All-girl racing team from Brownsville takes on Taladega Superspeedway

An all-girl racing team from Oliveira Middle School basked in the spotlight this week after a third-place finish in the Greenpower USA national finals May 1-4 at Taladega Superspeedway outside Birmingham, Alabama.

The team came within a whisker of the F24 national champion and hopes to return next year, team co-sponsor Jorge Jasso told the Brownsville ISD Board of Trustees during a recognition round at Tuesday’s board meeting.

Greenpower USA is a hands-on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, or STEM, program for students in grades 4-12. It is designed to captivate students academically while developing crucial employability skills, the program’s website says.

Greenpower USA provides a customizable standards-aligned curriculum, high quality car kits, parts and a race schedule that this year included races in McAllen, San Benito, Weslaco, Elsa and Brownsville.

At Taladega, the competition is divided into two 90-minute heats.

“During the first heat and the first lap it’s an all-go. You see it in Indy, you see it in F1. Everybody’s going. It’s one of those where you either move out of the way if you don’t have power or they’re going to move you out of the way,” Jasso said.

Because of the rankings, Oliveira started from Gate 4 in the first heat. As driver Chloe Ovalle was making the first turn a car ran into the back of her car, breaking four spokes on one of the wheels, Jasso said.

“How they were able to keep that car running for, at that point 89 minutes, and for it to perform at the level it did, and again, I’m a science teacher and I can’t explain it today. So, during the first heat we ended up tied for second We were at the winning team, which has won the national title seven times back-to-back, they’re basically a junior NASCAR team, they had 35 laps. We completed 34, so at that point we were tied at second going into the Saturday heat,” he said.

The car was involved in a wreck on Saturday, so the team thought it was out of the running, but the other teams “didn’t perform as well as we thought they did” Jasso said.

Jasso said he was sitting at the awards ceremony contemplating what he was going to tell the team about overcoming adversity when Oliveira was announced as the third-place winner.

Everybody started saying who is Oliveira and where are they from? “Brownsville. Where”s that?”

“Well, I’m glad to say that they know who Oliveira is. They know where Brownsville’s at. And the questions have already started, you know, are you coming back next year? And the answer is we will. The national championship coach came up to me and he’s like ‘Hey, we love competition, and nobody’s been able to give it to us like you guys did.’ And the fact that these girls, they just went out there and performed to the best, and we had them. When I say we had them, they were on the ropes and they knew that. He knew that, so he knows that we’re coming,” Jasso said.

The team includes Chloe Ovalle, Edelyn Jones, Valeria Castro, Seren Araiza, Megan De Leon, Aimee Gaytan, America Garza, and Argentina Garza. Besides drivers, it includes a pit crew and strategists who keep the drivers informed of conditions during races.

Jasso and Nancy Halasz are the coaches.

Ovalle, Jones and Castro are eighth graders, so they’re moving on to the high schools.

Jasso took a picture of team members holding hands on the plane heading back to Brownsville, which he said says a lot about the teamwork involved in getting a car to the finals.

Jasso said recruitment for the team starts the year before. Once the team is selected, he and Halasz decide who’s going to be the pit crew, the strategists and the drivers.

There are practice sessions doing figure eights and donuts on a course by the football field at Oliveira to determine whether they have fear and how level-headed they are.

“At these races, we race against high school and university teams, so the drivers have to have a cool and level head. And of course, not only are they driving, but they have to be able to communicate with the strategists and let them know how the car’s performing,” Jasso said, adding that on a straightaway the cars can go as fast as 30 mph.

Ovalle, a driver, said she has to keep her eye on the temperature to make sure the battery doesn’t overheat, as well as the mirrors for the cars behind, and the voltage. The cars are electric, with two 12-volt batteries.

“We’ve gotta make sure the car’s running smoothly,” she said.

As far as being recognized, Castro and Ovalle said they weren’t zoned to Oliveira and if they wouldn’t have decided to enroll there they wouldn’t have gotten to experience the Greenpower program.

“It opened my love for engineering, and now I want to pursue a career in engineering,” Ovalle said.

“It was a spark for something we didn’t know,” Castro said.

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