Where it all began…

This is the first Supermileage vehicle Preble students built in 1999-2000.  It had a mild steel chassis with a sheemetal/monokote body. Needless to say, it earned the nickname “THE TANK”. The vehicle worked great… until we took it apart to paint the chassis!  Although #26 made it through technical inspection at UW-Stout, it failed to make an official run… it actually quit running ten feet from the finish line on it’s last run.

Lessons learned… make a light vehicle and calculate your gear ratio.  After we returned from the competition, we recalculated our gear ratio.  The Tank was running the wrong set of gears.  It was geared to go 175 MPH!  Not exactly the correct ratio.