Belgium Solar Team Trains At St. Cloud State, Wins American Solar Challenge

(KNSI) – The world-champion solar car team that spent four weeks at St. Cloud State University last summer has won the American Solar Challenge, becoming the first European team ever to take the title.

The Innoptus Solar Team, 11 engineering students from KU Leuven in Belgium, beat a field of more than 20 teams in the eight-day race from Minneapolis to Amarillo, Texas. Second place went to a Dutch team from TU Delft, the reigning world champion and the rival Innoptus told KNSI News in July it came to America to beat. Delft was camped on the same St. Cloud State campus during training.

The win started in the Granite City. Innoptus arrived in June and spent a month on campus fine-tuning its car, the Infinite Apollo. The team picked St. Cloud because it sits roughly halfway between the qualifying event at Brainerd International Raceway and the starting line at the University of Minnesota. The 400-pound car is about a tenth the weight of a typical electric car and can travel roughly 300 miles on battery alone.

The race is scored on distance rather than speed, so teams add closed-loop miles when conditions allow. Innoptus covered about 2,670 miles across eight states, following the Great River Road along the Mississippi to St. Louis and then historic Route 66 south through extreme heat. The team qualified third at Brainerd, moved up to second, and took the lead outright on the fifth day.

Innoptus is already back at work in Belgium. Twenty-three new students have joined to build the team’s next car for the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge in Australia in 2027. Before that, the team defends its European title September 19th and 20th at Circuit Zolder in Belgium, a 24-hour race with 29 solar cars entered. Innoptus will run two of them.

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