The race may have finished yesterday, but we couldn’t leave WSC-mode just yet. Today’s main task was to clean out the vehicles and repack all of our tools, gear, and equipment in the crate. Simultaneously, we had contingents writing postcards to our top donors and handing out info cards down at Victoria Square, where the car remained on display for the public.

The whole team returned to the square in the afternoon to show off the car to visitors and chat with members of the others teams that we had not seen all week. We also lined up our car with the University of Michigan’s for a photo shoot in front of the fountain. (We tried to include MIT and Stanford also, all of the teams from the U.S., but they had already left for the day.) Our shared elation at having finished the challenge heightened the camaraderie among all of the teams, and it was fun to share stories of our challenges and victories along the route.

The final official WSC event was the awards ceremony this evening. The ceremony opened with a traditional Aboriginal performance – song and dance celebrating the land and its animals. The goals of the Global Green Challenge complement the values expressed by Aborigines about the environment, so the juxtaposition was fitting. In addition to seventh place, Principia walked away with an arguably higher honor: the Safety Award. Race officials have long praised Principia’s dedication to safety, and it was gratifying to have that recognized one more time.

At the end of the night, the team celebrated Halloween here in Australia by dressing up – like other solar car teams, that is! At the reception after the awards ceremony, the long-awaited team shirt swap took place. No one wants to go home with a week’s worth of their own team’s shirts at the end of a race, so we trade with the other teams to remember new friends and snag the coolest uniforms. By the end of the evening, it’s impossible to tell who’s on which team! Principia team members came away with t-shirts, polos, baseball caps, and even team pants from all of our favorite competitors. We all felt like kids who’d gone trick-or-treating as we compared our spoils on the way home to Adelaide Shores.

The last chore for the night was to figure out how to stow our new treasures into our luggage and finish packing things up with the car. Most of the team is heading back to the states early tomorrow morning – in time for classes on Monday. A small group of graduates and faculty (Tom Brownell, Peter Chaney, David Crabill, Steve Shedd, and I) will remain in Australia for a few more days to ship off the crate and then visit Huntingtower, a school for Christian Scientists in Melbourne. All of us have enjoyed our time in Australia immensely, and I think I can speak for the whole team when I say we’re really not ready to leave!

Before we do leave, I want to take this final opportunity to thank all of the supporters whose donations helped us get here in the first place. I’m not exaggerating when I say we couldn’t have done it without you. I hope you’ve all enjoyed keeping up with our progress and that you’ll continue to monitor our website for future updates and even more photos. We’re grateful for your ongoing support.

Over and out,
Karen

Hello, Solar Friends!

The race is over, and the results are in: we’ve officially come in 7^th place in the World Solar Challenge class of the 2009 Global Green Challenge, behind Tokai (Japan), Nuon (Netherlands), Michigan (USA), Sunswift (Australia), MIT (USA), and Aurora (Australia).

As I explained yesterday, our goal for the morning was to push the car as hard and fast as possible, hoping to cross the finish line with an empty battery pack. Justin Sinichko put the pedal to the carbon, and with Matthew Piatt and Tom Brownell in the Chase van giving instructions, we flew down the road at more than 100 kph – definitely running the pack down, like we planned. Weather reports led us to believe we’d be operating under cloud cover for most of the morning, but those predictions never panned out. We had clear, bright sunshine for most of the way, and we were able to travel much faster than we’d anticipated. Several times, the Lead van had trouble staying far enough out in front of the solar car because it was moving too fast! The morning and the kilometers zoomed past, and we crossed the official end of timing line at 10:13 a.m., securing our position in the standings.

From there, we still had to navigate through the city of Adelaide to complete the course and parade across the ceremonial finish line in Victoria Square. Once we got close, the team piled out of the vans and into the world’s first solar bus, which led Ra 7 to its final destination. In the square, the team surrounded the car on the ground, and we all walked Justin and Ra 7 across the finish line, to the raucous cheers of spectators, officials, and other teams.

