Waterloo’s concrete toboggan team carved out a podium finish at one of Canada’s most competitive student engineering challenges, with a third-place finish overall.
Competing at the 2025 Great Northern Concrete Toboggan Race (GNCTR) in Montreal from January 22 to 26, Waterloo Engineering’s 26-member team excelled in multiple categories—earning first place in sustainability, second-place in theoretical design and technical report, and third-place in steering design, concrete reinforcement design and ski geometry design.
This year’s event also featured a nostalgic return by a Waterloo alumni team—the 1998 champions—who brought back their original sled, the “Circle of Death.” Alumnus Mark Tigchelaar (BASc’ 98, civil engineering) told City News that the toboggan was initially meant to be an experimental, secondary design but wound up being the winning entry more than 25 years ago.
Now in its 51st year, GNCTR is the longest-running engineering competition in North America, offering students hands-on experience in structural design, materials science, and team collaboration. This year’s event brought together over 400 engineering students from more than 20 universities across Canada. Hosted by Concordia University, the competition required teams to design and build toboggans with concrete running surfaces, weighing less than 350 pounds, capable of carrying five teammates, and equipped with functional braking and steering systems.
Twenty-six students competed on behalf of Waterloo Engineering at this year's Great Northern Concrete Toboggan Race in January. Photo credit: University of Waterloo's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.