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The main thing Travanti Davenport and Sevon Tinsley want you to understand about “The Beast” is that it was made from scratch with healthy doses of pluck and teamwork.

The chassis? Built around the gate from a discarded dog fence, rescued from the trash by one of the kids in Dudley High School’s automotive technology program.

“We just snatched the part you open up, used it for our base and went from there,” Davenport said of the undercarriage for their battery-powered car with the ferocious nickname.

The doors? Made from the lids of some worn-out laundry tubs. The metal framing under the painted, cardboard body? A junked vacuum hose “just laying around the shop, so we took it apart.”

But the essential ingredient in their made-from-scratch project was teamwork, said Tinsley, who, like Davenport, is a junior at Dudley this year.

“It was a lot of brainstorming, a lot of everybody just giving a helping hand with that they know,” he said. “It was risk taking, lots of experiments.”

The experiments panned out big for Davenport, Tinsley and the other students in teacher Ricky Lewis’ automotive classes. Indeed, The Beast and another plug-in car they built recently took them all the way to Houston — sort of.

The kids didn’t drive the cars all that way. But the innovative vehicles were their tickets to Shell Oil Company’s annual Eco-marathon for high-mileage vehicles built by high school and college students.

The two cars failed to win any medals, but consider the competition. The Shell contest attracted entries from across the United States and Canada, including teams from such engineering-oriented schools as Penn State and Purdue universities.

“They spent a tremendous amount of money on theirs,” said Lewis, who has taught automotive technology at Dudley since 2005. “I really felt proud when I thought about us being there, too, and we only spent $150.”

The students had the chance to display their cars, run them on the test track and rub shoulders with faculty and students from the nation’s top technology schools.

“I think that really opened their eyes to the possibilities,” said Jack Martin of Burlington, who accompanied the team to Houston and who teaches technology courses at Appalachian State University and Alamance Community College.

Some of the major schools had scholarships available and “they encouraged the kids to come talk to them,” said Martin, also a leader in the Triad Electric Vehicle Association that counts the Dudley program among its members.

Students in the extracurricular program at Dudley aren’t those who normally attract the attention of big schools, Lewis said.

Some struggle in a normal classroom setting. Some are from immigrant families in which parents speak English haltingly.

But they are mechanically gifted. Give them a challenge, say mixing traditional go-cart mechanics with newer, electric technology and imaginative recycling: They excel.

And they really took to the Shell project, Lewis said, building the cars over the past five months after school in the shop.
“Seriously, I have to run them off when it’s time to quit,” Lewis said.

They found some of their classroom education indispensable as they moved ahead. For example, early on, Lewis assigned sophomore Omar Acuña the job of working out a fairly complicated equation to determine the height of their second car — to be sure of the so-called “prototype” vehicle’s stability.

Acuña said math is not his favorite subject, but he nailed the calculations. “I checked behind him with his math teacher and he got it right,” Lewis said.

Then there’s Barry Oodee, a Nigerian immigrant who turned out to be the team’s recycling star, always coming up with new ways of reusing scrap metal and other materials. People in his old country are forced to make do with what’s at hand, he explained.

The team also includes several students of Vietnamese origin who brought their unique talents to the table, Lewis said: “I really like the multicultural thing we have going here.”

Later this month, the team plans to take the cars to another competition in Roanoke Rapids at the N.C. Center for Automotive Research.

And next year, Lewis’ after-school program in alternative vehicle design and construction will become part of Dudley’s curriculum during the normal school day, on a pilot basis, Lewis said.

His students are amazed at the prospect of having a regular class so suited to their skills and interests. “I never thought I was going to be working like this,” said Liet Rmah, a Vietnamese student.

“Well, you haven’t seen anything yet,” Lewis replied. “We’re going to take it even higher.”

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