Only one team made it to the final city in this year’s national multi-state high school solar car race.
Palmdale High School students pushed their car onto campus Friday, marking the end of a race cut short. Last-minute technical problems scuttled the team’s plans to drive the car across the unofficial finish line.
“We got first place, right?” one student joked.
It was an unexpected ending to an unusual race. A COVID-19 outbreak among the competition’s coordinators ended the 2023 Solar Car Challenge three days into a weeklong contest from Fort Worth, Texas to Palmdale. It was the first time in three decades the competition had been cut short.
“I was so tired many times,” said senior driver EJ Dela Cruz, recalling the challenges the high school team faced. “But just working on that car, wanting to succeed, just really turned me into something different.”
Since their first race in 2015, the Antelope Valley team has finished the Solar Car Challenge every year except 2020 and 2021 because of the pandemic.
It’s no small feat: Over the years, they’ve dealt with faulty wires, blown fuses and even a car catching fire mid-race back in 2018. Plus, persistent funding challenges faced by California public schools.
Assistant Principal Chris Andrews says the challenges have led to valuable lessons for the students.
“Ultimately it's about perseverance,” he said.
Alumni of the program agree. Several Palmdale High School graduates, who are now engineers themselves, can still describe the technical details of building the car as if they happened yesterday rather than nearly a decade ago.
“That was just probably one of the best experiences that I've ever had in my life,” said Oscar Guzman, a 2015 Palmdale grad and former solar car team member. “It really defined what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”
Palmdale’s solar car team is embedded in the school’s Engineering Academy as a class to ensure students receive academic credit and teachers get paid for their work. The school-within-a-school evolved from vocational education classes like automotive mechanics and construction. The program is one of Antelope Valley Union High School District’s 10 academies, which also include concentrations in health care, multimedia, film and video.
“Our jobs as public educators are in order to be able to prepare students for all of those options and choices not within the high school,” said Betsy McKinstry, district director of Career Tech Ed.
Students in the Engineering Academy work in a room that used to be an automotive shop. Sweeping garage doors lead to a classroom where students learn how to use computer-aided design software, laser cutters and 3-D printers.
“In engineering, a lot of it is actually building things that you're going to test,” said Ruben Rodriguez, a founding Engineering Academy teacher. “All that is manual. All that is hands on.”
Wyatt Garcia also graduated from Palmdale High School in 2015 and said Rodriguez tailored the classes to teenage interests. For example, the students built skateboards from scratch.
“You weren't going to fail,” Garcia said. “It was all just like little building blocks where you learn how to do this.”
During the 2013-2014 school year, a school field trip to a science symposium where students spotted a “badass” university solar car inspired the students to build a sun-powered vehicle of their own. Garcia wasn’t there, but would hear the story re-counted when he later joined the Solar Falcons, the Palmdale High School team.
The Solar Car Challenge competition, started in 1993, provided a template and a goal — students worked together to build a car, then drive their invention in a race against students from across the country.
Rodriguez served as one of the team’s first advisors back in the summer of 2014.
Lockheed Martin initially sponsored the project and engineers from the aerospace company that helped develop military aircraft mentored the team.
Solar panels absorb light from the sun, then a photovoltaic converter changes the energy to electricity that is stored in batteries and powers the car’s motor. Palmdale’s vehicle, known as the Helios Falcon, has a separate battery that powers the speedometer, horn, emergency lights and other dashboard functions.
Students work in four groups to build all components of the vehicle: electrical, automotive, solar and fabrication. Along the way, students typically solve for dozens of potential disasters. For example, the car’s battery is housed in a metal box that, if not properly ventilated, can overheat and explode.
It opened my eyes and it really helped me understand like, ‘Hey, like, this is how math is used in the real world to solve real problems.’
Guzman, then the team’s vice president, remembers the Lockheed engineers working with students in 2014 and 2015 to ensure the car’s battery could cool off by calculating how much air needed to flow through the battery compartment.
“That light bulb went off and I was like, ’Wow, that's incredible,’” Guzman said.
