>> It's not too hard to build a car. The engineering's not crazy difficult. It's not
too hard to make sure everything's safe, to get strategy, to get all of these pieces in
order. But it's really hard to do it right and not screw up once, and it's that
attention to perfection that excited me and set it apart.
>> You can't build a car with the team of folks who just want to list this on their resume and then
leave and get some high-paying consulting job. You need people with passion and who are
deeply motivated by designing, creating, innovating, discovering.
>> I think that the draw of potentially being the best in the world is something that is just
intoxicating.
>> The first thing that hit me was really how successful the team was. We'd hear,
you know, the victories in '90 and '93 and we'd hear about 2001. We'd hear about them
crashing right before and coming back and finishing this race and sort of
these stories of you know of giants.
>> We weren't willing to start celebrating
until we had crossed the finish line. And I will never forget when we took the
canopy off Sunrunner and I saw Paula's face and she looked like a
little kid on Christmas morning.
>> There had been three national championships before us, and so,
putting number four on the board for us was an incredible feeling.
>> In '07 we went to win the Australian race, that was our goal. And it was heartbreaking when we
crashed.
and...I mean that was really hard. The car performed great afterward. We got it
back on the road. We passed a lot of people. We showed what the car was capable of, what the
team was capable of, but it never made up for that.
>> The legacy of Michigan solar car is always that Michigan will do well, and it's not
that we expected to win, it's that we thought we had done enough to win.
>> We had done a lot of testing in the U.S., more
miles than we'd ever put on a car, and got to Australia and started driving it
in the outback and found that the winds in the outback are not like the winds in
Michigan, which seems like a given, one might think, "Oh, why didn't you think of that," but
we just didn't at the time. We got on the road and we found the car just did not
have the stability that we thought it was going to have based on our
simulations.
>> Well certainly one of the low moments was our experience on the 2003 race.
It was a rush to develop the car. We had minimal testing. We went to the race, went through
qualifying, and couldn't complete a figure eight with the car. Pretty basic. But
at that point we were disqualified from competing and everyone just kind of sat
around in the parking lot and said, "Wow, we're going home now rather than to the starting line."
We should've be able to do it, and we didn't.
>> I felt like we had failed. I felt like I had failed my team and that somehow we had
failed ourselves, or we had failed our car.
There was a very clear feeling of disappointment. I think absolutely that if
we had not made some of the mistakes that we made, we could have won.
>> There are a lot of lessons that we learned from that, and I think, actually, failure is
really important in that you learn lessons that you wouldn't otherwise learn.
It would be way too easy to sort of skip past them because you succeeded.
>> You only ever reach success if you have failure probably a lot of failure.
>> We did a lot of real soul searching and looking at what other teams we're doing and why, and it's
interesting when you step back from saying I'm number one, you stop saying, I've got this
right, and you start saying, what are other people doing that's clever and creative and what can I
learn from what I steal a little bit of, and what can I build on.
>> A big part of the team's culture is that feeling of, it's not good enough.
>> We really kind of re-thought everything from, how the team runs on a daily basis to tire change drills,
how design should work, how manufacturing should work.
>> We're so clearly, for the past 25 years, going
in this direction of trying to be the best in the world and all of that is important.
>> I continue to be amazed at what the teams after us did.
>> You know, we were just trying to win a race, I never thought it would turn into this institution.
>> I think the biggest thing I'd like to see continue, really, is that people are in fact taking
risks. People are pushing themselves, the technology, the people around them.
>> It's something that they love doing - that constant kind of insanity of, we want to
build a little carbon fiber box which can do 130 KPH down a desert highway
on nothing but the sun and, by the way, you have to fundraise it and build it
yourself, and you're also taking classes at the same time.
It's not for people who like boring lives.
At all.
>> I think this race was one of our best performances, ever.
As the days go by now I'm getting closer to the day where I leave the team and become an alum,
and it's a sad feeling and it's also kind of happy feeling, too, because it means
that I can pass down my knowledge to newer people, younger people, and train a
new generation of Michigan solar car engineers. And I hope to stay heavily
involved, and provide my experiences with solar car and also the experiences
I learn in my future career to the team to make them better than they ever were.