Perhaps the most striking aspect of the SA Solar Challenge, which finished in Pretoria at the weekend, was the sheer logistics involved. Each of the 13 entries had at least two back-up vehicles and half a dozen crew members, and the organisers, observers and safety crew needed another convoy.
Solar racers are low, wide and - on top at least - they're the same colour as the road. The top competitors also accelerate surprisingly quickly, which means they're almost as vulnerable on the road as motorcycles - which is why there was a safety vehicle with flashing orange lights ahead of the leading racer and another behind the front-running convoy.
The world-championship winning Team Tokai had a crew of 21 - plus their own media team! - and five back-up vehicles, most of which, it must be said, were hybrids. They changed almost every bearing on their $10-million car after every stage and needed a full-time weather service to get the most out of each amp.
Successful solar-powered cars are thus insanely expensive, totally impractical and frighteningly vulnerable; they are no more suited to early 21st-century roads than our transport infrastructure is suited to them.
And no, Cheryl, you can't go shopping in one.
But, when you turn the clock back almost 120 years to the first official motor race, run from Paris to Rouen in July 1894, you find much the same situation.
Most of the 'horseless carriages' that were entered had barely enough power to get out of their own way and all of them needed help along the route from back-up crews who travelled either in horse-drawn carriages or by train.
The first to arrive in Rouen was Count Albert de Dion, who'd averaged 18.6km/h in a lightweight steam-powered De Dion Bouton - but he was disqualified because he couldn't drive the car without the aid of a stoker to keep the home fires burning.
A 2.2kW petrol-powered Peugeot, driven by Albert Lemaitre, came in second (and went down in history as the official winner of the first ever motor race), followed by another Peugeot.
However, these were deemed ineligible for the Constructors' award because Armand Peugeot had not yet graduated to building his own engines (until 1896 his cars used Daimler engines built under licence by rival carmaker Panhard et Levassor), so the main prize was shared between the next two arrivals, one driven by Rene Panhard and the other by Emile Levassor.
A number of the competing vehicles were simply shaken to pieces by what passed for paving on the French roads of the day.
The few with pneumatic tyres spent more time replacing them than driving, and one of the steam-powered cars blew a tube in its boiler while the stoker was busy throwing a shovelful of coals on the fire. The stoker - shaken, scalded and stirred - promptly bailed out, followed almost immediately by the driver, who reportedly suffered nothing worse than cuts on his hands and knees. The car was left to its own devices.
Those first racing cars were just as impractical and as unsuited to the roads of their day as the competitors in the SA Solar Challenge, but they were the ancestors of the petrol and diesel-powered vehicles we take for granted.
We cannot guess what will power the cars of the next century, or what type of roads they will drive on, but one thing is certain. Just like the spectators who turned out to watch the 1894 race to Rouen, the hundreds of South Africans at every control point along the route of the 2012 SA Solar Challenge were watching motoring history being written.