No regrets despite Indy crash

Waterloo students fail to finish, but 'still learned a whole lot' at historic autonomous race. Months of hard work ended with a disappointing crash for two University of Waterloo students during a historic autonomous vehicle race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS) on Saturday afternoon. A million-dollar, self-driving racecar developed by master's students Brian Mao and Ben Zhang with teammates from three U.S. universities hadn't completed its warmup lap when a GPS failure led to an unscheduled left turn into an infield wall at the famed home of the Indianapolis 500. But as they assessed the damage, analyzed what went wrong and watched the winning German team take the US $1-million top prize in the first Indy Autonomous Challenge with an average speed of almost 136 miles per hour (mph), they had no regrets. Their team, the only student-led entry in the nine-car final, decided to go for it despite having GPS issues earlier in the day. In all, four teams crashed or failed to complete the race with similar problems. "Of course there are some tears, some sadness, but we still feel good that we had the courage to try pushing the limits of what we could do," said Mao (BASc '20), who earned an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering at Waterloo and is now working towards a master's degree in applied mathematics.