Pocatello teens built a solar-powered vehicle and they’ll be competing in a national racing tournament
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POCATELLO — Two Gate City students and one foreign exchange student are headed to the Lone Star State to harness the power of the nearest star to planet Earth – the sun.
Chris Ulland, 18, and Logan Friesen, 17, both from Pocatello, and Krystof Oresky, 17, an exchange student from the Czech Republic, will all be competing in the 2024 Solar Car Challenge in Fort Worth, Texas. Another team member, Matthew Land, is not able to attend the competition.
The former Grace Lutheran School students built a solar-powered car for the contest. They’ll be racing them over four days at Texas Motor Speedway, facing challenges posed by weather conditions and potential car breakdowns.
The winner won’t be determined by who places highest overall, but rather by which team’s car drives the most cumulative miles.
“Getting to build your car and going to race it, that is some pretty incredible experience,” Ulland says.
Ulland and Friesen will take turns racing the vehicle and trying to get in as many laps as they can.
While one of them is driving, the other students will have to work on ensuring the car stays running.
“If something’s wearing out or something’s coming loose or something breaks, you have to go and fix it as quickly as you can so you can get back on track and get laps,” says Ulland.
The first three days of the competition are called “scrutineering”, which will determine if the students actually qualify. The judges will conduct a series of tests on each of the team’s vehicles to make sure they’re meeting the safety requirements.
If a vehicle doesn’t qualify, the team will have to work on fixing it.
“That’s often the more grueling part and that’s where some teams don’t qualify,” Ulland said.
While all of the teams are there to compete against each other, Ulland said there’s a “community of sharing tools and helping each other out. We’re all in here to race together.”
The challenge will start Thursday, with the scrutineering phase ending on Saturday. The qualifying teams will then race from Sunday to Wednesday.
This is the first year students from Pocatello have formed a team to go to the challenge. The team, called Russet American Racing, is the only team from Idaho competing. The 32 total teams in the challenge come from 12 states across the country.
The students formed their team when they heard about the competition through their principal, Hanne Krause, who had come from a school in Oregon that competed in the challenge. The team started working on their car in the first semester, picking out parts and designing it. In the second semester, they built the car.
Logan says designing and building the car was a learning experience, which involved learning how to use software to design it. They also learned to troubleshoot during the construction phase.
“Once we moved to actually building, it shifted over to trying to figure out how are we gonna make this all fit together?” says Logan.
Russet American Racing’s solar-powered vehicle was ready to test drive on June 15.
“Being able to take a step back and look at what we’ve accomplished — it was really surreal. It was incredible,” says Ulland.
Ulland and Logan recently graduated and will be moving on to college. Ulland will be attending the California Polytechnic State University and Logan will attend Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and Oresky will return to school in the Czech Republic.
While the hands-on experience gained by participating in this challenge will help the students advance their mechanical engineering abilities, they also believe that it will eventually advance the technology of solar-powered vehicles. Friesen said that the student’s cars won’t be “groundbreaking” but it does get them interested in the technology.
“Maybe (the students) can progress it further later on in their careers,” Friesen said.