Orange Vevor ducting hoses outlined a track used by students from different clubs to host the first self-driving car race at UCF in the L3Harris Engineering Center Friday night. “We literally expected our car to, like, blow up,” Sreemahesh Tadepalli, junior aerospace engineering, said. “We weren't expecting anything, and we got the fastest lap.” The race was measured by which group’s vehicle completed the most laps and had the shortest amount of time completing those laps. Tadepalli and his group’s vehicle, named “Gurt” after a friend’s nickname, raced 17 laps, with one of the laps completed in the shortest amount of time in the grand prix, which was about 14 seconds. His group represented the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. “Ours wasn’t even working like two hours ago,” Tadepalli said. The team split itself into three groups to create an autonomous vehicle: mechanical, software, and electrical. Tadepalli said the team wanted to challenge themselves to use the cheapest materials and use “the most bare bones stuff to make the best car.” When other groups used higher-level computers, Tadepalli said he and his team used a Pi 4, a cheaper single-board computer used for the software. Like Tadepalli, students said they lost many hours of sleep working to program, design, and build their autonomous vehicles, meaning they use software and sensors to move on their own. “They spent like three nights doing this, no sleep, only Taco Bell,” Tadepalli said. “I just know it was an absolute living hell.” Israel Charles, coordinator of the AI Racers, said he was up until about 3 a.m. the day of the race, helping and guiding the teams since some of the vehicles still did not work properly. “At first, it seemed like they were moving really slow, but eventually, it started speeding up,” Charles