Had it not been for a hurricane and an extra-wide roadway, the technology center of the universe right now might be Metairie, La., a suburb 10 miles outside of New Orleans. Instead, a few dozen amateur robot makers will have to content themselves with being a technology history footnote, albeit a remarkable one.

The Darpa Grand Challenge desert race earlier this month marked the first time that computer-controlled vehicles were able to navigate such a long (132 mile) and difficult a course. Darpa, a Pentagon technology agency, sponsored the event to spur the development of battlefield robotic vehicles, though there are many who say such vehicles are still a long way off.

The winner was a Volkswagen from Stanford University, which finished in just under seven hours.

In an unheralded fourth place, though -- just 37 minutes behind the winner -- was an entrant from Gray Insurance, a small, family-owned casualty company in Metairie. Fourth place may not sound like any big whoop until you realize that the Gray Team finished ahead of cars from some of America's most elite technical universities, as well as from a number of big defense contractors. In fact, theirs was one of only five vehicles that managed to even cross the finish line.

The Gray Team had no prior experience in elite fields like robotics or artificial intelligence, spending their days instead in humdrum corporate data-processing tasks. They didn't decide to get involved in the race until 10 months ago, and didn't take delivery of the car they used until April.

Not to mention how two months ago most of them had their homes destroyed by Katrina.

Eric Gray, who owns the business with his father and brother, says it all began rather simply. "I read an article in Popular Science about last year's race, and then threw the magazine in the back of my office. Later on, my brother came over and read the article, and he yelled over to me, 'Hey, did you read about this race?' And I said, 'Yeah.' And he said, 'You wanna try it?' And I said, 'Yeah, heck, let's give it a try.' "

Since Mr. Gray admits to knowing virtually nothing about computers, he turned things over to Keith B. Goeller, who heads Gray's 10-member IT department. The plan, says Mr. Goeller, was to keep his team small, look for the best off-the-shelf products, and then assemble them without being religious about anything.

In other words, he says, just like any other day at the office.

Mr. Goeller and his crew ended up buying a lot of the same components used by others in the race, like the laser sensors made by Sick Inc. of Minneapolis. The hard part was writing the software that would allow the computer -- a "ruggedized" version of a regular Intel-powered PC that Mr. Goeller found at a boat show -- to navigate the course, discerning, for example, whether the patch of gray in front was a rock or the shadow of a cloud.

Robotics researchers have spent decades working on those problems. Lacking all such training, Mr. Goeller says his programmers, including staff member Paul Trepagnier and Jorge Nagel, a volunteer from the Tulane University computer-science department, simply began reading lots of books.

Some were on obvious fields, like artificial intelligence, but they also read about videogame programming. Apparently, the challenges involved in guiding an animated monster through a fake landscape are related to those in driving an actual car through a real desert.

The hurricane not only forced the team to relocate multiple times, it also prevented them from adding a crate of additional sensing equipment that Mr. Goeller says would have made the car -- a Ford Escape hybrid named Kat 5 in honor of recent weather -- more nimble.

Mr. Gray says his original goal had been to simply do better than the eight or so miles that contestants had done in last year's race, when not one finished the entire course.

In the end, Kat 5 performed heroically. The only glitch occurred when the normally narrow race path expanded onto a wide lake bed. Kat 5 dutifully tried to scan the entire lake bed, looking for a safe path; all the extra processing slowed down the vehicle. Mr. Goeller says it would have been an easy fix to have kept the software from overheating by looking too far.

With race-day attention focused on entrants from elite outfits like Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, Kat 5 did most of its work unobserved. In fact, Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford professor whose team was victorious, says he couldn't explain exactly how the Gray Team had managed to do so well because it never occurred to him before the race to check out the team.

Mr. Gray says the project cost about $650,000, and was supposed to be good PR for the company, though the ongoing hurricane mop-up has kept the insurers from making hay from the accomplishment.

The moral of the story?

"It's a beautiful thing when people are ignorant that something is impossible," says Mr. Gray. "In fact, that's the American way."