As a member of the Principia team, I can say one thing for sure: it takes a lot more than a big name to win a race like this. You can have all the funding, all the research labs, and all the best professors, but still have a team that doesn't know what it's doing. I'd say experience is a more important factor. When we first started out in '93, our car barely went 30 ft. We've been progressing steadily since then, with a lot of help from other teams and our sponsors.
Also, the fact that we don't have an engineering department hasn't seemed to matter much, since there's so much sharing of knowledge amongst the teams. Although all the teams have unique cars with unique designs, we tend to learn a lot from each other's mistakes.
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As a member of the Principia team, I can say one thing for sure: it takes a lot more than a big name to win a race like this. You can have all the funding, all the research labs, and all the best professors, but still have a team that doesn't know what it's doing. I'd say experience is a more important factor. When we first started out in '93, our car barely went 30 ft. We've been progressing steadily since then, with a lot of help from other teams and our sponsors. Also, the fact that we don't have an engineering department hasn't seemed to matter much, since there's so much sharing of knowledge amongst the teams. Although all the teams have unique cars with unique designs, we tend to learn a lot from each other's mistakes.