Start of the New School Year

October 1st, 2025

As the new school year has begun, we’ve decided to ramp up recruitment, while concurrently continuing to make progress on the changes to La Vitesse.

As we closed out the second part of summer, we’ve moved out of Maker Nexus and back to our garage workspace. Before we transitioned back to the garage, we made significant progress on the frame and front suspension! We officially completed the crush zone on the electrical side of the car and continued adding various supports and mounts around the frame. In our last update, we had just finished one side of the front suspension. Since then, we’ve finished the set for the other wheel, assembled both sides, and mounted them on the car.

Completed front suspension assembly attached to the car.

The process of assembling and mounting the suspension was more difficult than anticipated, as we had to make some last minute changes to ensure that both sides were aligned, sometimes having to remake entire parts of the assembly. Thankfully, the setup is now in good shape and seems pretty durable. We are also grateful to have the car back on four wheels! We are now turning our attention to the steering.

We’ve had a few issues with the steering, so far, especially since the suspension isn’t well attached to the steering rack, leading to some unanticipated complications with rotating the front wheels. To understand what the issue was, we had to fully take apart our steering assembly and put it back together. Our plan is to strengthen the connection from the suspension to the steering to fix the problems, and once that is complete, we need to make sure that the wheels are properly aligned. Since we are working out of the garage, once again, we are going to be working with our portable welder, which we will need to practice on before welding anything onto the car.

Simultaneously, we are working on finding swingarms for the rear suspension. We have recently purchased and received our new hub motors, which we are very excited to start working with. Once the parts for the rear suspension are finalized, we will begin working on our braking system.

In the process of moving out of Maker Nexus, we have been packing up and preparing to transition back into Anish’s garage for the rest of the school year. While we are sad to leave, this move shows that we have made progress and we do not need to fix anything major on the car.

Another big step is testing our solar panels. We have begun setting them up to test their efficiency and performance, especially since we’ve spotted some cracks in one of the panels. We need to make sure the solar panels are able to harness enough energy to power the car. If one of our nine panels isn’t working at an acceptable efficiency, we are prepared to scrap that panel and continue with only eight panels which hopefully won’t be necessary.

With the new school year kicking off, we have brought our focus back to recruitment. We recently held an open house on September 27th, and were glad to see a great turnout. We had a great time meeting different interested students from various schools, ages, and with different subteam interests. We are still welcoming high school students from the Palo Alto area who are passionate about sustainability, transportation, problem-solving, and are looking to get hands-on experience. Anyone that's interested in joining the PASCAR team can fill out our interest form, which can be found on our website or our instagram.

More soldering practice.

All in all, we are trying to make what progress we can amidst AP finals and currently ongoing AP exams. We plan to flesh out the parts list and order some time before summer break, at which point we'll start the physical work on the car. Go PASCAR!