Awaiting us at the end of the walk was a majestic fountain in the center of the square, and as the numb euphoria of finishing the race started to wear off, we realized the other teams greeting us were chanting, “Fountain! Fountain!” Justin was the first to make the plunge, and he came out dripping and looking for company. About half the team ended up drenched, laughing and splashing in the fountain in celebration of finally making it to Adelaide. Members of the other teams that had already arrived joined us in the wet and wild cheering and dunking, and the whole square was bright with sunlight and good cheer.

We steered Ra 7 into a display tent to one side, and then spent a few hours talking with the public and hearing racing stories similar to our own from the other teams. No other solar cars arrived on the scene while we waited, and we’re still uncertain as to just how many teams finished the race without trailering. We’re looking forward to seeing the other teams tomorrow and hearing how our friends on the other 20-odd teams fared.

In the meantime, we took some time to ourselves as a team to explore the non-solar-car-related wonders that Australia has to offer. Our destination was the Cleland Wildlife Park, where we saw, petted, and fed kangaroos, koalas, emus, giant pelicans, wombats, echidnas, dingoes, Tasmanian devils, monitor lizards, and wallabies. Then it was off to a celebratory dinner at Outback Jack’s on the beach, thanks to supporter John Chaney, who traveled all the way from Houston just to meet us at the finish line.

Now the team is settled into the Adelaide Shores apartments (and grateful to be back in real beds!) for the next couple nights. We only have a day or so to pack everything up to ship back to the States, but for tonight, we’re happy to forget the work to come and bask in the joy of having run a good race.

Cheers,
Karen

On our second to last day of racing, the team awoke to a sunrise only the Australian Outback could afford. To one horizon, the setting moon and dark starry sky were being chased away by the beginning of another day. In our beds (an assortment of Wal-Mart sleeping bags), we lay gazing at the two-toned sky through the roofs of our tents and a film of buzzing flies awaiting our inevitable exit. The traffic on the Stuart Highway was beginning to pick up again with the coming of the dawn, and we could hear our teammates stirring in the tents around us. These were the morning sights and sounds we’d gotten used to in the past few days, and this was our last morning to experience them in the Outback. We knew that by the end of the day we’d have reached civilization again. It was a bittersweet morning.

With the team loaded up in the vans and ready to embark, the car’s treaded Dunlop tires gripped the warm pavement. The phrase “solar is rolling” echoed across the channel one radio frequency, and we were off the line, starting right on time at 8:00 a.m.

Ra 7 got moving at a pretty good clip right off the bat with a well-charged battery pack and Tom Brownell behind the wheel. In no time at all, we’d made it to our control point in Glendambo. As we were charging in the parking lot, team Aurora pulled in, just about 15 minutes behind us. We left the control point with Justin Sinichko in the car and high hopes for the midday sun. The following drive between Glendambo and Port Augusta was hilly and scenic, and we passed a whole family of emus by the side of the road! We were making great time, and the car was performing the best it has yet.

As we pulled into the town of Port Augusta just after 2:00 p.m., we hit some traffic and a few red lights – obstacles we’ve been fortunate not to see much of during this race. At one red light in town, the solar car had stopped on the line and could not get going again when the light turned green. “The accelerator pedal just isn’t working,” Justin radioed back to us. In moments, our head safety officer Mark Evans and car leader Peter Chaney were out of the van and at Ra 7’s sides to push her safely out of the intersection.

Ra 7 rolled toward the side of the road and out of harm’s way, but it seemed the problems did not stop with the accelerator. The brake pedal had also gotten jammed, and Justin was unable to stop the car once it was rolling. Ra 7 coasted along the curb for a few feet, then came to a jostling halt against the bumper of the lead vehicle. With the safety crew flagging traffic and a team on the ground removing the upper body in a flash, we quickly saw that Justin was entirely unharmed, and the car itself suffered only the tiniest damage in the carbon fiber shell of the lower body.

