Team Effort Yields Spectacular Finish for Pine Plains Racing Team

One morning last September, a large truck pulled up in front of Stissing Mountain High School and unloaded a series of large and very heavy crates. For the 25 Pine Plains students nervously watching, reality hit.

“We were all shocked to think that we would have to build a race car out of whatever was in those boxes,” said Jackson St. Bernard, a junior. “Our job became real that day.”

Over the next eight months, St. Bernard and his peers learned a multitude of new skills, created marketing presentations, secured sponsors, and carefully constructed a sophisticated race car out of hundreds of parts.

On Friday, May 22, it all came together. The car that the students built, a Ford Cobra, ran for the first time on a race circuit with other race cars built by high schools from as far as Owego, New York.

Pine Plains was one of seven New York state high schools selected to build race cars as part of the Winner’s Circle Project, an Ithaca-based nonprofit STEAM program that supplies the cars, offers technical assistance, and, at the end of the school year, judges the student-built cars on criteria such as performance, build quality, marketing, and creativity.

Some 160 high school students from seven schools participated in this year’s project.

The Winner’s Circle Project was conceived in 2019 by Pius Kayiira, an Ithaca-based educator. “Our goal is to inspire the next generation of innovators with project-based learning, and give students opportunities to succeed in any field,” Kayiira said.

Then, at an awards presentation in Lime Rock, Connecticut, on May 22, he thanked the participating students. “You make us a better world,” he said.

At Pine Plains, as at other schools, the project consisted of two teams: a build team responsible for assembling the racer, and a marketing team responsible for corralling the sponsors without whom the students wouldn’t be able to finish the project, and publicizing their effort.

The Pine Plains build team counted 17 students, with eight students running the marketing team.

The Pine Plains car is a faithful recreation of the legendary Shelby 289 Cobra, the first American car to dominate international road racing in the 1960s. It arrived in Pine Plains as a kit from the manufacturer, Factory Five Racing. The Cobra is a fearsome beast with a bored and stroked small-block Ford that cranks out 425 horsepower, exhaust pipes the size of stovepipes that are loud enough to shake your innards, hulky wheel flares to accommodate the outsize race tires, and an elegant fiberglass composite body. With that amount of power in a car that weighs just 2,400 pounds, it’s a sure bet the Cobra flies.

A race car being a complicated piece of machinery, the Pine Plains students were divided up into smaller teams to tackle individual components and other dedicated tasks.

“The students found their niche and what they were good at,” said tech teacher Jim Benincasa, who supervised the build and is called “Mr. B” by the students. “Some were good at the subframe assembly, others were good at wiring.”

“I worked on the rear suspension,” said Marcel Wojtasik. “And then I was put on the team working on the brake lines. It was really hard. I was incompetent at first. Now I am proud and happy that it all worked out.”

“I never thought I’d get such an opportunity,” said junior Corra DiBlasi, who built the wiring system with two friends. “My only question is: When do I get to drive it?”

Each student spoke of overcoming a personal challenge. “I did not know what the parts were,” said junior Eben Dedrick. “I did not even know how to use the tools. Honestly, it was kind of overwhelming at first.” Dedrick learned how to rivet the fragile aluminum body panels onto the frame. “That took a lot of patience,” he said. “I wasn’t sure we could make it.”

One person who had no reservations was Principal Christopher Boyd. “Knowing my kids and the support they get from this community, I had no doubt at all they would succeed,” Boyd said. “The growth they achieved is just incredible.”

The biggest thrill was hearing the engine roar to life for the first time. “It felt so good to hear that sound and to realize that all our hard work had paid off,” said Dedrick, who is now planning a career in mechanical engineering.

“My parents were blown away to see a bunch of high school kids build a car that looks like this. They were really proud of us.”

Some of the students were initially daunted by the fact that they’d be competing against larger teams, some of whom have been building race cars for years. But, St. Bernard said, “We showed that no matter how small a community, it doesn’t mean we can’t aspire to a lot and achieve a lot.”

While the build team was busy figuring out how to install coilover shock absorbers and other challenges, the marketing team was raising money to keep the project afloat.

With assistance from Jennifer Blackburn, a humanities teacher at the school, the marketing students produced newsletters, a stream of social media posts that garnered more than 72,000 visits @PinePlainsRacing, and a compelling promotional video.

The students were then taught to approach potential sponsors, present the project to them verbally and in a variety of media, answer their questions, and close the deal.

They won the support of 39 sponsors and secured over $20,000 in cash as well as numerous in-kind contributions. Sponsors included Pine Plains Auto Body, which gave the car its striking, historically accurate paint job, the Stanford Fire Department, Halton Construction, Odd Fellows, Hudson Valley Ophthalmology, Spud Shack, R & R Servicenter, Lo Nan Farms, Adams Fairacre Farms, Baroni Recycling, iHeartMedia, and The New Pine Plains Herald.

“I didn’t expect much community engagement,” Benincasa said. “I was wrong. When people found out they started calling and emailing us with all sorts of offers of help. There was so much support. It was a bit overwhelming honestly.”

“We networked a lot,” St. Bernard said.

“At first it was hard to get sponsors’ attention,” said Carol Miguel Jimenez, a junior on the marketing team. “We were a new program and they didn’t know where we were coming from. But the sponsors also knew this is a small town so we wouldn’t scam them or anything like that.”

St. Bernard helped put together the presentations. “I discovered I am more creative than I thought I was,” he said. “We had a problem fitting the radiator. It was me who came up with the idea of mounting it to a bracket.” He now aspires to a career in sports management. “When I’m older,” he said, “I want me and my kid to do a project like this.”

Career training was integral to the project. Among the high points were visits to a BMW design facility in New Jersey and to the Factory Five manufacturing plant in Wareham, Massachusetts.

“The project gave me an opportunity to experience what working in a real company is like,” Miguel Jimenez said, adding she is now inspired to pursue a career in media production. “I learned to appreciate the value of teamwork. Initially it was hard to communicate between the build team and the marketing team, but when we understood each others’ roles, we solved the communication issue. Without teamwork, it would have been chaos.”

Miguel Jimenez designed the logo that depicts a bomber rising into the sky.

“To show optimism,” she explained.

On Friday, the months of hard work came together at Lime Rock Park, the storied racetrack just over the Connecticut border that has challenged America’s greatest racers since 1957.

In a major demonstration of trust in his students, Benincasa drove the gleaming racer with its two white racing stripes around the track with the other cars in the program. Some 6,000 spectators watched and applauded. At the awards ceremony on May 22, Pine Plains won the Winner’s Circle award for visual communications and first prize for build quality.

The team is already planning for next year’s effort. They’ve sold the Cobra to an amateur racer, and will use the proceeds to finance the purchase of next year’s Cobra kit. They’d better be on their game. Word has it archrival Red Hook High School will field a Cobra for 2027.

Will the school administration support the project again?

“Are you kidding?” Boyd said. “You will have to pry this program out of my cold, dead hands.”