It was one of the first times Guzman saw engineering in action, but it wouldn’t be the last.
“It opened my eyes,” Guzman said. “It really helped me understand like, ‘Hey, like, this is how math is used in the real world to solve real problems.’”
The team built the first car in less than a year and named it for the Greek sun god. The Helios Falcon traveled 349.5 miles around the Texas Motor Speedway and placed seventh out of 15 teams in 2015.
Wyatt said years later, when he experiences self-doubt, he remembers the solar car team’s debut.
“We fought for it, like, we, we grinded through it,” Garcia said. “People around us supported us through it. And I think that really gave us the motivation, like, to continue on.”
Garcia returned to mentor subsequent solar car teams. It was a way to give back, and also earn supplemental income while he attended community college and cared for his daughter, who was born his junior year in high school.
“It gave me a lot of purpose,” Garcia said.
Behind the scenes, teachers and district administrators over the years built an infrastructure to financially support the program.
The Antelope Valley Press reported the first car, plus travel to Texas for the competition, cost around $95,000.
The district combines money from state and federal career and technical education funding to maintain class sizes and purchase materials for the Engineering Academy.
“If you can demonstrate that this is good for kids, you can find the funding,” said Andrews, the assistant principal.
The Solar Team also relies on individual donations and corporate sponsorships, including from local science, technology, engineering and mathematics companies.
“To have a homegrown talent pipeline of underrepresented communities that are in our schools, especially in Title One schools, is really important to economic development,” said McKinstry, the district director.
The demographics of Palmdale High School’s Engineering Academy largely reflect those of the school overall, with about 85% of the 220 students identifying as Latinx. There are proportionally fewer Black students — they make up 7% of the engineering academy and 14% of the school overall. Over 80% of the engineering academy is male, while the school overall has a roughly 50-50 gender mix.
Nearly 70% of engineering academy students come from low-income families or those in which neither parent has received a high school diploma.
LAist interviewed Palmdale High School educators, students and alumni. The story also has quotes from rising senior Hannah Valdez’s audio diary of the race that included interviews with several teammates. Valdez is the student responsible for the team’s communications.
The Solar Challenge alternates annually between a closed track race and a multi-state sprint where each team has an allotted time each day to travel as many miles as possible. The 2023 route stretched from Fort Worth, Texas to Palmdale.
Once students arrive in Texas, every team has to pass through a rigorous car evaluation dubbed “scrutineering” before they’re cleared to compete.
This year, judges questioned whether the structure of the Palmdale team’s battery box would hold up in a collision.
While the team is used to heat — Palmdale regularly tops 100 degrees in the summer — Texas humidity added challenges.
“You're already stressed and you're hot and you're mad and the car's not working,” recalled team member Hannah Valdez, who serves as the team’s spokesperson. “You're told you have to get this fixed and this and on top of this and that and that It just all really comes into one big issue— that puts a strain on the team.”
The fabrication team rushed to manufacture a solution.
The last-minute modifications worked and the Helios Falcon passed scrutineering.
On the first day of the race, July 16, the team woke to muggy heat and cloudy skies. Sprinkles soon turned to heavy rain, thunder and lightning. The car was slow to start and only got up to about 20 miles per hour instead of its usual average of 25 to 35 miles per hour.
On day two, the team spent between three and four hours repairing a blown fuse.
A team from Watertown High School in Wisconsin and the Bend School District in Oregon helped with the repairs — a valuable reminder of the race’s purpose.
“It's not about competition between teams, but it's about teamwork,” said Dela Cruz, one of the Palmdale team’s drivers. “And wanting every team to succeed and just finish the race altogether.”
This type of aid is common. Back in 2022, the Palmdale team provided another high school with a spare motor.
“There's always hiccups and I think that's what makes it even more exciting yet challenging and frustrating,” said Kassandra Vazquez Jimenez, a 2019 Palmdale graduate. "You can be there and you'll learn the inside and the outside of the car.”
By 10 a.m. on day three, the team found their groove, Valdez said at the time. The Helios Falcon had its best day yet, and traveled 40 miles on the stretch of race between Carlsbad, New Mexico and El Paso, Texas.
