While a few clouds loomed over the Cato-Meridian High School team during a national competition for environmentally friendly vehicles, the future looks bright for the second-place winners.

The six high schoolers responsible for Sunpacer, the school's solar-electric hybrid vehicle, faced the loss of the car's motor and the use of half its eight-year-old batteries during the Tour de Sol, a five-day event in Saratoga Springs earlier this month.

Senior Matt Tucker heard a loud pop before seeing “a little puff of black smoke” rise from the engine as he drove the car on the contest's first day.

“I was getting out of that car,” Tucker said.

The senior jumped out of the stopped vehicle, and the students removed the side panels to search for the problem. They found an electrical glitch that killed the motor and fried one of the remaining four batteries.

During last year's event, the steel-framed automobile blew one of its two power packs, leaving the team to compete with only four batteries.

“One of the problems is most of the kids are involved with different things ... and it's difficult to get them together after school,” said Jeff Ostroski, the team's advisor. “We really only had a month and a half to work on it (this year).”

But all that's about to change.

Beginning next fall, the school will offer a class focused on the team's alternative fuel automobile, according to Ostroski. The students plan to replace the motor, add a controller and experiment with different power sources during the school year, he added.

“The kids said that they didn't want to wait to ... get this going (this year),” said Ostroski, who also teaches technology at the high school. “That's a credit to them.”

Tucker hit a top speed of 47 mph in the 950-pound car - which is nearly half the size of a regular-sized vehicle, he said.

In ideal situations, drivers can push the environmentally friendly automobile to speeds of 55 mph on flat road and 60 mph while traveling downhill, he added.

“We thought that we would go and be able to compete. Our expectations were not to win, but just that the kids would have the experience,” Ostroski said. “We need to have a hardship like that to build up the team.”

The team consists of sophomores Sasha Moore, Brandon Rubadou and Ashley Thomas and juniors Scott Mansfield and TK Hayden.

Another group offered an extra motor so the students could continue in the annual contest, Tucker said.

“We were a little bummed, and we were wondering what had happened,” Tucker said. “We were hoping we could still compete.” Prior to last year, the Sunpacer earned the high school first place for the previous five years in the Tour de Sol. “We came in second this year, but we feel that was good considering the circumstances. Last year, we had a melt down of our battery pack which left us with 60 percent range,” Ostroski said.

“Past years, we could travel 70 miles, this year we were down to 30.”

The group couldn't replace the power pack because the supplier, a subsidiary company of General Motors Corp., no longer produces them, said Ostroski.