With those assurances, the team focused on discovering and solving the problem that had caused these mishaps in the first place. The braking issue required only an easy mechanical fix in the pedal, and the car immediately resumed braking safely and completely, as it should. After examining the accelerator pedal, we determined it was not a mechanical problem that had robbed Ra 7 of her acceleration. Our next guess was the motor controller. After replacing the motor controller with one that we borrowed from our racing friends at Rolla, we learned that this also was not the source of the breakdown. It seemed the motor itself was the culprit, and we radioed to Ken Pratt, who drives our truck and trailer, for him to bring us our spare motor.

While waiting for the truck to arrive, we decided to move the car to a safer location than the side of the road since we’d be doing some major repairs. (Our motor is mounted to our single, foam-filled rear wheel, so putting in a new motor meant a difficult tire change around the rear suspension along with completely reinstalling the motor itself.) We happened to have stopped right in front of a residential driveway, and the homeowners had come out to the fence to see what the commotion was about. We didn’t even have to ask twice for these kind strangers to offer us the use of their driveway to complete our repairs away from the traffic. Their hospitality didn’t end there, though. As we worked, the family brought out jugs of ice cold water for us – a welcome relief from the heat.

We believe now that the motor failure was caused by overheating due to excessive use of the regenerative braking feature – a much less concerning reason than many we could have imagined! Once the truck arrived with the spare, the repair went smoothly and quickly, considering its complexity. It took the team less than half an hour to replace the motor and the rear tire, a time that would be impressive even under the best of conditions. Altogether, we were stopped on the side of the road for just under an hour before we could finish the last three kilometers to the control point at Port Augusta.

While we were stopped, team Aurora went cruising past us, and by the time we reached the check point, they were already on their way down the track again. It looks like we won’t be beating them this time, but we’re pretty satisfied that we were able to hold them at bay for so long this morning!

The 30-minute media stop in Port Augusta seemed relaxed and uneventful after the motor change stop, and by 3:40 p.m. we were back on the road. The battery pack had had plenty of time to charge up during all the stops, and Justin was ready to get the car back up to speed and make up some lost time.

The closer we got to Adelaide, the more natural features we’d been missing reappeared: bodies of water, trees, mountains, and even clouds. There was a little too much cloud cover in the late afternoon for solar racing at full speed, but by the end of the day we had logged another 572 km and gotten within 180 km of the official end of the race.

At the end of the day, our 10-minute window of searching for the right place to stop for the night led us to an open field of straw with a gravel drive just off the highway. We pulled off into the dirt and set up the array stand, facing the setting sun. Soon the landowner came out to investigate, and he assured us that we were welcome to use that bit of his farmland to charge out batteries and work on the car until sunset. Our scout had found a campground farther down the road for our nighttime accommodations, but the farmer invited us back to his field for our morning charging and final preparations. It was our second run-in with selfless kindness from people we didn’t even know in just a few hours, and we were grateful to see this proof that our needs have already been met with love.

We finished off the night with a hearty steak dinner at a local pub and a bittersweet sendoff to our media van driver (recently re-dubbed “Hollywood”) Sten Palmer, who had to return to her job in Port Headland. The team bedded down early with the car tucked into the crate to get a good night’s sleep before our final day.

The plan for tomorrow is to really push the limits on our car to make it to the official end of timing with our battery pack almost completely drained. Once our time has stopped ticking and the race is officially finished, we will pause to charge up again and then wend our way into town to cross the ceremonial finish line in Adelaide around noon. As far as we know, we are currently in 7th place, and with team Twente about an hour behind us and team Aurora about an hour ahead of us, we don’t expect that to change.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s update about our last day of racing and then a final report on Saturday after the awards ceremony. And be sure to catch our last couple of radio shows, too. We’ll be broadcasting live on Princpia Internet Radio (www.principia.edu/radio) at 3:30 p.m. Central time on Thursday and Friday.

As always, thanks for your ongoing support. We’re almost there!

