WASHINGTON-A two-student team from Churchill County High School in Fallon, Nev., recently won the national high school auto repair championship at the 2001 Ford/AAA Student Auto Skills national finals held in the nation's capital.
To earn $96,180 in scholarships and prizes, the winning team, 18-year-olds Greg Bolender and Destin Corbett, outpaced a field of competitors from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, as well as Argentina, Mexico, Australia, Canada and Puerto Rico.
Contest manager James Dunst called them among the ``best of a new generation of automotive technicians who will be fixing tomorrow's cars. Today's automobile is an extremely sensitive, sophisticated piece of equipment, and these two will help them last longer, run cleaner and get better fuel efficiency.''
The contest was held near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. Student tech teams were timed as they diagnosed and repaired identically bugged 2001 Ford Focus vehicles. Students from Australia placed first among the international teams. Second-place winners were from Virginia; third place went to a student team from Georgia.