[Cory]

There was a local soap box derby type race held up until 2001 here in the Bay Area as a fundraiser for a nonprofit that featured something similar. They had a high school division and a corporate division. Most of the local FRC teams competed in it. Compaq, Hitachi, HP, KPCB, Sun, and pretty much every other influential tech/VC company in Silicon Valley participated.

The lengths that the corporate teams went to to outdo each other were pretty ridiculous. They had teams of engineers working on them full time, some did wind tunnel testing, one had 2 members of the US Olympic bobsled team as their pushers at the beginning. I can't even imagine how much money they spent each year.