In their first attempt at building and racing a full-scale electric race car, Stevenson MADE seniors came out victorious.
26 Stevenson Manufacturing, Automation and Design Engineering seniors joined forces to engineer an electric race car that would be put to the test against other Michigan high school teams at the 15th annual Innovative Vehicle Design (IVD) Challenge held at Kettering University.
“It’s been a lot of fun – trying out different things, seeing what works and what doesn’t,” Stevenson MADE senior, Christopher Hilla, said.
The Stevenson MADE IVD race car competed in two competitions, the ‘Figure 8’ where the car was driven for 20 minutes in a figure 8 configuration that was 100 ft. in length and the one-hour ‘Road Course’ which was a 0.5 mile race course complete with turns and hills to navigate through, in addition to the subpar weather conditions on race day.
“Last week it was 80 degrees and sunny, today it is pouring rain and we’re in winter coats and are soaked,” Stevenson MADE academy coach, Mark LaCombe, said. “But we’re out here working with a smile on our face. It’s been fun.”
The chosen driver of the IVD was MADE senior, Jack Tengler who explained the rain made some of the electronics short-circuit unexpectedly.
“It made us run into more problems than we anticipated,” Tengler said. “But, I think we still did really well.”
“If you saw us a week or two ago, you would not have thought we’d be doing as well as we did today.”
From where the team started months ago to where they finished, Hilla explained he was proud of the end result.
“I’m happy we were able to finish the race and the car managed to stay relatively together and still ran at the end, unlike others we competed against.”
At the conclusion of the IVD Challenge, the Stevenson MADE team was recognized with three awards:
1st place in Full-Scale IVD Ambassadorship
1st place in Full-Scale IVD Elevator Pitch
2nd place in Full-Scale IVD Overall Innovation
Congratulations to this group of dedicated students who worked on the IVD car: Zohaib Ali, Chris Anaya-Melendez, David Azcarraga, Tomas Bassilious, Kyle Carbary, Nolan Datema, Anthony Doe, Madisen Easterly, Eathan Falkiewicz, Anthony Gabrail, Ryan Graebert, Chris Jilla, Solomon Hirmz, Gabrielle Kalosky, Greta Kaminske, Annalisa Marck, Wesley Melitz, Marven Mikael, Kayli Nguyen, Tyler Nguyen, Amanda Palmer, Alec Pavlik, Juliana Riley, Milad Setto, Huzaifa Siddiqui, and Jack Tengler
Original source can be found here.
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