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St. Mary's senior wins national auto design competition Delaney Barr's design of a Mars vehicle earned her national recognition and a scholarship. Photo by Christin Szczesniak. Sunday Jan 15, 2017 at 12:01 AM Ryan Pfeil Mail Tribune @RyanPfeil Picture this: It's a few decades from now, and Earth has colonized Mars. During the day, travel over the rocky, windswept terrain is done in specialized all-terrain vehicles, rugged-looking vessels that have a wide stance and a good amount of clearance to handle the unpaved Martian rock fields. It's a design 17-year-old Delaney Barr has had in her head since summer 2016, and fully rendered on paper, it recently landed her top honors at a national auto design competition. Her vehicle design for the Ford Bronco M — "M" for Mars — received the Design For the Future Award at the Motor City Auto Industry Night in Detroit, the launch event to the North American Auto Show, this past week. "It was phenomenal," Barr said. "It was a dream come true." Barr, a St. Mary's School senior and Gold Hill resident, was one of four student automobile design finalists selected for the student design competition sponsored by the Ford Motor Company and Lawrence Technology University outside Detroit. In the end, she earned the top prize, a $12,000 annual scholarship to LTU's transportation design program and also got to attend the main auto show. Barr's journey to Mars began last summer, when she attended an auto design camp at LTU. A fan of cars since childhood, she recently grew interested in the design component after discovering the careers available in that industry. One of the college camp's students, a previous Design For The Future Award recipient, recommended she try for it. Entrants were asked to design an adventure vehicle for the future. Barr got started in August. A participant on St. Mary's robotics team, she and her teammates have been mentored by Matt Heverly, a former Medford resident who now works on the Mars rover program at NASA'S Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Her vehicle ideas started there. "Every time we got to robotics, we're always kind of thinking about Mars and how it's kind of the next frontier," Barr said. "I just thought a really cool adventure would be a weekend on Mars." She got to work, doing research on the planet's terrain and how that would play into a design that would work well on the surface. She also researched futuristic art and the wide stances on rainforest beetles and other insects and how that assists them while traveling. She completed her design in late October, complete with an advertising mockup. "The Jones family is not limited by roads anymore," a mock ad on her presentation reads, complete with a photo of a smiling mother, father and child. "While you might be limited by the Earth, they are taking their kids to see the landscapes of Mars. And the Bronco M edition is the only car to take them there." Keith Nagara, LTU transportation design program director and competition official, said hundreds of students submitted entries from across the country and world, but Barr's and the three other entrant finalists stood out. "(Barr's) at that level where she's thinking really creatively and setting the benchmark really high for herself," Nagara said. "It was also the level of her design work and the execution of her sketch work." Barr will attend LTU in the fall, where her design work will continue. After that, who knows? Someday the Bronco M may end up being standard issue for getting from A to B on Mars. "The feeling (of that) would be unexplainable. It would be the most amazing thing I could ever hope for," Barr said. "To have something like this be able to go on Mars in the future would be a dream come true." Reach reporter Ryan Pfeil at 541-776-4468 or [email protected]. Follow him at www.twitter.com/ryanpfeil.