Race, Reuse, Recycle: A Call to Action

The Indianapolis 500 celebrates its centennial this year. This is not a story about Indy, though it is about the cars that used to race there.

One of those cars, a 2000 Lola chassis, was all but destroyed in a crash at another stop on the Indycar racing circuit. Fortunately, that “tub” ended up at the DeLaSalle Education Center high school in Kansas City, Mo., where “at-risk” students and their mentor-instructors thought it would enhance their education and inspire their futures if instead of just studying car design and construction, they could actually design and build a car of their own.

By the way, by “at-risk” we’re talking about teenagers who, in many cases, had experience with drugs and violence and without what DeLaSalle offers might be heading soon to incarceration or interment.

Instead, they took a race car chassis that also had no future and turned it into an amazing electric-powered vehicle with a see-through skin that they’ve tested at Bridgestone’s Texas Proving Grounds track. They also got to make field trips to Ford’s design studios in Michigan and to the automotive technology and restoration department at McPherson College in Kansas. The car will be on display in early May at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Working one-on-one with their mentors, the students restored the Indy car tub, designed and fabricated the shrink-wrap style, see-through body and its wire-frame support, installed the electric motors and other components, and even drove the car for its test laps at Fort Stockton, Texas.

They call it experiential learning, and it continues as the DeLaSalle students continue to develop the car so it can go farther and faster on each recharge. By the way, those students also are going farther and faster. They’re staying in school and graduating and enrolling in college.

And now those original DeLaSalle mentors have formed a non-profit called MINDDRIVE so they can share the program with other students at other schools, which is where you come in. I’m sure that some of you who read this website either are or have been Indy team owners or know people who are or have been Indy team owners and who therefore have a bunch of old, obsolete chassis cluttering up their garages.

Except as the kids in KC have shown us, those tubs aren’t obsolete. They can be used to teach and to inspire another generation.

So this is a call to action. Contact someone at MINDDRIVE through www.minddrive.org website and donate those tubs, and then offer to become a mentor at a school in your own community. You’ve won on the track, now win for the future.