Low to the ground, with two wheels in the front and one in the back, the vehicles look somewhat like pinewood derby cars or go-karts. Their energy comes from batteries, but under the right conditions, they can reach 40 miles per hour.
Fifteen engineering students built the vehicles themselves as part of East Central High's after-school Electrathon club. The local club is part of Electrathon America, an electric vehicle racing organization that describes itself as offering "hands-on opportunities for participants to learn about STEM (science, engineering, technology and math) principles as they design and build an electric vehicle for competition."
Electrathon goes beyond standard classroom learning and gives students a stepping stone into the world of engineering, said Forrest Hawthorn, a career and technical education instructor at East Central High School and faculty adviser for the local club.
"Going through the engineering process, a lot of times it feels like you're banging your head against the wall," he said. "But for these kids, I'm always telling them, 'Hey, that is engineering in a nutshell. You try something, you build it, you test it, you break it, you redesign it and you try it again.'"
Hawthorn has worked to expand Electrathon racing in the San Antonio area. There was just one local race last year, he said, but this year the students in his club have four opportunities to race against teams from other schools and school districts. Saturday's race, at Zamora Middle School in South San Antonio Independent School District, is the second local race of the season.
The four local races will lead up to the series championship in April, the Alamo City Electrathon Race, where a couple hundred students from 20 San Antonio schools will participate. Hawthorn is director of the ACE Race, working with South Texas Business Partnership, which lines up sponsors, venues, concessions and other logistics.
To compete in Electrathon races, the vehicles must meet certain specifications. The Electrathon American handbook describes them as "single person, lightweight, aerodynamic, high efficiency, electric vehicles with three or four pneumatic tires ... powered by standard non-leaking lead acid battery packs not exceeding 73 pounds." The vehicles can be built from a variety of materials and, as long as they adhere to safety guidelines, can have a number of different designs.
With everyone on the same playing field, the challenge becomes designing a the most energy-efficient car possible and racking up the most laps. One East Central car won the Alamo City Electrathon Race last year with 125 laps in two hours.
In preparation for Saturday's race, the East Central High students on Tuesday were fine-tuning the cars during their free periods at school in the the John Glenn Annex machine shop on the CAST Lead campus across the street from the high school.
The team members say they aren't nervous about their chances in the upcoming race. They have plenty of shop hours and practice laps behind them. They know the goal is endurance, not speed.
"If we don't maximize the amount of energy that we have during a certain time, then we could potentially lose the amount of laps we get," said Jose Ochoa, the club's vice president
The team has four electric vehicles, which they've named named Hornet, Wasp, Stinger and Plan Bee. Some were built using kits donated by Toyota. The students built Wasp from scratch.
As the students secured pre-heated batteries — which one theory says allows them to absorb more energy — in the vehicles, preparing to scoot around a school parking lot, Hawthorn mainly supervised. When he brought Electrathon to East Central High in 2017, he had to be a lot more active in his instruction, he said. Now, if all goes well, the students perform like a well-oiled machine.
"Some are just total nerds, and they geek out on the whole math side of it. They love doing the battery testing," he said. "I've got other kids who could not care less about testing batteries, but they love wrenching on the cars. Or maybe you've got a couple kids who really get into the fabrication and cutting and grinding and welding metal."
'FUN TO MAKE STUFF'
Dylan Ellington, 17, gravitates toward mechanics. He's learned how to use an angle grinder and TIG welder, and he spends most of his free time during school in the shop.
"Even if it's not specifically working on the Electrathon cars, this is the one class I look forward to the most every day, because it's just fun to make stuff," Ellington said. "Those are skills that are going to pay off in the future."
Some students, like Hollie Helmke, 18, get their hands into lots of things. During the race, she'll be driving Hornet. She's already clocked more than 1,000 miles in the vehicle.
When Helmke joined the club last year, she started as a mechanic and learned to use a drill press and angle grinder — "simple stuff like that," she said. She's now club president and plans to study engineering at Texas A&M University next year.
Helmke said she sees Electrathon as a creative outlet, like when she recently figured out how to install a mount for one of the vehicle's switches.
"There are so many different ways you could install the mount, but I decided, OK, I'm going to use a scrap piece of metal and kind of just work my way around it, just drill in the holes and weld it on," she said.
The team is eyeing an even bigger competition in the spring: Emerald Coast Electrathon, in Florida. This year, Hawthorn wants to bring more local schools with them.
Hawthorn said the East Central team has placed first in the Florida race's high school division, but this time he's giving his students an edge against the older competitors. He wants to win in the other division, for college and adult competitors.
He recently bought a German motor called a Heinzmann with funds from a competitive grant from the district's nonprofit foundation. If all goes according to plan, it will arrive in time to install it and prepare for the big race.
"I really want to go there and see my kids beat all the adult and college teams," he said.
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