A new dawn for the solar car team 

The CarrollSun Solar Car Racing Team has begun preparing for their 24-25 season, anticipating another dominant year at the SunChase competition hosted by Florida Gulf Coast University in April.

A powerful presence in Carrollton’s extracurricular RECS department, the solar car team has become a family of students and faculty who share immense passion for all different areas of engineering. Meeting every Monday and Wednesday until 6pm, members work all year to design and create cars that are competition ready by April. For the past two years, members have been sorted into two sub-teams that each create one car. 

Last year was one of their most successful yet. The ‘Total Eclipse” team led by Chiara Ortiz ‘25 and Claudia Oses ‘25 were the Overall Champions of their entire competition while also taking home 1st place in the Sprint Race, 1st place in Presentation, and 3rd place in Endurance. 

The “Fast and Fuschia” team led by Sofia Tilen ‘25 and Natalie Romero ‘24 placed 1st in Endurance and 2nd in Presentation despite facing significant technical difficulties which they were able to ultimately overcome.

The captains this year are nothing short of a senior powerhouse. This year Gianna Perez ‘25 and Tilen will lead one team (formerly known as Fast and Fuschia), while Oses and Ortiz return to lead a second team of students (formerly known as Total Eclipse). The teams will select new names this year, no doubt following the precedent of their witty names from years past. 

Ortiz has been a member since 6th grade, and has devoted much of her high school extracurricular experience to improving the solar car team as she enters her seventh and final year as a team co-captain. 

Reflecting on her triumphs from last year, she said the team faced many roadblocks in which they had to use analytic skills to overcome. “Our biggest challenge was definitely the motor systems,” said Ortiz, “Both teams had issues with the motor controller not being programmed correctly to the accelerators we bought, so we had to manually reprogram them.” 

“Figuring out what was wrong and then being able to fix the problem took a lot of time and energy, but I’m happy we got both motor systems running smoothly by the end!”

As she looks forward to her final season, Ortiz still plans to test new ideas based off of the team’s performance last year to lead to an even faster car.“We are planning to shift to rigid solar panels and a new battery configuration,” she said, “since we saw that last year the endurance part of the race was getting tougher and was being weighted more.” 

“I’m definitely excited for the team to potentially expand into new competitions like the Electrathon, which is a more local contest that happens multiple times a year,” said Ortiz as she detailed what’s to come for the future of solar car. “This new competition would provide fresh challenges for our team to face and learn from together.”