Cheers,
Karen

P.S. My apologies for the late posting of this update. I told you the team bedded down early, and that included the keys to the vans – aka my access to our BGAN unit from CapRock, which gives us satellite internet. So it had to wait until the morning!

We’ve had another record-breaking day here in the Outback. Ra 7 traveled 615 km (382 miles) today, our longest day so far this race,  Ra 7’s 2nd longest day overall (after one day during NASC 2008), and the 4th longest day in Principia solar car racing history. This 615 km trek has placed us more than two-thirds of the way to Adelaide, positioned between the control points in Coober Pedy and Glendambo, still in sixth place.

We started the day with a bang. We pulled onto the Stuart Highway right at 8:00, and we sped right up to 85-90 kph (about 55 miles per hour). After last night’s battery pack repairs, the car was in much better shape for fast driving, and we had surprising success with the weak morning sunshine.

Not long into the morning, we had our first roadside stop when two things happened. First, the back door of the lead van suddenly popped open, dumping a water jug into the road, and second, an important connection in the BPS jiggled loose and shut off power to the car. In the solar car, Justin Sinichko coasted gently to the shoulder just behind the water jug, and the team (led by the safety crew, of course) piled out of the vans. While Tom Brownell and John Broere fixed up the battery pack, David Crabill and Ross Vincent rigged up a way to keep the back door of lead closed. The whole stop took about 15 minutes, and then we were back on the road and zooming once more.

Around 9:40 a.m., we pulled into the control point at Kulgera, and we left again ten minutes later, right on schedule. At that point, we had 412 km to Coober Pedy, the longest leg of the race. During that leg, we crossed the border into South Australia from the Northern Territory, passed the 2,000 km mark signifying that we’d finished two-thirds of the race, and took a 10-minute break at the Cadney Homestead for a bit of charging and a driver change. With Peter Chaney behind the wheel, we got back on the road.

As the trees disappeared, the Outback became what most of us imagined it to be – empty. On our way to Coober Pedy, the Opal Capital of the World, we passed by hundreds of individually owned opal mines. We also crossed an Australian landmark, the dog fence. The dog fence stretches 7,000 km from east to west to keep dingoes out of the southern portions of Australia, where sheep farming is prominent. Our observer informed us that the part of the fence that we see – a 6-foot chain link fence with wooden posts – is only half of it. The fence extends the same distance down into the ground to keep the dingoes from digging under it, as well. Maybe it was just because we hadn’t seen anything but sparse grass and scrubby bushes for hours, but we were excited to drive past the longest fence in the world.

As Peter drove us out of our Coober Pedy control point around 3:40 p.m., we had another brief issue with the battery pack. The same connection that had come loose this morning was acting up again. However, we tacked it back in place and were quickly on our way with just over an hour left to drive.

At the end of the day, it’s sometimes hard to find a place to stop for the night where we have good east and west exposure for charging combined with a decent place to camp.  This evening as we were driving along, there were steep, rocky ditches on either side of the road. It seemed unlikely that we would find a safe place for the car to pull off without risking popping a tire, or worse.  As 4:55 rolled around, our Scout vehicle radioed back – they found a perfect spot, and we arrived there right at 5:00. Our journey has been full of these instances of circumstances working out just exactly how they need to, and we’re grateful for the reminder that all of our needs are met by the one Mind.

At tonight’s Wednesday evening testimony meeting (hosted by our team metaphysical head, Mark Evans), team leader Tom Brownell shared a similar demonstration with the team. Referring to the numbers that he and Matthew Piatt spend all day analyzing from the telemetry system, Tom told us that the numbers were improving, even when no physical changes had been made to the car. As a team, we’re working hard to keep our thought uplifted and to recognize that no part of Principia’s racing success has been the result of physical improvements. We race well when we keep our two team goals as our highest priority: glorify God and do our best. And so far, we’ve done a winning job of meeting those goals.

