Team PrISUm, Iowa State’s solar car team, flew by the competition to place fourth in the Formula Sun Grand Prix, a contest team members had been working toward for months.

The event was held May 19-25 at Heartland Park in Topeka, Kan.

Erin Isvik, outreach coordinator for Team PrISUm, said 14 teams competed in the three-day event. Winners were decided on the basis of most laps completed around the 2.1 mile closed track.

Almost half of Team PrISUm’s members attended the competition, said Isvik, sophomore in computer engineering.

“We have approximately 30 to 40 active members, and I believe we had 13 students go to Topeka to compete in the race,” she said.

The team wanted to compete in the race to give its new members the experience, Isvik said.

“We have a brand-new race team. None of the people at this race competed in last year’s Sunrayce, so it was a good opportunity to train a new race crew and give them experience,” she said.

Ben Nimmergut, assistant director of Team PrISUm, said team members gained a great deal of knowledge by participating.

“The race was a great experience for us, and we got experience for our new members. We raced our Phoenix solar car, and most of our new members hadn’t even seen another solar car the size of ours [5.59 meters by 1.97],” said Nimmergut, senior in mechanical engineering.

Nimmergut said new team members learned a lot about the finer points of racing during the competition.

“We experienced bad weather conditions, changing drivers, pit stops on the track and having a race strategy for track racing,” he said. “We also learned how other teams race and how to improve our racing.”

Isvik said the team usually competes in cross-country races, so this provided a new challenge.

“This was a track race instead of a cross-country race, so it has very different rules,” she said. “The rules for this race are very similar to the rules for the American Solar Challenge, which the team will compete in during July of next summer, so we wanted to test those out, too.”

The American Solar Challenge begins in Chicago next summer and wraps up in Los Angeles.