All too soon, it was time to leave for competition. The team that was driving the car to Texas pulled one last all-nighter before they left. A couple things may have been misplaced…”I’m sorry, you want me to take WHAT on the plane???” Our motor’s stator made it in one piece to Austin in my checked baggage, despite my hysteria.

That first night in Texas, I looked all around at my teammates in the house. We listened intently as our engineering manager, Dan, listed all of the things that needed to be completed that night before we headed to scrutineering the next morning. There were fourteen pairs of eyes, lit up with determination. Fourteen. Our numbers had more than doubled in size since last competition! The night was busy, with several crews working on the car out on the ranch house’s porch, and more working on things inside the house. I spent some time blowing up air mattresses for the team, stark contrast to last year’s first night, where I was soldering inside the solar car inside the trailer, with several flying insects for company as I strained to see by the work lights the two others were using outside the trailer…

Somehow, we all managed to wake up (sort of) the next morning. Our house was very close to the Circuit of the Americas racetrack, where the FSGP was taking place. So while a few people drove the car over, the rest of us walked the 3 miles. Probably not the best start to the day.

We got our scrutineering schedule, and luckily for us, we had all stations scheduled for the first day! That meant we could get as much out of the way as possible, and get feedback early so we could fix the car as soon as possible and be track ready. That day went by fast. Our scrutineering sheets were covered in all sorts of colours, indicating our varied grades of passing in the different sections.

The rest of the week was a blur.

There were two major issues that stand out. First, our motor. Dan and his motor team had worked on designing and building our very own carbon fibre DC motor. It was beautiful. But every now and then, something didn’t work. Since we left London, the motor set up had undergone about four transformations before we settled on using our old CSIRO motor again. Luckily for us, Sam Lenius, a volunteer at the event who is something of a solar car legend, spent several days working with us in a chronic loop of assembling, testing, and disassembling the motors. He taught our team many things from his time on the Minnesota solar car team, things that made him seem like a wizard in our eyes.

Then there was our canopy. Earlier in the summer, we realized our new roll cage was too large to fit in the canopy. So it was extended. Before we left London, we realized the canopy could not be maneuvered over the roll cage that way, so we cut it in half and planned to implement a drawer system so that it would slide over the roll cage. In Texas, after several trials, and combatting many different issues about driver visibility, we finally put the canopy in place and realized…that it couldn’t latch onto the roll cage. Regulations required that the method for driver egress (in most cases, the moving canopy) had to be fixed during driving operation. And we couldn’t latch the canopy into place anymore! There was not a lot of time left in the competition, and we needed to pass Body and Sizing ASAP, but how could we pass without a canopy? There was a group of us standing around the car, staring at the incredulous problem in front of us until someone jokingly suggested “why don’t we cut an opening in the top and permanently fix the windshield in place?” “Huh, why don’t we???” After some hurried discussion with the scrutineers and race officials, we emerged with the very first open-top solar car.

And then one of our drivers, Patrick, ended up with the fastest egress time the competition has seen: 3.2s!

And in contrast to last year, BPS was our first green in scrutineering! By the time we were done scrutineering, we had 5 greens and 1 blue, and we were ready for the track on day 2 of racing! It was a crazy few days filled with ups and downs, and by the time we were about to go on the track, we were riding the high from our most recent series of accomplishments.

We got our safety vests and our game faces on. Everyone was nervous and excited. We were finally going to see our car drive on the track! The rest of the team was positioned at the end of the pit lane closest to the hill, ready to hop in a van to rush to the car in case of emergency. I walked the car, with Dan driving, down to the secondary start line. We turned around and faced the monstrous hill looming ahead of us, behind the pit lane lined with tents and teams.

“Well…that sure is big.”

With one last breath, Dan took a run at the hill.

Everyone in the pits started cheering as our car sped down the lane. People came out of their garages to watch as Western University took the hill for the first time. For a second, I almost believed that the cheers from all of the other teams would be enough to push us up.

