FRANKLIN TOWNSHIP – Just a handful of teams each year have the audacity to enter the ASE Clean Snowmobile Challenge’s Zero Emissions event, and far fewer pass the safety inspection that qualifies them to actually run their sleds in competition. So Michigan Tech’s team was ecstatic when they finally passed safety inspection and got their electric sled out on the slush Thursday.

“We qualified about three, four hours ago,” team member Anthony Rettig said at the subjective handling course at Michigan Tech’s Keweenaw Research Center, where Tech’s sled was being put through its paces. “It’s the first time for three years at least the electric has been on the track.”

In fact, records show it’s the first time ever Tech has qualified to run in live test events. Most years, said Rettig, only one team passes the safety inspection. Records show years when no team qualified.

This year, four days into the event, Tech is just the second of six entrants to qualify, behind last year’s winners the Lapland School of Applied Sciences from Finland, whose previous sled was immediately put to work in the Arctic by the National Science Foundation.

Getting to the test course is “just relaxing,” said Rettig. “We’ve done 7 a.m. to midnights every day. Every time one thing got fixed, another popped up.”

The high bar to qualify for electric test competition isn’t just because challenge organizers are mean, a discouraged Clarkson University team member admitted earlier in the week. It’s actually because of the high risk associated with any mistakes on an electric sled, with extremely high voltage under the butt and water – snow – surrounding riders as far as the eye can see.

Now Tech is cheering on the electric teams behind it, and lending a hand as necessary, in the cooperative problem-solving spirit that’s long been a hallmark of the challenge.

“We’ve been working hand-in-hand with the other teams,” said Tech zero-E team member Ethan Weimken. “We had a part that was lost in the mail, and someone shipped it for us from another campus. “A day later we were finding stuff around here for them.”