It looks like we’re out of the running for winning the race, though, for that honor has already been awarded team Tokai from Japan. The news of their arrival in Adelaide reached us this afternoon, and we hear that both Nuon and the University of Michigan are hot on their heels. Those first few teams were moving fast!
Speaking of the competition, we were visited this evening by a member of team Aurora. Rooted in Ford Australia, Aurora is recognized as one of the best solar car teams in the world, and for now, they’re about 45 minutes behind us. If we were excited for Michigan to be scouting out our team’s position in Omaha in 2008, just imagine our delight that Aurora considers us competition worth scouting! With a team like Aurora close behind us, our 6th place position is somewhat tenuous, but we remain committed to doing our best and helping other teams to do their best as well. We’ll keep running our race, and we wish them the best in completing their own.

At this point, we have about 745 km left in the race. Our final two checkpoints are in Glendambo and then Port Augusta, and we should arrive in Adelaide on Friday morning. I’ll keep you updated on our progress, but don’t forget to listen in to our radio updates on Principia Internet Radio, too! We broadcast live every afternoon at 3:30 p.m. Central time, and you’ll hear brief updates at the top of every hour.

Cheers,
Karen

We began this race just 12 degrees south of the equator in Darwin, and we have now traveled more than halfway to Adelaide, through Alice Springs and across the Tropic of Capricorn. The weather is telling; the humidity has vanished, and the chill of the nights and early mornings ensures us that we’ve left the tropics.

Day three of racing has come to a close after 565 kilometers (about 350 miles) of driving by Justin and Tom. We began the day perfectly on time, leaving our campsite at precisely 8:00 a.m., and our stops throughout the day continued with similar efficiency.

Our first Control Point was Barrow Creek, a gas station and pub about 130 km into our drive. On the way up the track a few weeks ago, Joe, Steve, and I stopped at Barrow Creek for lunch one afternoon. Along with the best Australian cheeseburgers we’d ever had (topped with bacon, barbeque sauce, a fried egg, beet root, and pineapple), we got an earful from the Barrow Creek pub owner, Mick, about the money papering the walls of his pub.

In the 1960s, the story goes, cattle drovers were paid once a month, and they often spent all their money very quickly. To ensure that they would have enough cash for a drink as they were passing through town, these drovers began to leave money at the pubs – bills with their names written on them tacked to the wall. Over the years, the walls at Barrow Creek have been covered with bills – both Aussie and foreign – from passersby who’re continuing the tradition.

When Joe, Steve, and I arrived, Mick told us this story and showed us all of the American money taped to the walls. He also produced from beneath the bar his collection of United States quarters. He had collected 25 of the 50 states so far, and he laid them out for us one by one, proudly pronouncing the name of each state he had collected.

He didn’t yet have the quarters for either Illinois or Missouri, and he had never heard of an American $2 bill, so we left Barrow Creek a few weeks ago with a mission, and we made a few phone calls. Last week, Katie Farquhar, the team’s business manager, brought with her from the States 11 new state quarters and a crisp $2 bill for Mick from the Principia Solar Car Team. We signed our team name on the bill and gave it, with the quarters, to our scout vehicle to gift to Mick when they arrived ahead of the caravan. Mick was delighted, and we heard him bragging later to some patrons at the bar about having 36 of the state quarters! It was a heart-warming interaction we won’t soon forget.

While scout was taking care of business with Mick inside the pub, the team was pausing to charge the array outside. Technically, Barrow Creek was only a 10-minute control stop, but we’d been having some trouble with one battery module dipping to lower voltages than all the rest, so some directed charging for that module was needed. We took about 30 minutes total in Barrow Creek, then hopped back on the road at full speed.