But that night, the advisors called the team to the hotel lobby and announced the 2023 challenge was over. More than a dozen staff members of the Solar Car Challenge had COVID-19 and the remainder of the race was canceled to avoid spreading the disease among students.
Team Captain Anthony Sonanes Cruz gave the team space to process.
“I know they needed to let things out and they were just upset,” Sonanes Cruz said. “I wasn't going to say anything to them.”
The Palmdale team returned to their rooms to test. No one from the high school team had COVID then or has tested positive since.
Soon, the team caravan, which included a pickup truck, trailer, and van began the drive back to Palmdale.
“My best memory was spending the nights with the teammates,” driver Dela Cruz said.
The students played Cards Against Humanity in the evenings and were gifted free breakfast from an Arizona café that saw a video of the team on social media.
The Solar Falcons seniors got one last chance to drive the car on an empty stretch of desert road Friday afternoon.
The Palmdale solar car team has yet to win first place, but alumni describe the experience leading up to the competition as nothing short of life-altering.
Rodriguez, who retired in 2022, said the goal was never for every student to become an engineer.
“What I want is for them to be able to apply whatever it is that they have learned,” Rodriguez said.
Vazquez remembered being one of few women in the engineering academy when she joined as freshman in 2015 and said it was teachers like Rodriguez that encouraged her to continue.
“They would just take me under their wing and help me navigate it,” Vazquez said. Her senior year, Rodriguez introduced her to a team alum that helped inform her decision to study engineering at UC Irvine.
Vazquez now works as a mechanical engineer at Southern California Edison in Palmdale.
Wyatt Garcia planned to join the military or become a firefighter after graduating. After joining the solar car team, he switched to studying engineering at Antelope Valley College. Garcia went on to graduate from Cal State Long Beach with a degree in electrical engineering.
“This whole trajectory, where I'm at right now, is all because of solar car,” Garcia said.
Garcia now works at Honeybee Robotics in Pasadena.
“My stuff I’m working on [that] I physically touched … it’s going to space,” Garcia said with a little bit of wonder before clarifying that whether the craft makes it to the moon will depend on several factors outside of his control.
Garcia’s classmate Oscar Guzman went on to study computer science at Cal State Northridge and is on track to complete a master’s degree in 2024.
Last year he accepted a job at Lockheed Martin — the completion of a dream initiated when he first met engineers from the company while working on the solar car. Guzman doesn’t plan to leave the Antelope Valley any time soon.
“There's plenty of opportunity,” Guzman said. “As long as there's people here who, you know, can lead the way.”
Honks from an ambulance, the school’s cheerleaders, revving engines from a local motorcycle club and dozens of friends, family and educators greeted the students at the school just after 6 p.m. Friday.
The team unloaded the Helios Falcon in less than 2 minutes, a routine they perfected while in Texas.
The eleven students huddled in front of the car and at the count of three shouted “Falcons!” in unison.
The team held back tears and laughter while the school’s principal, a board member and the adult support crew commended their work.
“This year I saw 10 misfits become one cohesive team,” said Pedro del Valle, a staff member at the high school and a longtime solar car supporter. “I saw them come out of their shells. I saw their confidence build. And all I can say is, as parents, you should be very proud of every single one of them.”
Sonanes Cruz, the team captain, said he was overwhelmed.
“I thank everyone for the support,” he said. “What else can I say? Thank you.”
The team has a few weeks to rest before preparations for next year’s solar car race and school start in August. Sonanes Cruz will return as the team's captain and CEO.
One team dream is to race in the advanced division of the competition where cars are capable of reaching up to 70 miles per hour. The team also has an electric vehicle that sat out this year’s race that they hope to use in competition again one day.
One of the first things to address is the mechanical issue that hampered the Helios Falcon’s homecoming. Sonanes Cruz guesses it’s a loose wire that should be easy enough to fix.
“I haven't seen one challenge that we have not found a solution for yet,” Sonanes Cruz said.
