A group of Billings middle school students is revved up for the National Science Bowl.

They'll compete next week in Washington, D.C., with a flashy red hydrogen fuel cell car they built over the last five months, and the math and science knowledge they have gleaned throughout their academic lives.

The students leave Thursday for an all-expenses-paid trip they earned after winning the regional competition in February. They are the only middle school team from Montana and Wyoming to attend. Helena High is representing Montana in the high school division.

The competition is sponsored by the Department of Energy. More than 5,000 middle school students and more than 13,000 high school students participate. That many kids make for some tough competition, especially considering some kids come from magnet schools where their main focus is math and science.

Their adviser, Pat Kenney, joked he may be more nervous than the kids about going to nationals. This week the girls on the team were worried about getting packed and the boys wondered about entertaining themselves on the long flight.

Kenney is OK with taking on the role of nervous adviser, because the kids need to just enjoy themselves and learn. That's exactly what they've done so far.

The students were "gracious winners," when they won the regional middle school competition in Billings, Kenney said, even though they had the bragging rights of being the first team to win both the academic and fuel cell car categories. They placed fourth in engineering.

"They were just very dignified," Kenney said. "They did it so gracefully."

Kenney teaches physics at Will James, where four of the five team members attend school. The team got a special dispensation from the DOE so that member Mikayla Nelson, a seventh-grader at Riverside, could participate.

Debbie Bomar, a member of last year's team from Riverside, returned this year to serve as assistant coach, which required DOE permission. She is an eighth-grader at Riverside and competed at nationals with Riverside last year. That team won the nation's top engineering and design trophy at nationals and placed sixth overall in the car race.

"Her experience has been tremendously invaluable," Kenney said.

They're busy kids and have put in long hours outside of school to be ready for Science Bowl.

"We all just make it work," said Cate Hanna, the team's captain.

Kenney said extraordinary parental support has helped with the team's progress and ability to spend as much time on the projects as they do.

Each student brings strengths to the team. Nelson and Madelaine Carmody are the main car designers; Hanna has been focusing on the engineering schematics for the car; Miles Otstot is the math guy and Brady Davis focuses on aca-demics including math.

The academic side of the competition includes a team of four that is quizzed on a broad range of questions in a fast-paced Q&A format. Carmody and Nelson rotate a position on the team so that everyone participates.

The race car is a hybrid of earlier models. At 235 grams, it weighs in 30 grams lighter than the car they raced at regionals. That former model won with a time that was 0.2 seconds off the national record, the kids said.

Their car has compact discs for back wheels and plastic front wheels. The disks will be wrapped in rubber tubing, with slits for traction. Lined up between the wheels are four ping pong balls that serve as oxygen and hydrogen storage units.

The design maxes out the 8-volt cell to produce 9 volts of power. In the competition, the car will race on a 10-meter track. They expect a time of about 3.5 seconds and each of them added "hopefully faster."

Not all of the students' time in Washington will be spent in competition. They'll visit the National Mall and plan to see the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and the Holocaust Memorial Museum.