Monday, Oct 26, 2026 • Brian Lopez : Contact
For six months, a group of students at The University of Texas at Arlington spent their weekends in a shop in Mineral Wells, cutting and welding metal to build a race car designed to run on sunlight. In July, they loaded the car onto a trailer, drove 18-and-a-half hours to Minnesota and raced it in their first national competition.
The Blaze Raycers, UTA’s first solar car team, designed and built the race car in about 10 months and competed in the Formula Sun Grand Prix in Brainerd, Minnesota. Of the 56 teams that registered, 28 had built cars that qualified to make it onto the track. UTA was one of them.
Over three days of racing, the car finished with the eighth-fastest time in the field and boasted the fastest lap of any team from Texas, reaching a top speed of 55 mph.
Building from the ground up
Many new solar car teams take over an older car developed at another university. The Blaze Raycers chose to design their own. They started in summer 2025.
Sponsor Mark Rose allowed the team use his shop in Mineral Wells, located nearly 70 miles west of UTA. The students drove there every weekend to build most of the car’s chassis. Isaiah Rubio, a mechanical engineering senior and the team’s mechanical lead at the time, welded the whole chassis. He has since become the chief engineer.
“It was a really fantastic experience, getting to do some real engineering with real budgets, real design constraints,” Rubio said.
The students also made about half of the car’s solar panels. Anthony Mena, a resource and energy engineering senior and the team’s solar lead, said each custom panel weighed less than half a pound. In contrast, the four panels they had to purchase weighed about 10 pounds each. For next year’s race, the team plans to build the car’s entire solar array.
A week and a half in Minnesota
The team spent some 10 days at the competition. Before racing, the car was put through about six days of inspections, called scrutineering. Engineers and judges checked that it was safe to race and met all of the competition’s guidelines.
Related: UTA debuts its fastest formula SAE car yet
Jesse Ramos, a junior majoring in resource and energy engineering and the team’s operations lead, said the days started early. Team members got to the work site at sunrise to prepare the car before heading to inspection stations.
“Minnesota is a lot warmer than you’d expect during the summer,” Ramos said. “It got pretty toasty up there.”
Ramos said he organized the team during races, making sure every member was in the right place at the right time.
“I couldn’t have asked for a better group of friends to do this with,” he said.
Lessons beyond the classroom
Team members said the project taught them skills that can’t be replicated in the classroom, such as working with vendors and sponsors, planning logistics and solving problems under pressure. For example, students shipped material for the car’s body from a South Carolina vendor to UTA, then transported it to a shop in Houston to be cut. Ramos and Jason Esquivel, a junior majoring in resource and energy engineering, built most of the car’s body.
“It was a lot of learning because we’d never done anything like that with materials I’d never worked with,” Esquivel said. “It took a while to get a handle on the material, but we got it to look as good as possible.”
Katelyn Bellows, also a resource and energy engineering student who works on the team’s media and solar array, said the team often had to think quick on its feet.
“We would have our car mess up mid-run and have to fix it on the spot,” Bellows said. “Coming up with solutions immediately and working together, to me, is more important than just knowing math.”
Chris Boyer, the team’s faculty advisor, said the experience makes students attractive to employers. All of the team’s senior members landed internships.
“It’s a lot better to have these experiences in the university than it is in the workplace,” Dr. Boyer said.
Boyer now serves as an industry advisor to UTA’s Electrical Engineering Department. He said student vehicle programs like the solar car, robotics, Formula SAE and drone teams depend on industry support because mentoring takes a lot of faculty time.
“A lot of us on the industry side really want to see these types of programs continue,” he said. “We want to see a lot more of these.”
Next season
For next season, the team plans to keep the car’s mechanical design, rebuild the body and electrical system, cut weight and do more testing. Its goal is a top-five finish at the 2027 Formula Sun Grand Prix.
Long term, the team hopes to build a program as well-known as UTA’s Formula SAE team and compete in an international solar car race in Australia.
To keep that momentum going, older students are mentoring new leaders.
“If you don’t start teaching the younger generations, the team will never progress,” Bourgeois said.
About The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA)
The University of Texas at Arlington is a growing public research university in the heart of Dallas-Fort Worth. With a student body of over 42,700, UTA is the second-largest institution in the University of Texas System, offering more than 190 undergraduate and graduate degree programs. Recognized as a Carnegie R-1 university, UTA stands among the nation’s top 5% of institutions for research activity. UTA and its 300,000 alumni generate an annual economic impact of $28.8 billion for the state. The University has received the Innovation and Economic Prosperity designation from the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities and has earned recognition for its focus on student access and success, considered key drivers to economic growth and social progress for North Texas and beyond.
