Chemistry Race Competition 2025

At the start of last month, a team of five of our students, including two Year 13s (Christian and Kaartigan) and three Year 12s (Nicolas, Yunyang and Quang), accompanied by Miss Rose, travelled to Cambridge to represent the school at the sixth annual ChemRace, under the team name of ‘Molecular Maestros’.

After registering at the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, our team, along with 59 other teams, was welcomed with a presentation on the history of the ChemRace, including its origins in Czechia, followed shortly by the rules of the competition, detailed as follows:

Each team of five is initially given six questions, labelled A1, A2, A3, A4, A5 and A6.
Each question is initially worth 4 marks. Once we complete a question, we quickly run to the relevant station to get it checked, and if our answer is correct, we are awarded all 4 marks. If it is wrong, the maximum number of marks available for that question is reduced to 3. This then repeats until either the maximum number of marks for a question has reduced to 1, or we answer the question correctly – you can always get at least 1 mark for a question, no matter how many times you get it wrong.
After we get a question correct, we exchange it for the next one in that sequence – for example, if we got A1 correct, we get it exchanged for B1, then C1, and so on.
We are given two hours and the team with the most points (out of a possible maximum of 240) wins.

This year, our team was redirected to the departmental café, which, although it didn’t have quite as rarefied an atmosphere as the main lecture hall, meant that we were very close to our answer checking and exchanging stations, and the team could all sit around one table and work together as efficiently as possible. Our general strategy was to have Nicolas and I working mostly on the Physical Chemistry questions that turned up, whereas Kaartigan, Quang and Yunyang worked mainly on the Organic Chemistry questions, such that we all played to our strengths as much as possible. Initially,only the Year 12s would get up to exchange answers, in order to give the Year 13s more time to work on difficult problems, but that strategy soon descended into chaos due to the frantic nature of the competition!

The competition had many interesting questions linking together different areas of Chemistry, such as a question on the concentration of phosphoric acid in Coca Cola, or one on the maximum radius of a puddle of a sulfur compound possible before it can be detected by the human nose, and another on NMR spectroscopy to detect lithium in medical drugs. Much to my delight, there were also a couple of Physics questions featured in the competition, such as one on nuclear reactions and E=mc^2, and another on the wavelength of light emitted due to transitions in organic molecules! The format of many of the questions was very intriguing – some were written as riddles and others as poems. Almost all of the questions included backstory or interesting facts which were quite fun to read, despite how much we were struggling for time! The very first question also caught us quite off guard – it read “How many hemistry [sic] races make up a Chemistry race?” (The answer is two).

After two hours of intense Chemistry problem solving, everyone was given 90 minutes to walk around and enjoy Cambridge while the scores were tallied up, and we used this opportunity to explore the different colleges of the university. Upon our return, the closing ceremony was held and the overall leaderboard was announced, with Wilson’s School coming in 18th overall with 96 points, having answered around 2/3 of the questions correctly. Although we were not close to winning this time, it was a wonderful experience and all of us had a great time solving challenging and interesting problems, with many instances during the competition itself where the whole team was laughing over a ridiculously stupid mistake one (or all!) of us had made. Also, a special thanks to Miss Rose for spending her entire Saturday accompanying us to Cambridge and back! With the experience gained by the current Year 12s, and the knowledge that all of us acquired, I am confident that they will succeed in leading our school to victory next year, and will have a great time while doing so!

Report written by Christian (Year 13)