A couple hours later, around 12:30 p.m., a wire in the battery pack broke loose, and we had to make an emergency roadside stop. A closer inspection revealed that it was the same problem we encountered yesterday with a loose sense wire. These little wires are connected to every module in the pack, and they are responsible for monitoring the voltages, etc. for each module. As a whole, our pack is only as good as the highest high voltage and the lowest low voltage. If a single module steps outside a certain range, the battery protection system limits the entire pack to keep things safe. With a sense wire knocked loose and the voltage for that module unknown to the battery protection system, it defaulted to safe mode and shut the car off.
We encountered this problem twice today (both before and after the 30-minute control point at Alice Springs) and once yesterday for different modules. I reported last night that such issues were results of the newness of our pack, thinking it needed a good shakedown for the new connections. As it turns out, though, that analysis was incorrect. While the cells and soldered connections in the battery pack are brand new, these sense wires were borrowed from the old battery pack, so the wires themselves have become fatigued and weak.

In order to fix the problem more permanently, Tom and John are performing major battery pack surgery tonight to replace the sense wires and reinforce the connections between battery tabs. Now you may remember I also told you about sealing the battery pack during scrutineering to prevent tampering during the race. Before we changed anything within the pack, we had to check with race officials to make sure we were within the regulations. Officials ruled that fixing these connections and replacing sense wires was acceptable battery work since it did not include replacing or charging any of the battery cells. That’s good news for us since it means we can fix our pack, but it might be a long night for John and Tom.

When we weren’t making quick fixes in the battery pack, we were traveling at a reasonable speed down the highway, often running between 95 and 100 kph (around 60 mph). We did pass the Australian team Sunswift early in the day, as we predicted, but they passed us right back about an hour later. Late in the afternoon, we breezed past the Dutch team Twente broken down on the side of the road. At the end of the day, we’re unofficially back in 6th place, having moved up from yesterday’s 7th.

The team is still working well together, and our control points and roadside stops are getting more and more efficient. We should pass through two more stops tomorrow, Kulgera for 10 minutes and Coober Pedy for 30. At this rate, we should make it into Adelaide on Friday afternoon. Stay tuned for website updates (check out the new photos!) and for our live broadcast on Principia Internet Radio (every afternoon at 3:30 Central time) to keep up with our progress!

Cheers,
Karen

The generator is humming and the flood lights are streaming across another roadside car park on the Stuart Highway. The nose of the car is jacked up while team members change the tires, check the brakes and the suspension, and make repairs to the fairings. The batteries and the array have been tucked in for the night. Those who aren’t working on the car directly prepare for further racing by cleaning out the vans, seating spare tires, cleaning up from dinner, and finishing staking tents. The Principia Solar Car Team is settled in for another night on the road.

We had a successful second day of racing, completing a total of 540 kilometers in 8 hours (racing from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. with two half-hour media stops), an improvement over yesterday’s 530 k in 8.5 hours (racing 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. with one half-our stop). We made it through the Control Points in Dunmarra and Tennant Creek with no trouble, and we’re not far from our next stop: Barrow Creek.

Around mid-afternoon, we encountered a common Australian road hazard: a dust storm. This particular cloud of dust was roughly 250 kilometers wide (by race officials’ best estimates) and engulfed our caravan in a heavy dusty haze for much of the trek between Dunmarra and Tennant Creek. There wasn’t much wind, but the dust filled the air and veiled the horizon. It diffused much of the sunlight, and the car barely cast a shadow.

When we stopped around 2:00 in the afternoon for a quick roadside mechanical check, we found the array coated with a thick film of grime and had to clean it before continuing down the track. During the dust storm, and for a while after emerging from it, we had to reduce our speed because of the limited amount of energy the array was pulling into the battery pack. But we kept a steady pace throughout the afternoon and into the evening.

Near the end of the day, we began noticing some concerning voltages in one module of the battery pack, and we pulled over to have a look under the hood, so to speak. From the telemetry, we knew there was a problem with a sensor that had been knocked loose. Tom and John pulled out the battery pack (Tom still wearing his driving shoes and helmet) and began snipping and soldering. They worked quickly, but our time was running out. When 5:00 rolled around and the car was not yet rolling, we knew we had found our stopping point for the night.

