A grueling, 630-mile road race where the only fuel is sunlight

On July 19, dozens of teams of high school students will begin the five-day, 630-mile race from Fort Worth to Fort Stockton in Texas. But this is not your ordinary competition. Students design and build their own cars, using off-the-shelf materials and 3D printed materials. The winner is the team that accumulates the most driven miles. And the only fuel they can use to power their Frankenstein-like vehicles comes from the mass of burning gas that hangs in our atmosphere: the Sun.

This year is the 30th anniversary the year of the Solar Car Challengea competition that brings together high school students from across the country with the common goal of building the fastest solar powered car. The competition was established in 1993 by Dr. Lehman Marks, a Texas teacher with a passion for STEM. Students learn a variety of skills through challenges, including project management, budgeting, fundraising, and engineering. But more importantly, they need to build a solar powered car that can go far.

Lehman said the Solar Car Challenge was born out of frustration with STEM education in the late ’80s and early ’90s. At that time, he had a group of students who were disengaged and unmotivated by studying books alone, and looking for a way to arouse their interest, he accepted a request from a friend at the University of North Texas, who was building a collegiate solar car because that is the new competition.

“We went there and the kids were just amazed at the maturity of the solar project,” he told me. “And all the way back from Desmond to Dallas, he kept yelling, ‘Doc, please don’t let us build a solar car?’

He quit, but quickly realized that high school students would not be able to compete fairly with college teams because they lacked the technical skills and funding available at universities. Thus, the Solar Car Challenge for high school students was born, a scholarship program started in 1993 and the first national competition in 1995.

Since its inception, the program has enrolled more than 85,000 students in 39 states and several countries, including Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, Spain, and Singapore. There are currently over 260 active high school solar projects. The event alternates between track and cross-country, with this year’s event being a grueling, 630-mile race across Texas. The five-day tour begins on July 19th in Fort Worth and travels through the towns of Palestine, Round Rock, Fredericksburg, and San Angelo, before ending in Fort Stockton. Lehman said residents of the town come out and celebrate the teams every time they pass by.

“It’s not just about building a car,” Lehman emphasized. “I’m learning to drive the car legally.” For this upcoming event, one of the things I’ve been preaching to the kids is that, before you get here, you need to put 500 miles on your car. You need to know, is it going to break down?

The race usually consists of three races: classic, technical, and solar power, in which teams race electric cars that receive power from solar power plants. This year’s challenge introduces a new category: the cruiser. In this category, teams build four-seater cars with solar arrays integrated directly into the vehicle’s body.

The idea to create a new sector was born out of years of people questioning whether solar cars could be more like real cars than the flat, high-speed cars with a driver often sitting underneath the solar panels. Indeed, many of the cars don’t even resemble anything you’d recognize as roadworthy, looking like a mix of futuristic airplanes and high-tech go-karts.

Lehman said the designers want students to create solar cars that look like real cars, with solar cells attached to the bodywork itself, four seats, four doors, and a trunk. They believe this helps show that solar-powered vehicles can have practical applications, giving people an idea of ​​what solar-powered cars could look like.

“People will say, ‘Oh, that’s neat, but it’s not real,'” he said. “Now we can show them what it’s going to be like. And I think that’s a step up.”

Blake Wood is a 17-year-old senior from Benbrook Middle-High School in the Fort Worth area. He is also one of the captains of the Old Rip Racing solar car team, one of the few independent teams in the race. Their 14-member team includes students from three different schools, which Wood sees as their greatest strength, as it allows students who might not otherwise meet to join them on an engineering challenge.

Wood says the team started preparing about a year before the race. Their first assignment was a drawing on paper where they studied the winning cars from previous years in the Classic Division, which is designed for first and second year groups. They analyzed what made the other cars work better and incorporated those ideas into their original design. As the project progressed, the team improved its computer-aided design (CAD) skills, gradually translating their hand-drawn ideas into modern models. Learning programming became part of the curriculum.

“I think our car, it looks good to me,” Wood tells me. “It’s unfortunate, so we often don’t see that everything is connected, and we feel like we’re planning something or making something and then putting something back together, and then we’re like, ‘No, we need to weld in that area. Let’s remove that electrical thing.’

But while battery electric cars have been popular, solar cars have remained experimental. Several startups are pursuing solar-powered cars he adopted the most proven technology or he has run out of money. Wood says he’s optimistic that solar cars have real long-term potential, as long as educational competitions like the Solar Car Challenge continue to expose students to renewable energy technology at a young age. As participants eventually enter professional careers, they can continue to develop the innovations needed to commercialize solar systems.

“We’re making progress,” Wood said. “I mean, we’ve got a lot of high school students making them, and I think with the right tools and more technology than all of us have, I think it can.”

Lehman agrees, pointing primitives like Aptera who are still pursuing the goal of a solar car. But he said that marketing has never been the real goal of the Solar Car Challenge.

“People say, ‘Are you trying to make a better solar car?’ Between you and me, I am not,” he said. “I’m trying to build a student who has skills, who learns about dedication, commitment to work, learning about teamwork, learning about engineering and battery skills. I’m trying to build workers and trying to build engineers.”