From Blank Page to Racetrack: How UTA’s Blaze Raycers Built Their First Solar Car
Soltron is the first solar-powered race car built by the University of Texas at Arlington’s Blaze Raycers, a student team Reynolds & Moore backed as a lead sponsor throughout its first season. Less than a year before the car rolled onto the track at Brainerd International Raceway, it existed only as an idea. By July 2026, the students had turned that idea into a working vehicle and brought it to the Electrek Formula Sun Grand Prix in Minnesota, with our Systems Safety Engineer Intern Skyler Bryant leading the battery work.
Solar racing challenges teams to move a car as efficiently as possible using energy collected from the sun. The rookie team cleared scrutineering and put its car on the track on the third and final day. Soltron completed 16 laps, recorded its fastest lap of 4 minutes, 24 seconds, and reached 55 miles per hour. For a team with no inherited vehicle and no established playbook, reaching the starting line was an achievement of its own.
“We started from scratch and engineered something on our own from the ground up and made it ours,” Chief Engineer William Bourgeois said.
Building Soltron From Scratch
The team brought together six disciplines: resource and energy engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, operations, and project management. Every design decision created tradeoffs across all of them. The result is a three-wheeled, single-occupant solar car built around a steel space-frame chassis, a lithium-ion battery system, a 2-kilowatt hub motor, and a 1,240-watt solar array. Students built about 90% of it, sourcing specialized components such as the motor and maximum power point trackers, then fabricating, wiring, and integrating the structure around them.
Faculty Advisor Dr. Chris Boyer helped the team weigh schedule, cost, and technical ambition. Bourgeois described what that looked like in practice.
“You can way overthink part development, and it’s like, okay, hey, we can spend forever working on this part, or we can go to Home Depot and pick up a $3 aluminum bracket that would do the same job,” Bourgeois said.
The constraints compounded as the build went on.
“The chassis limits what you can do with the body. The body limits what you can do with the array,” Telemetry Lead Jordan Nalepka explained. “Everything constrains each other.”
The chassis reached roughly its 20th iteration as design reviews exposed those conflicts. With six weeks left before the trailer had to be loaded for Minnesota, the body was still not in production, so the team selected materials it could obtain quickly and shape by hand or with a CNC router. The approach got the car to the track on time, but removing the body panel took seven or eight people, which turned every inspection into a group operation.
Putting Safety Into the Process
Safety shaped several of the car’s major architectural choices. The Blaze Raycers placed the 120-volt battery pack behind the driver instead of near the front, kept high-voltage wiring away from the occupant, and built parts of the chassis and suspension beyond the competition’s required safety margins. Reviewers told the students they had overbuilt several of those systems, but the additional margin gave the team confidence in the car’s core mechanical structure.
Bryant also shared functional safety concept and failure mode and effects analysis documents with the team’s Safety Lead. The first-year schedule kept everyone focused on getting a working car onto the track, and in the next design cycle the students plan to introduce risk analysis, documentation, and test planning earlier, connecting that work more systematically to their design decisions.
16 Laps and a Long Runway Ahead
Before the car could race, it had to clear scrutineering and four major dynamic tests. During the brake test, the Blaze Raycers watched a more experienced team’s car slide as its wheels locked. Bourgeois drove Soltron into the same test and stopped cleanly on his first attempt.
“Here comes Will, and he stops on a dime,” Operations Lead Jesse Ramos recalled. “I hear it go quiet, and every team’s just like, ‘Wow, that was really good.’”
Soltron passed all four tests on the first attempt. On the track it completed 16 laps and finished 24th in the official single-occupant lap-count table. A charging problem prevented the solar array from replenishing the battery and eventually ended the run, but the main electrical components remained intact, leaving the students with a focused troubleshooting list rather than a failed foundation. Solar Lead Anthony Mena estimated that an entirely custom array could remove about 45 pounds, and the team believes it can cut as much as 150 pounds overall while preserving the suspension geometry, braking performance, and powertrain decisions that worked.
The most important result from Minnesota did not appear in the standings.
“Being the engineer who designed it and then you have to go work on it and contort your body in a weird way to access a bolt really gives you an appreciation of designing something that’s easy to work on for the poor soul that has to do that in the future,” Bourgeois said.
Reynolds & Moore sponsors student engineering teams as part of its support for technical education, backing programs that give students responsibility for a complete system rather than a single component. Chief Technology Officer Paul Schmitt said the Blaze Raycers’ experience reflected a broader engineering lesson.
“One of the hallmarks of great engineering is learning that every design decision has consequences. Building a system from the ground up, troubleshooting it, maintaining it, and improving it gives students an appreciation they simply can’t gain in a classroom. Experiences like this develop engineers who think beyond the immediate problem and consider the entire lifecycle of the system.”
The Blaze Raycers plan to bring Soltron back to the track next season, this time with a car they already understand and months to test it under the Texas sun. The students believe a top-10 finish is within reach, with a podium possible if all three competition days go their way.
