UK’s Top Team: Scania Sheffield book their tickets to Bratislava

Scania Sheffield has won Scania UK’s Top Team competition, in the process booking their places at the European finals in Bratislava in September. The national finals of Scania’s global workshop training competition, saw the top 10 UK teams go head-to-head across five technical workstations. This included tackling four practical assignments diagnosing and solving mechanical and electrical issues with trucks, buses and a Terex crusher, and answering 50 theoretical questions.

After a day of gruelling competition, Scania Sheffield, competing in their first finals, were crowned UK champions ahead of their colleagues at Scania Eurocentral and Scania Purfleet, who finished joint second, and Scania Exeter in third. As winners, the team of Steve Lyness, Steve Clarkson, John Clift, Adam Wilcox and Andrew Simpson will represent the UK in the European Top Team Finals in September. The winner will earn a place in Scania’s Global Top Team Finals in 2023, hosted at the home of Scania, Sodertalje, Sweden.

Darren Woodward, General Manager at Scania Sheffield, said:

“I couldn’t be more pleased for the team and the whole depot. It’s given us such a much-needed boost. It’s fantastic to see the team rewarded for all their hard work, and now they will represent their country.

We are already discussing what we are going to do to defend our title in two years. But first we go to Bratislava, and we have no plans to finish at the European finals.”

The Top Team programme is run over two years, with teams from across Scania UK’s 86-strong service network battling it out at a national level, before the winners get the chance to compete on the international stage. The teams are whittled down through theory-based tasks before the best 10 teams battle it out in a range of physical and theoretical tasks at Scania UK’s Loughborough Training Centre and the Marriott Hotel in Leicester.

Aaron McGrath, Head of People Development at Scania UK, said:

“It was a tough competition and for Sheffield to come to their first finals and win it. That’s some significant achievement. This is the only opportunity technicians get to be named the best of the best.

But it’s also an opportunity to intensively train some of the best people in our business.”