Students from Pana High School will leave Wednesday morning for the Solar Car Challenge in Texas. The car has been worked on for the last two years. The team won multiple awards last year including a rookie award for best technological advancement, and out of 4 personal achievement awards given out, to a possible 250 students, Lucas Duduit and Katelyn Townsend from the Pana team won 2 of them. The group from Pana High School was the only team from Illinois to compete in the challenge and finished fifth last year. Team Captain Lucas Duduit says that the team is trying to improve on last year’s finish.
Duduit says that there is much more to the Solar Car Challenge than just the race. The team also participates in something called Scrutineering which is a play on words for scrutinizing and engineering.
The team is comprised of Lucas Duduit, Jessica Pollman, Katelyn Townsend, and Boone Elledge. The team will race for 4 days six hours a day, 3-hour shifts with each driver driving three hours at a time against 30 other teams at Texas Motor Speedway. The car will be running at 23 MPH on average. To keep up with the team, like their Facebook page “Pana Solar Car” or go to solarcarchallenge.org for live updates.
