New Season and Plans

April 5th, 2025

Welcome to the new 2025-2026 season! Palo Alto Solar Car and Racing (formerly Palo Alto Solar Vehicle/Miraj Sustainable Racing Club) is back with plans to race in the Solar Car Challenge in 2026. We decided to skip the 2025 race in favor of taking extra time to pass on years' worth of knowledge from our seniors to our newer members. Our ambitious goal last year of racing in the Advanced Division still stands, and this summer we'll be replacing the suspension, brakes, and composite shell among other parts of last year's La Vitesse in order to bring it back to Dallas in 2026.

La Vitesse sitting in our new workspace after we moved all our materials from one garage to another.

The step-by-step plan for the design/build process at the moment begins with part by part weekly discussions. As we individually research, report findings, and make decisions, we'll be aiming to tackle everything from CAD to propulsion system design to rear suspension by May. To achieve our ambitious goal of having a finalized parts list by early May, we are meeting more frequently in April. During these meetings, our electrical expert Liam will also be delivering lessons on soldering, schematic design, PCBs, and more in parallel with the team's parts research.

Divya, Diana, and Alice showing La Vitesse to the community at the California Ave. farmer's market.

Since we're on pause for spring break, we'll resume in a week or so the process of researching new parts, designing the changes to the car, cleaning out our workspace, recruiting, and fundraising! We've been to the California Avenue farmer's market to do outreach, and we had a great time—Divya, Diana, and Alice manned a table with the trifold poster of photos that Diana put together. We raised a bit of money, met some potential mentors, shared our project with community members, and some young kids got to sit inside the car :) We plan to visit more outreach events in the coming several months, so follow our Instagram to see where we'll be.

As for recruiting, spread the word! Up till April 21st, we're looking for high school students near or in Palo Alto who have interests ranging anywhere from engineering (mechanical or electrical) to business. We have roles open in web development, social media management, CAD, aerodynamic design, and more—reach out by email if you have any questions at all. Tune in to the next blog post to keep up with PASCAR!