Day in the Sunshine for the Little Guy

Here’s to the local David, Cal State Los Angeles, which won a nine-day, 1,250-mile solar-powered car race last week against Goliaths like MIT and Stanford.

Unlike their more monied rivals, the Cal State engineering students had to design and build their flame-yellow car, Solar Eagle III, without the benefit of a photovoltaic research lab or the other academic perks of the big leagues. But what they lacked in resources they made up in the sort of enthusiasm generated by a city in love with cars.

They were notable also for their pragmatism, nurtured by the Cal State system’s historically strong focus on applied learning. They designed a car that won not because it was ultralight or ultra-fast but because it was reliable. As Solar Eagle’s lead driver, Roman Vasquez of Montebello, put it, “We never had a problem at all” throughout the race over bumpy secondary roads in the Midwest.

In addition to pragmatism, persistence was key to Vasquez and co-driver Dylan Wakasa’s victory, for despite a series of electrical failures that plagued two earlier attempts at the crown, they kept trying. For both students, just as for the turtle in Aesop’s fable of a race with a hare, “slow and steady wins the race.”