Gloucester High School seniors Robert Cain and T.J. Priddy were the runners-up in the Virginia Ford/AAA Auto Skills competition held Saturday in Virginia Beach.

Cain and Priddy qualified for the hands-on state competition with their scores on a written test in February and joined the other top 10 scoring teams in Virginia Beach last weekend. Working as a team, Cain and Priddy debugged their Ford Focus and had a perfect car two minutes ahead of the team from Fauquier High School in Warrenton.

While both teams had perfect scores in the final inspection of their hands-on work, the Fauquier students had earned a four-minute advantage with their unsurpassed scores on the written test. The written test scores became the tie-breaker and the Fauquier students prevailed in earning the state title.

"We don’t want to underscore the winning team, as they did a great job also, but T.J. and Robert represented us well and as far as mechanical ability goes, they were number one," said GH...