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Randall's son, Mike, is the last Southeast Raleigh High veteran still on the Insight team. Most of the 30 to 50 students in the Southeast robotics program each year go on to pursue engineering and related fields in college.

"Something like 98 percent of our students went on to four-year programs, and almost 80 percent of them were in fields of science and technology, which are phenomenal figures," he says.

Cool under pressure

Today, Insight Racing has a far-flung team of 50 contributors, all unpaid, with a core of about 10 professionals and 10 students.

They were in Kinston on a blazing hot June day when Lone Wolf had its own near-meltdown.

Three DARPA judges were there to decide whether Insight Racing would advance to the next round of competition. They gave Randall's team four hours to show that the Lotus could negotiate a four-way stop and handle other traffic maneuvers.

When temperatures inside the car reached 100 degrees, the computers shut down and Lone Wolf stopped cold. Insight Racing would be eliminated if the car could not finish its tasks. The DARPA judges gave Randall 20 minutes to solve the problem.

The car wasn't producing enough cold air to combat the heat. Like the NASA engineers who improvised a life-saving solution for astronauts on a 1970 moon mission, Randall's young team had to stay cool and think fast.

"It was done in about 15 minutes with duct tape -- and just like Apollo 13," says Simon Cobb of Lotus Engineering. "That was hugely indicative of the way Grayson works."

"He said, 'Just take your time and do your best,' " says Amit Bhatia, a doctoral student and team member since 2005. "If you panic, you'll end up making mistakes."

Lone Wolf will start six days of semifinal competition Friday with 34 other driverless cars at the former George Air Force Base in Victorville, Calif. The top 20 teams will meet Nov. 3 for the final 60-mile event, which DARPA calls a simulated military supply mission in a mock urban setting, complete with moving traffic and other obstacles.

The dozens of students who have helped teach Lone Wolf to drive are building foundations for rewarding careers in engineering, Randall says.

"This whole project, it's been just fabulous to have the students work through these issues," he says. About 10 students will make the trip to California.

"They'll remember this for the rest of their lives," he says. "That will [help them] understand how the schooling that they're doing gets applied in a real-life situation -- and you just get excited about it."

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