High School Electric Car Championship
The Michigan Electric Car Championship trophy has
left Michigan. At Berlin Raceway in Marne, Mich., Kennedy High School’s electric
car program, Cougar Electric Company, won the championship trophy. Kennedy faced
some very stiff competition — Lakeshore High School, from Stevensville, Mich.,
had won the championship every year since 1998.
Eric Mager drove and Brad Gilbertson was crew chief on the winning car. The
winning team members are Eric Mager, Erin Wilson, Brad Gilbertson, Ausi
Slaybaugh, Wyatt Hawkins, Corey Scott, Anissa Brown, and Barry Wilson.
Cars from several schools across Iowa, including Cedar Rapids Prairie, Michigan,
Nebraska and Wisconsin competed.
Electric car competitions are about designing, building and racing a single
person, lightweight, aerodynamic, high-efficiency electric vehicle. They are
powered by sealed lead acid batteries weighing no more than 67 pounds. The
objective is for students to drive the vehicles as far as possible for one hour
using limited electrical energy.
In 2001, Cougar Electric Company was awarded the First in the Nation in
Education Award by the then governor of Iowa, Tom Vilsack. The team was one of
only five K-12 programs in the state to receive the award.
Cougar Electric Company's Mission Statement
The goal of our program is to build and race single-passenger electric cars,
while providing the students in the program a great educational opportunity in
several vast fields. This class not only teaches students manufacturing skills
to build the cars, but also skills in teamwork, public relations, engineering,
writing / editing, graphic design / fabrication, and photography / videography.
Cougar Electric Company History
The program began as a dream of 2 students, and a teacher in 1997. After 2 years
of research, planning, and preparations, the Cougar Electric Company as it had
come to be called, built it's first racecar. The first season was full of
learning opportunities, including several near-victories, something that was
very challenging in a sport that was at the time dominated by veteran teams such
as Prairie. So after that first season, the "experienced" team came back home
and started developing the plans for 3 new cars for the 1999-2000 season.
By this time the team had grown to more than 10 committed members who put in
many hours working to get 3 new cars built in the limited off-season, often
staying until midnight or 1am as the races approached. In the spring of 2000,
the #41, #300, and #200 cars were unveiled in the season-opener at Hawkeye Downs
Speedway. During this race, Matt Miller driving the #41 Lynch Ford car speed to
an astounding speed of 57mph. The year only got better after that, with our cars
sweeping 1st, 2nd, and 3rd at a majority of the races we attended, a major
improvement from just a year earlier!
At the end of the year, nearly the entire racing team left as graduating seniors
leaving the maintenance of the old cars, and the planning for the 2001 season up
to several incoming juniors. With little-to-no experience in the car
design/building, a group of 5-7 core team members began the difficult task of
learning from scratch what the seniors had all known before they left. Luckily,
the new people were all a little crazy, and were able to come up with some neat
ideas for cars. Add to that the expanded use of our wind-tunnel to test the cars
BEFORE we built them, and we all knew it was going to be an interesting season.
So the season began, our most stringent the team had run, Including a 10-day,
5-race stretch in Michigan and Iowa that nearly killed us all (figuratively
speaking anyways). Unfortunately while we were trying to built faster cars, we
were also mentoring several other teams to build faster cars, because we ended
up getting 2nd place in every race the entire season... only being beaten by
people that we had helped build their program, and of course... Lakeshore!
Also in 2001, Cougar Electric was awarded the FINE (First In the Nation in
Education) Award by the governor of Iowa, Tom Vilsack. The team was one of only
five, K-12 programs in the state to receive the award, and the first electric
car program in the world to win such a prestigious award in education.
In 2002, Cougar Electric Company continued to improve and the #400 car
successfully regained the Iowa State Championship for the team. In Nebraska, the
#200 car picked up the Nebraska OPPD State Championship in the Exhibition Class.
On top of it's success on the track, Cougar Electric branched into the area of
hosting the first race in Cedar Rapids in two years. The first annual Toyota
Financial Services Midwest speed trials drew over 30 cars for the two-day
event... the largest turnout for a racing event in Iowa in many years!
In 2003, Cougar Electric had a group of nearly 40 students involved in the
class, as well as a mainly new group of students taking the reigns after 8
students graduated at the end of 2002.
Class Information
Advised by auto teacher Barry Wilson, the class is offered 2 periods per day,
and currently enrolls 40-50 students per term. All of the students are asked to
give 100% commitment to the program, and are required to obtain, and maintain at
least a 3.0 grade point average. The class is open to everyone in 9th-12th
grades assuming they meet those requirements.
Our team is divided up into 6 main departments. Accounting (Kennedy's 2nd yr.
Accounting class), Chemical Engineering, Documentation, Electrical Engineering,
Facilities, Graphics, Mechanical Engineering, Promotion, and Webmastering.
The goal of our program, is to design, build and race electric (battery) powered
race cars, while providing the students in the program a great educational
opportunity in several vast fields. This class not only teaches students
manufacturing skills to build the cars, but also skills in teamwork, public
relations, engineering, report writing, graphic design and fabrication, and
photography / videography.
The students of Cougar Electric Company are continually challenged with new
ideas designed to stress the limits that one person, and/or a team can achieve,
and at the same time learning to push those limits even further for more
advanced learning.
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