KINSTON - For one second, as the blue Lotus Elise takes off for a test run around the parking lot, five engineering students forget the Coke can one of them left on the engine block.

Then the can tips over, and they shout a collective "Whoa!"

Fizzy brown cola gurgles onto three or four white Mac Mini computers, two black ethernet adapter boxes and a multicolor tangle of cables packed in the sports car's engine compartment. The driver hits the brakes.

Grayson Randall lets out a chuckle.

"China Syndrome! China Syndrome!" he cries, eyes twinkling, as the students grab towels to mop up their mistake. Randall is recalling the 1979 Jane Fonda movie about what can happen when a careless engineer spills cola in a nuclear plant control room: near meltdown.

Randall is president of Insight Racing, a volunteer team of students and engineers that has spent four years preparing for a robot-car contest called the DARPA Grand Challenge. The Pentagon-sponsored competition, with $3.5 million in prizes, will culminate over the next two weeks at an abandoned air base in California.

A dozen team members are spending one last weekend tinkering with the little Lotus, nicknamed Lone Wolf, at a Kinston airport hangar. Their leader handles the soda spill calmly, and he makes sure they learn from it.

"Remember that drinks and computers don't go well together," says Randall, 52, of Cary. "Before you move the car, check for loose tools and drinks and stuff. Get a screwdriver rolling around, and it could cause a lot of damage."

In his day job as a senior software engineer at IBM, Randall directs teams of professional programmers in software development projects. He has nine patents to his credit.

He spends nights and weekends working with high school and college students. Although he has tapped the skills of professionals in the Triangle and other states, students form the heart of his robot car venture.

For about six years, Randall mentored a Southeast Raleigh High School robotics team that was one of the top winners out of 880 teams in a 2004 international competition.

"I can guarantee you that, without Grayson's drive, they would never have achieved what they achieved," says Tom K. Miller, a vice provost at NCSU. "It had a huge impact on a number of the students."

Some of them, including Miller's son, Kenan, went on to study engineering at N.C. State University. In 2003, when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced its competition to help design robotic vehicles for use on battlefields, Randall assembled a team of NCSU students he had mentored at Southeast Raleigh High.

"I started thinking it would be a fun project to take on," he says. "I had the opportunity to go hand-pick some of my best students."

Real-world software

The Lone Wolf effort has also included the work of a few dozen computer science undergraduates. Since 2004, Randall has commissioned nine software projects through a program that involves seniors in real-world corporate assignments.

"After he's worked all day with IBM, in the evening he comes over to the campus, and he'll sit down with a group of students to lay it out," says Robert J. Fornaro, who directs NCSU's Senior Design Center. "In his mind, he has carved up everything, and what he has to do to get leverage out of the student teams."

Students in Fornaro's program have designed programs to track the robot car, use lasers to detect obstacles, run the car's complicated computer network and chart the quickest, safest path to its destination.

Randall won national recognition for his work with students in September. He received a "citation of honor" from IEEE-USA, a professional engineering group with 235,000 members.

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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