Seventy-eight ninth graders from Del Valle High School in Texas spent last weekend not in a classroom but inside the garages at Circuit of the Americas, building cars under strict rulesets, simulating pit stops, and pitching sponsorship plans to GM executives.
The program, called “Driven to Explore,” ran alongside the Lone Star Le Mans round of the FIA World Endurance Championship. GM Motorsports partnered with Austin Community College’s Make It Center and WEC officials to deliver five structured modules tied directly to the students’ school curriculum.
Those modules ranged from tire science, presented by Michelin, to a Sphero Pit Lane Challenge and a media exercise called Media Moguls. Students also toured the paddock alongside Cadillac Hertz Team JOTA and TF Sport crews. They then watched a live practice session with prototype and GT machinery circling the 3.4-mile track.
The effort is run by GM Motorsports’ K-12 STEM IMPACT group, co-led by Robert Binns and Kenna Edwards. It started over three years ago with simple classroom talks. It has since expanded to trackside experiences at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Virginia International Raceway, and now COTA.
“Each team member has a personal story of how a camp or mentor inspired their own STEM career,” Binns said. “The IMPACT group is our opportunity to give back and inspire the next generation to follow.”
The structure is worth examining. These were not feel-good photo ops where kids pose next to a race car and go home with a lanyard. Students had to build a competitive car within a defined ruleset, execute a simulated pit stop as a team, and present a business and sponsorship plan to GM program leadership.
That last exercise, the pitch, is the kind of work most college business majors never attempt.
Edwards framed the broader ambition. “Motorsport presents a tremendous range of opportunities for young individuals and Driven to Explore allows them a window into what is possible.”
Binns was more specific about the endgame. “I look forward to the day when an intern or new hire joins GM Motorsports because they were inspired by the work of this group.”
That line reveals the quiet logic beneath the outreach. GM is investing in a future talent pipeline. The automaker’s motorsport footprint is growing fast, with Cadillac running factory-backed prototypes in WEC and preparing its F1 entry for 2026.
The engineering workforce required to sustain that expansion does not materialize from nowhere. You plant seeds early. You plant them in public schools five miles from the racetrack.
Del Valle High School sits in a working-class district on Austin’s southeastern edge. It is not a feeder school for engineering programs. The median household income in the area trails the Austin metro average by a wide margin. These are exactly the students who rarely see the inside of a professional racing paddock.
Automakers have run community outreach programs for decades. Most amount to glorified PR exercises, a check, a banner, a paragraph in a sustainability report. What sets this apart is the curriculum integration, the competitive structure, and the direct connection to professionals doing the work in real time.
Whether any of those 78 freshmen end up designing aero packages or managing logistics for a race team remains to be seen. But they now know those jobs exist, and they spent a weekend learning what it takes to do them.
Three years ago, GM Motorsports’ STEM group was a small team running classroom visits. Now it is embedded in the WEC calendar, running structured programs at major circuits across the country, and growing.
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