Three years.
That is how long the Michigan State Solar Racing Team has been working to design and construct a solar-powered car from scratch. Now, three years and many challenges later, the team will finally be able to compete with its vehicle this summer.
The team, a student-run organization founded in 2000, builds and races solar-powered vehicles. The car currently in development is named “Cynisca,” after a Spartan princess who competed in the 396 and 392 BCE Olympic Games.
Electrical engineering major Owen Winegar is the president of the team, which includes around 50 students. He has been looking forward to competing with Cynisca after being a part of its construction throughout his entire time at MSU so far.
“This group really started with the car and had a lot of really early struggles … and so I’m really excited for this car…and finally testing this car and driving [it],” Winegar, a junior, said.
The team is preparing to compete in the Formula Sun Grand Prix in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The event is the preliminary competition for the American Solar Car Challenge, which is a cross-country race that takes place every two years and will be held in the summer of 2026.
At the Grand Prix, the car will undergo a scrutineering process to make sure it drives properly, checking everything from the vehicle’s electrical system to functionality through dynamic testing. The team will then compete for 24 hours, split over three days, trying to complete the most total miles around the track.
“It’s all about efficiency,” Winegar said. “You just try to go for the most amount of miles.”
The vehicle obviously needs the sun to continue to function, but the engineers are prepared for a cloudy day.
“For the competition, you actually start with a full battery. Basically what you’re trying to do with your solar panels is actually maintain that whole charge over the three days … but weather wise, all of the other teams are also facing the same challenge, so that makes it fair,” Winegar said.
The competition could get delayed if weather becomes too much of a factor; however, most of the time they still compete.
The amount of collegiate solar car teams has grown a lot in recent years. Winegar said the sport exploded in popularity in the past three to four years.
“We’ve [MSU’s team] been around for 25 years, but a lot of teams just started. Now I think it was like 35 cars that are coming down [to compete],” Winegar said.
The MSU team has not done a lot of testing on Cynisca yet, but the battery may allow the car to travel anywhere from 200 to 400 miles.
“We’re getting the same amount of miles as a Tesla charge with a way smaller battery pack just because of the solar panels and the aerodynamics of our car,” Winegar said.
One unique aspect of Cynisca is its catamaran style, meaning the driver does not sit in the center of the car, rather, off to the side. The student driving the car has to be a certain weight, around 178 pounds, to make sure it is balanced.
“You don't want your weight towards the middle of the car … you'll have a really weird breaking. So for us … we pick really light people because then we get to add weight to the right side of our car to make it more stable,” Winegar said.
A project like this is not cheap, with building Cynisca costing upwards of $100,000. The team relies heavily on sponsorships to help pay for the parts and equipment.
“The College of Engineering helps us out too every year… but we have a lot of big name sponsors. One Energy has helped … GM is always giving us financial and technical support with our vehicle,” Winegar said. “They’re advertising, because hopefully you’re driving across America with their logo.”
Constructing Cynisca has not been not an easy feat, so the team split up into different groups to divide and conquer each section. The mechanical team is responsible for the hardware of the car and the electrical team’s goal is to get the energy from the sun to power the car.
Abdallah Daha is the electrical director for the team. He oversees multiple sub-teams of engineers who work on different parts of the car’s electrical systems. Daha goes into the shop at least three times a week to help work on the car.
Daha explained how the team outsourced to other companies for certain parts of Cynisca, but he said a goal in the future is to build and design more of the parts in-house.
“So it's only a couple of systems right now that we bring from other companies, but we are always trying to move in the direction that we build our own stuff in the future,” Daha, an electrical engineering junior, said. “Two years from now, we would like to have our own battery extension system, for example.”
There were many challenges for the team over the past three years – most notably, having to transfer the critical knowledge to new members when senior members graduate.
“If you don’t transfer this knowledge and what you’ve learned in the four years efficiently, you’re just repeating the same thing because the car and team will never evolve,” Winegar said.
The Solar Racing Team is a way for students to get hands-on engineering experience whilst being a part of something that can have a substantial impact on the world. Winegar is excited for the team to compete this summer, and spoke highly about the community that this group has formed.
“It’s a really good sense of community,” Winegar said. “You get so much technical knowledge way beyond the classroom.”