.C.
Both Dao and Channon are students in Hayfield's Auto Tech I class, which teaches the basics of engines, brakes, suspensions, steering and electrical problems. Nine other Auto Tech students from Hayfield began the competition in March by taking a 50-question written exam. Dao and Channon were the school's top two finishers, answering 51 combined questions correctly, which put them among the top 10 scores in the state, out of over 2,000 competitors.
"I wasn't really expecting it to get to Richmond, because the test was kind of hard," said Dao, of Springfield.
Once they had qualified, the real fun began. To compete against the other nine, two-member teams in the "hands-on" portion of the competition, the pair were notified they would be fixing whatever they found wrong on the day of the competition with the Taurus. They spent three weeks preparing by working on an identical 2005 Taurus donated by Ourisman World of Ford in Alexandria.
Instructors Gregory Payne and John Bogan found new ways each day to challenge the students.
"Every day, we'd get there and they would have broken the car, and they'd tell us, 'Won't start, go fix it,'" said Channon.
The problems ranged from general issues like engines or brakes, to the more specific, like one time the instructors reversed the connector pins on the high beam headlights, so the low beams went on instead. That was a tricky one, the students said, but it paid dividends down the road.
"They would think of hard stuff. The stuff in the competition was easy compared to what they would do," said Channon.
THE EXTRA TIME spent preparing for the state competition was bonus for the students, said Bogan.
"They probably learned more in three weeks about a Ford Taurus than a lot of mechanics would have learned on an '05 Taurus. They knew that car, from front to back," he said.
The day of the competition, which took place on a field outside the Virginia Aviation Museum in Richmond, the students brought their tools and went to their car. On the command of the judges — "Gentlemen, start your engines, if you can" — they were off and running. Although they had been given a repair order telling them what to fix, Dao said he had been so used to flying blind, they put it aside at first.
"We're so used to them just telling us to go fix the car, so we didn't really even look at it until like 10 minutes in," he said.
When the smoke cleared and the pair slammed the hood shut, they had fixed all four major repair issues in 38 minutes, 20 minutes ahead of the second place team, from Hylton in Woodbridge. Marshall Academy in Falls Church was third.
"I didn't even know we were the first ones to finish until we closed the hood. For those 38 minutes, I didn't pay attention to anybody else," said Channon. "It only took them five minutes, and he told us we had a perfect car. Then we knew pretty much we had won."
For winning the competition, both students received close to $80,000 in scholarships divided among a host of schools. The national competition will mean another written exam and a similar fix-up job on a 2005 Ford Focus. They will start their preparation this week.
"I didn't think we'd make it this far. I was surprised. So, we'll see what happens," Channon said.
Both students are interested in pursuing car mechanics in some form as a career, but Channon said his father, who is a mechanic in Woodbridge, is presenting him with a realistic picture of what it can be like.
"(He said) it's a hard job, hard on your body," he said.
Regardless, Bogan said he can notice the students' improved confidence after their top-notch performance at the state competition.
"There's a big difference in the way they carry themselves from before the competition. You can see their confidence boost."