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Members of the BYU Supermileage club are pictured wiht their vehicle.

Nate Edwards, BYU Photo

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The BYU Supermileage club's vehicle is shown.

Nate Edwards, BYU Photo

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The Brigham Young University Supermileage club’s primary objective each year is to maximize vehicle fuel efficiency.

Along the way, the team has become efficient winners.

For the third time in the last four years, the group of BYU engineering students won the Shell Eco Marathon by creating a vehicle that can travel 2,145 miles on a single gallon of fuel — a length that could nearly get you from Provo to New York City.

The team also won the overall Global Championship for best team among nearly 80 competitors from several countries and were invited to compete at the 2027 global championship in Qatar.

“We worked so hard and I’m grateful for all the members of the team and their commitment,” BYU Supermileage team club president Camille Nobrega said in a BYU news release. “As we got closer to the competition, it didn’t feel difficult to put in a few more hours here and there because of the people around me.”

For the competition at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the team brought a prototype of an internal combustion vehicle that was an iteration of a previous design, according to second-year mechanical engineering student Kenji Prince.

The goal was to create a vehicle that needs little effort to move forward. They converted the engine to use ethanol, reduced the friction on their wheels and used a single piston in the engine, Prince told the Daily Herald. The vehicle itself is tiny, requiring the driver to lie down in it in a luge-like position.

“Everything we do to try to improve of the vehicle was to figure out what’s slowing it down, and how can we make it and go a little bit further with a little bit less effort,” Prince said.

The vehicle was driven four laps around the speedway, or 10 miles. Then, event organizers looked at how much fuel was used and calculated how far it could go with a full gallon. BYU defeated the second-place team by 122 miles per gallon and the third-place team by almost 900 miles per gallon.

“It’s been really awesome to be a part of and to be able to go to the competition with the team has been such an awesome experience,” Prince said. “It was honestly everybody’s effort to make this happen, like everyone put a really meaningful contribution to the project for sure.”

The positive result was just the latest for a BYU club that is doing its part to advance fuel innovation in the world.

“I think there’s a really bright future for automotive vehicles,” Prince said. “There will be innovation on the combustion engine route, and also other forms of energy,” he said.