In Formula One, races aren’t won by refusing to stop, they’re won in the pit lane, by teams disciplined enough to pause, recalibrate, and get back on track smarter than before. At Vulcan GP, we learned that sustainability works the same way; it’s not the sprint that matters, it’s what happens in the pit lane.
Long before we ever boarded a flight to the STEM Racing National Finals, our race had already begun in a garage powered by the sun. Our Design Engineer Agastya’s home doubled as our workshop, and it ran largely on solar energy. Every wing we modelled, every axle we 3D-printed, drew its electricity from panels on a rooftop rather than a grid built on fossil fuels. It felt fitting: a car built for speed, powered by something patient.
Our second pit stop was communication. Instead of driving across the city for every meeting, we raced through Google Meet and Zoom, cutting out the small, repeated journeys that add up invisibly. Our third was money – we ran a zero-budget marketing strategy and leaned on school-provided infrastructure, choosing judicious spending over waste, and built long-term partnerships with CHIREC, Origo Commodities and BattleGear instead of one-off sponsorships that vanish after a single race weekend. Our fourth was people. At CHIREC, we ran outreach sessions teaching younger students CAD and aerodynamics, treating sustainability as something social, not just environmental.
Then came the section of track we couldn’t redesign: the flight from Hyderabad to Delhi. We shaved off what emissions we could at ground level, pre-booking electric taxis on both ends of the journey, but the sky itself offered no such option.
Seven of us (six teammates and one adult companion) needed to cover 2,500 km round trip. No amount of clever engineering removes emissions from economy air travel. So instead of looking away, we did what engineers do – we measured it. At 0.27 kg of CO2 per passenger-kilometre, one round trip ticket produced 675 kg of CO2. Multiplied across all seven of us, our travel added up to 4,725 kg of carbon. We priced it against India’s voluntary carbon offset rate of Rs 600 per tonne, arriving at an amount of INR 2,835 to offset an entire team’s journey to Nationals.
That number became the foundation of Vulcan Zero, our internal pledge to invest in carbon offsetting rather than pretend the emissions didn’t exist. Between our solar-powered garage, our virtual meetings, our lean finances, and our education outreach, we found ourselves quietly advancing six of the UN’s seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs 4, 7, 9, 12, 13, and 17).
I now know sustainability was never about avoiding every emission, it’s about refusing to let any of them go uncounted, and making sure every pit stop before and after the race leaves something better behind.
