Well, I can say it’s been more than just a while…

The last time SunStang made a blog post, we were riding on the high of returning from our first competition in 7 years. That was back in the summer of 2014. A group of about 6 of us made it out to Austin, Texas for the 2014 Formula Sun Grand Prix (FSGP) to make our mark in SunStang history. We were the underdogs who didn’t know what they were getting into, and little did we know that we had started a momentum that has carried the SunStang team further and further for the past year and a half.

We were six Canadian kids, sweating it out in Texas, making incredible achievements in our desperation, drinking in with awe the amazing people, stories, engineering, and teamwork we saw all around us. As we were leaving, we’d look at the other solar team packing their beautiful creations into trailers, high-fiving each other and singing and we said “That’s going to be us next year.”

We came back to London, Ontario and started making plans the very next day. We were exhausted, but we were ready for the year ahead of us that would show us no rest. I remember a sort of feverish excitement among those people at that first meeting, as we thought about the unending list of lessons we learned and how we were going to improve. And boy…did that fever spread.

That September 2014, we had a surge in recruitment. Everyone who joined was enthralled by the stories we told about competition, and how amazing it was going to be when we go back. We instilled the fear of “the hill” in all of the new members. We went hard at reorganizing the team so that we were well equipped to rebuild the car to conquer that hill.

But it seemed like at every turn, there was bad news. Every couple of weeks, there was some other part of the car we had to change, some other obstacle that was slowing our timeline and forcing us to make some drastic decisions. It was discouraging, that was for sure. Many of our leaders were graduating at the end of the year as well, so it was a tough time juggling final year design projects with solar car design projects. But somehow…every time we arrived at a hiccup…we had an answer. And we kept powering through.

With the continuous onslaught of obstacles, we ended up making a LOT of changes we weren’t expecting. There was a whole new aluminum chassis, an entirely different battery box and BPS, our first team-encapsulated solar array, a custom composite motor, a wicked telemetry system, our composite bottom shell underwent a creative and hilarious weight-loss program…and much much more. We set out to improve our car, but in the end no part of the car went untouched.

Remember that “fever”? Remember those 6 kids that struggled in Texas? Well, just like any successful virus, our infection started off slow, and grew in strength through the toughest of times until we had twice the number of dedicated members working every single day in the summer to finish what we started. Sometimes, I’d take a look at the busy workshop and get a cheesy bout of the warm fuzzies, knowing that the passion for SunStang had grown so much in a single year. People I never at first thought to have such dedication were showing me what incredible leaders they had become.

There were a LOT of late nights. We bonded over our lack of sleep, 7-11 runs, and hilarious and unfortunate build mishaps. I can’t even count the number of times I came home after midnight only to wake up at 5am again for work. My sleep was filled with images of the hill, and I’d wake up trying to hold on to that feeling of euphoria as I watched our car climb the hill in my dreams. I know it was the same for many of the others.

It was eat, sleep, SunStang.

- Ayeda

…to be continued…