Pirelli announces UK Student Awards winners

The 2019 Pirelli UK Student Awards recently took place, recognising the hard work of talented individuals on their placement year.

Each winner was nominated by their manager, and the student then completed a presentation to an evaluation panel made up of the Pirelli UK management team: Dominic Sandivasci (chairman and chief executive officer), Evan Reddall (director of human resources), Jason Sugden (commercial director) and George Sagoo (legal director and UK group secretary).

The areas for consideration when selecting the winners included: business understanding, ideas/project impact on the business, agility with numbers and details, attitude, potential for growth, communication skills, innovation and risk taking.

First place went to Barney Gardner (Loughborough University), MIRS engineering. Pirelli MIRS (Modular Integrated Robotized System) is a fully automated and robotic method for producing tyres. The work of robots covers the entire production cycle of a tyre, from compounding to finished product at high speed without interruptions.

Pirelli comments that it was “too tough to select just one second place student”, meaning the runners-up are Abigail Durrant (Quality, Burton: Loughborough University), Vishal Handa (PQE, Carlisle: Loughborough University) and Natasha Lewis (HR, Burton: Liverpool John Moores University). Each student received a prize from Pirelli.

Dominic Sandivasci said: “Once again we have had a fantastic group of placement students and it was very tough to select the winners. They have demonstrated commitment to Pirelli and integrated within their respective teams brilliantly. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the manager statements and seeing all the things these talented young adults have achieved.”

This year’s winner, Barney Gardner, shared: “I came into MIRS quite fresh around the gills in terms of engineering and it was quite a big learning curve. I spent my first couple of months understanding the basics, learning engineering drawings and the technical side of MIRS. My main project was to redesign an application system for one of the components of the tyres. Once it was completed, we produced a part, had it tested on the line and since then it has been running flawlessly.”