But it wasn’t. I saw the brake lights of the car turn on as Dan slowed and pulled over barely a quarter of the way up. I heard his voice over the Bluetooth, “I wasn’t going fast enough”. We needed more speed to get up the hill.

Round two: more momentum! We were back at the start line. I remember telling Dan to gun it as soon as he could, but he was ignoring me with a look of concentration clouding his face. Then he pulled the thinking man pose, and sped towards the hill.

This time, it seemed like everything was silent except for the sound of our car rushing down the lane, and a single voice. It was a young man from the Montreal Polytechnique team, and he was yelling something in French that I couldn’t understand. It was one word, drawn out with so much energy it seemed like he was trying to use his voice alone to push us up the hill. He yelled it three times before our car reached the foot of the hill, and up it went.

There were cheers and claps from everyone in the pits…until the car stalled halfway up. “Guys…I need a push…”

I ran down the pits as I watched the rest of my team get behind our car and push it the rest of the way up the hill. And finally…I saw the car leave the huddle of SunStangers and make its way around the first turn.

The rest of the team came back to the pits, exhausted and red-faced. I left them my Bluetooth headset to talk to Dan and I ran to get them water from our garage. While I was filling up their water bottles and water jugs, Sam Lenius found me. “Ayeda, is something wrong? What happened?” I hurriedly explained our attempts at the hill. “No, I know that. But Dan should have done a lap by now. I haven’t seen him pass yet. It’s been a really long time.” I was more than a little confused and befuddled by the heat. I couldn’t understand what Sam was trying to say. By the time I returned to the end of the pit lane with all of the water for the team, they were gone. So was the emergency van.

After several minutes of confusion, panicking, and wondering what to do with all the water bottles in my arms, I finally returned to the garage to see our car parked inside an empty garage. I then received an angry text from one of my teammates “WHERE ARE OUR WATER BOTTLES?!?!” I found half of the team cooling off in the air conditioned administration building. They told me what happened. Dan was approaching the final turns of the track when all of a sudden the car lost momentum. It just stopped driving and started rolling to a stop. But the BPS was still on and working. He pulled over and waited for the team to arrive. When they did, they simply restarted the car. Dan continued but pulled into the pits before passing the start line. We couldn’t risk another chance running the hill again.

I made my way back to our garage, to see if I could find our electrical lead, John. Maybe he’d have some more information for me. I saw Dan walking towards our garage from the other side, looking serene as he peered into the other teams’ garages. “How was that track?” I asked when he was within earshot.

Dan grinned. “It was awesome.”

After a couple moments reveling in how beautiful of a drive it was, I told Dan what I thought happened. “No faults, BPS was still running and the car was still on but it just stopped driving and began to freewheel. I’m pretty sure the motor reached the motor controller’s max temp and the controller shut it off.” John confirmed “I used the laser heat sensor on the track…and it was 115^o Celsius.” Our motor controller had a max temperature of 75^oC for the motor, whose max temperature was 100^oC. We overheated the motor. Even if we had tried the hill again, we couldn’t make it around the entire track in the Texan heat. We’d done all we could this competition.

On our final morning in Texas, Dan and I took some time to recognize each member of our competition team for their individual accomplishments. We laughed, clapped, and enjoyed each other’s company. Dan and I began a pep talk about how we may be disappointed about what happened this competition but we-

John cut us off, with exactly what we were going to say. “I’m not disappointed. Not at all. I’m actually really happy and proud of what we accomplished. That was amazing.” Everyone around the room agreed.

We were proud. We came through in the final days with a car that passed all of the scrutineering, and made it onto the track! We had so many crazy obstacles that kept bombarding us, but we shot each of them down, one by one. We created incredible things, like an entire motor, a battery protection system, a solar array, a whole solar car, all with our very own hands. Those are amazing engineering feats on their own, but we were a group of kids with little solar car experience and we made it all happen ourselves.

I looked around the room and saw a familiar look in everyone’s eyes. I saw 13 other people who were ready to use everything they had just learned in the year to come. These were people who were inspired to make SunStang great again and we were going to make it happen this year.

I saw the glint of that fever again.

-Ayeda