The Wake

I’m not sure how many times I’ve been awake before five o’clock in the morning during the summer, but once was enough when a solar-car driver put me to work by ripping off the sheets and leaping on my hotel bed. I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I signed up for this project.

I came away from a 2,500-mile race with the strength and confidence to build race cars; I’m a different person than I was when I first decided to work on this project, and I can only attribute that rift in my personality to the people I came to know through the building, testing and racing of our car. I’ll come to any project I face with determination and the expertise to win.

My racing team, consisting of about 20 dedicated engineers, was on a mission to build a solar-powered car. We did so in five months, following a year-and-a-half-long design process. There were also countless undergraduate and graduate students, sponsors, volunteer contacts in industry, and one very dedicated professor who helped.

In the process of building our car, students were responsible for every aspect of the work. The team recruited all of the active student members, raised all of our funding, and constructed nearly everything. Building on what we should have been learning in our classes, we did all of the design ourselves, much to my GPA’s detriment.

The first race of the summer—the Formula Sun Grand Prix—was the qualifier for the North American Solar Challenge. The University of Minnesota qualified first with the most laps, winning awards for the fastest lap and the Esprit De Corps; we were able to help Stanford University with their almost-race-worthy car and give support to MIT’s supremely short-handed team of two or three engineers able to attend the race.

Our team also won the Esprit De Corps award at the main event for our helpful attitude toward racing and the Kami Kazi team headbands we sported at every opportunity. We even made up for testing our car horn in the pits at two in the morning by donating a motor to the University of Waterloo when theirs blew up.

The main event—for which everything else was in preparation—was a 10-day road race in July from Austin, Texas, to Calgary, Alberta. It was probably the longest, hardest, and most rewarding thing I’ve ever been involved with.

In the first few days, we were required to pass a professional-style braking test, a maneuverability test and turning tests. Everybody on our team was scurrying around during the inspections with donated aviation radios relaying standings and tech facts as we were building or correcting last-minute details on our car.

The race had four stages. For most of the 20 or so qualified teams, the race began after the first-stage stop and continued at staggered intervals to the end. Minnesota remained in the pole position for the first two stages, ahead of the University of Michigan, MIT and Waterloo in roughly that order.

Toward the last few stages of the race we began to discuss winning and what it took to win a race like this; weighing the prospect of time penalties for minor traffic violations, discussing strategy, and ironing out team roles and responsibilities to do everything quickly.

The final stage of the race took place from Medicine Hat to Calgary in Alberta. The racing order was the order we came in to staging; the time between starts was staggered by only a minute.

The competition narrowed itself down as we reached the last stage: Michigan and Minnesota were the first two into the last leg of the race, and a one-minute difference in the final starting time wasn’t enough to separate the two titans.

We were neck-and-neck until the very end, with Michigan barely in the lead. Our caravan changed lanes several times, navigating between semitrailers and timing lights along the roads into Calgary, as spectators lined the highway for nearly 200 miles. We came across the finish line within seconds of Michigan, but the total elapsed time summed up to a difference of 11 minutes.

Considering the gap between the leading cars in the previous competition was close to four hours, it was an incredibly close contest. It was a test of our cars, our money, our teams, and our ability to race.

We gained more than a traveling trophy could have ever offered, and I wouldn’t trade a minute of racing to be a minute sooner over the finish line. With all of the people I met and everything we learned along the way, I wouldn’t trade racing for anything.

Jaques Dolan was a member of the U of M’s Solar Car team and is a guest writer for The Wake. He welcomes comments to . To find out more about the U of M’s Solar Car project, visit their website at