The VA250 Car Project didn’t need to shift gears and go over 250 mph, as it and its crew made a pit stop in Tullahoma earlier this month to connect motorsports, engineering and innovation to the community.

The VA250 Car Project is a national motorsports, engineering, and STEM initiative created to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary. The hand-built VA250 car, which was built in Martinsville, Va., reached 253 MPH at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in March 2026, establishing a new stock car land-speed record.

The VA250 stock car’s first stop was at Arnold Air Force Base on Thursday, Sept. 10, where the crew, consisting of University of Virginia (UVA) students Nived Sajay, a senior majoring in mechanical engineering; Benjamin Long, a junior majoring in mechanical engineering; Leila Ramey, a sophomore majoring in mechanical engineering; and Trey Burnett, a sophomore majoring in computer engineering, representing Virginia Motorsports, a studentled engineering program at the University of Virginia. During their visit at the base, the students interacted with engineers, machinists, and other members of the base, as well as took a tour of some of the machinery shops and the wind tunnels.

“It was honestly really amazing to see all of the engineering that goes into these things,” Ramey said. “They really went into detail and were able to explain stuff to us, which was amazing for us to be able to see kind of how it gets applied in a real-world setting.”

Burnett said the biggest thing about the trip to the base was seeing what the process they’ve been doing looked like on a macro scale.

“It was quite eye-opening to see a lot of the same stuff that we do in our machine shop, but taken to the next level that’s way larger and at a way bigger scale,” Burnett said.

Sanjay said his personal favorite part of the tour was seeing a horizontal test stand for solid rocket motors.

“As an aspiring aerospace engineer,” Sanjay said, “that was a pretty cool thing to see. It was really inspiring to go back to UVA and hunker down in my classes, so that I can hopefully participate in something like that someday.”

Long added that coming from university and seeing the sheer scale of what’s happening at the Air Force base was both incredible and extremely eyeopening.

“I think it’s very easy to not sort of understand the scale that you sometimes work at in a professional aerospace career,” Long said. “Getting able to tour around these facilities and seeing how real professionals do it has been an amazing opportunity for us since we’re just undergrads.”

The team enjoyed lunch at the University of Tennessee Space Institute, where Executive Director Dr. John Schmisseur spent time with the team to discuss engineering, education and the future of aerospace and engineering careers. The conversation of careers in engineering moved over to the next day on Friday, Sept. 11, where the team visited Tullahoma High School and talked with the high school students, where the UVA students spoke about their experiences of pursuing engineering at the university level and to get hands-on with engineering projects like the VA250 stock car.

After their trip to the high school, the VA250 stock car and crew made one last stop at the Hands-On Science Center, where the team spent the rest of the day engaging with students and the community about the car and doing hands-on demonstrations and simulations. The UVA students shared the sentiment that they wished had something similar to the science center.

“I really appreciate that they’re doing all of this STEM outreach and building centers like this that encourage kids to be interested in these types of things,” Ramey said. “I think personally, as someone who kind of grew up always loving these types of things, that it’s great for the community.”

“Younger me would, me would’ve also loved this,” Burnett followed up. “I went to the science museum a lot in Richmond when growing up. I think it’s a great place for young people to just kind of let their curiosity go free and see what they want to do and see if this is something that interests them as a career.”

Sanjay agreed with both Ramey and Burnett’s thoughts on the science center, and Long said going to places like the National Space Museum helped solidify his interests into aerospace engineering.

“Having something like this in Tullahoma is incredible for younger kids and adults as well,” Long said.

As for the lessons they learned along the way, the UVA students shared that the biggest factor in any project, ranging from the VA250 stock car to the projects are Arnold Air Force Base, is the people.

“The project is only as good as the team of people who are working on it,” Sanjay said. “If you can get some tenacious, hungry engineers to work on a project together, and get them to really hunker down and make something good–that’s what Joey did with his team with the VA 250 car, and they were able to pull it off. That’s super inspiring for us, and we’re building our own team to try and do something similar.”

Riding with the UVA students was Joey Arrington, former NASCAR driver, team owner, crew chief and owner/founder of Arrington Manufacturing, Inc. As for his involvement with the VA250 project, Arrington said he was approached by the state of Virginia and UVA about he and his team could help celebrate America’s 250th birthday.

“‘Well, the only thing I have to offer is I can make noise,’” Arrington recalled. “He said, ‘Okay, what, what does that mean?’ So, I told him, ‘You know, we set the land speed… We built the engine that set the land speed record in 2006. Well, I can build a car and break that record, and I’m pretty confident that we can run 250 or faster.’” After he was able to secure the funding, Arrington and his team, along with the UVA students, got to work and in March this year, they took the car to Cape Canaveral and broke the record as the drove 253 mph. Arrington admitted that he and his crew were introduced to the UVA students around January and February, but after looking over their data, he said they were spot on what the engineers working the wind tunnels told him.

“They’ve done a great job at confirming what we were told earlier,” Arrington said. “We got all the confidence that we can go back, uh, hopefully early part of next year and do 270.”

As for his experience coming down to Tullahoma and visiting the area, Arrington said he was surprised by the interest from all parties, ranging from the engineers at the Air Force base to high schools to the local men and women who love old cars. When asked if the stock car can achieve the next goal of 270 mph, he said that would be fairly easy.

“Anything after (270) we’ve got to concentrate on traction,” he said. “My goal is sometime before 75, which is not far away, to run 300.”

As for any final thoughts and comments, Arrington just had one piece of advice: stay in school.

“Pursue your education,” Arrington stated. “When you walk out of school, have one thing or certificate in your hand of some type of trade. At least take the time, discipline yourself to walk out of there with something in your hands that says, ‘I can do this.’”

For more information about the VA250 project, visit VA250CarProject.com.