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MAYODAN — The white 1988  Mustang parked inside the teaching garage at McMichael High School isn’t much to look at.

It could use a paint job, and the windshield is cracked. To open the driver’s side door, you have to fiddle with the handle. But when senior Michael Clark  hops into the driver’s seat to crank it up, he grins like a Cheshire cat.

Quiet accompanies Clark’s turn of the ignition, which means the car is working perfectly fine. Just as an electric vehicle should.

“All you hear is the road,” Clark said.

Clark and his friend and classmate, Ben Fulp,  converted the Mustang to a 96-volt  electric car in their last semester of school. It can reach speeds of 65-70  mph, Clark said.

“It is street legal, and it’s classified as an electric vehicle by the DMV,” said Fulp, also a senior.

Fulp presented the car as his senior graduation project. The car claimed Rookie of the Year honors at the SMARTT Challenge  competition last month in Raleigh. The national event educates young people about alternative fuels. Students from various states presented electric cars they had built.

Rookie of the Year is the highest honor a school entering the competition for the first time can receive, said John Butler,  the McMichael students’ technology teacher.

“I was just glad to get it running. That was my big goal for it,” Clark said.

The car also claimed third  place in electrical troubleshooting and second  place in oral presentation, Butler said. The Mustang won first  place in what Butler called the biggest event: auto cross. He likened it to downhill skiing and said the event tests a car’s performance.

Butler bought the car off Craigs-list for about $325,  ordered the parts needed for the project, and taught Fulp and Clark what they needed to know. The guys did all the hard work, including their own wiring.

“I would just pretty much let them know what to do for the day, and then they would do it,” Butler said. “And if they had any problems, they would come see me.”

But a grade and an award aren’t the most important things Fulp and Clark got out of the project. They said they also had a lot of fun, even though they worked on weekends and during spring break to get the car ready for competition.

“We’ve dumped a lot of our personal time into it,” Fulp said.

The students also did some other fine-tuning of the car, such as adding a stiffer spring to the throttle pedal and disassembling the windshield wiper motor and cleaning it. “It rides like a charm now,” Clark said.

Tinkering with cars isn’t something the young men first picked up in a classroom. Fulp used to watch his father, a mechanic, work on cars. Clark said he received his first truck at age 15  and fixed it up.

After graduation, Clark said he’s joining the Air Force and wants to become an auto mechanic. Fulp plans to enroll at Rockingham Community College to study machining.

And the car? Butler said it will be used to train other students at McMichael to build electric vehicles.

Contact Jonnelle Davis at 627-4881, Ext. 126, or jonnelle.davis@news-record.com