We believe the battery problem has been fixed and will need only minimal tinkering in the morning, but we’re remembering also that while Ra 7 has had plenty of race experience, her battery pack, BPS, and telemetry system are all new installments that may still need to be tested and tweaked. But that’s what racing is for! We’re testing this technology for a larger purpose than just winning the race, and we’re participating in this challenge with the goal of glorifying God, not winning. We’re satisfied with the progress we’re making and everything that we’re learning, regardless of how the race ends.

As it turns out, we’re not quite holding our position – we’ve slipped in the standings from 6th to 7th – but we’re not far behind our nearest competitors, the Aussie team Sunswift, who are camping just 4 kilometers up the road. Rumor has it, though, that they didn’t overtake us until after 5:00, so we may be able to pass them in the morning before they even get started. (Teams are allowed a 10-minute window after 5:00 to find a suitable place to stop for the night, but they must then start the same number of minutes after 8:00 the next morning.) Tomorrow we’ll hit Barrow Creek for a ten-minute media stop, then Alice Springs, which marks the halfway point. We’re excited to see what other challenges and lessons tomorrow will bring.

Thanks to one of our observers from Adelaide, we got another important reminder this morning about who we are as a team and what we’re really working towards. The observer was impressed with the loving interactions and displays of genuine Christian character he found on our team. He told one of our faculty advisors, he’s been away from his church for about a week and a half because of the race, and he came to our team feeling “thirsty,” as he put it. The observer joined us for our Sunday evening church service and again Monday morning as we read the Christian Science Bible Lesson, and he said he left our team feeling refreshed. This sort of evidence proves to us that we are accomplishing our mission, regardless of how the car is running or how well the battery pack is charging.

When you think about our team journeying through the Outback, please keep this thought of us in mind: not that we’re trying to beat other teams or fight against the elements to complete a race, but that we’re finding our way into every situation in which our unique character as competitors is needed, useful, and welcome. Thanks for all of your support!

Cheers,
Karen

We’ve finished our first day of racing! We traveled about 530 kilometers and have made camp for the night on the side of the Stuart Highway, just 100 k north of Dunmarra.

The race day started unexpectedly early. Instead of spacing teams out at one-minute intervals, the race officials released the cars in quick succession, and so Principia began the race just shortly after 8:30 this morning. Navigating through Darwin was not easy. With all the teams clumped together, there were a lot of slow-moving caravans to contend with, in addition to the regular Sunday morning traffic and the hundreds of spectators who lined the streets to see us off.

But Ra 7 wove her way through the streets to pass at least four teams before leaving the city limits. By the time the Stuart Highway dropped down to its typical two-lanes (compared to the four in Darwin), we were out on our own and cruising smoothly along.

As our most experienced driver, Tom Brownell was chosen to drive us out this morning. With a full battery pack, Ra 7 zipped down the road at a good clip. Until, that is, we started to notice some oddly low voltages in the battery pack. The array was turned on and the sunlight was strong, but the pack wasn’t charging like it should. The truck toting our crate zoomed ahead of the caravan to scout out a safe place to pull over, and we stopped for a quick electrical check.

Tom hopped out of the driver’s seat and began inspecting the battery pack and electrical connections. There, he found a startling (and slightly humorous) mistake: our array was not actually connected to our battery pack. In tinkering with the system last night, we had disconnected an essential link between the two, and it had never been reconnected. We took the opportunity to change drivers, and with Justin Sinichko in the car and the array actually connected this time, we pulled out again around 11:00 a.m. to continue down the track.

With the array turned on, the problems we were noticing in the battery pack entirely disappeared, and Justin was able to drive close to the speed limit the rest of the way to our first Control Point, just outside the town of Katherine. We pulled in around 1:40 p.m. for our required 30-minute stop to interact with the media and local spectators.

One regulation in this race that is different from NASC is that teams are not allowed to work on their cars during these media stops. This was an unfortunate rule for us this afternoon because just as we pulled into the checkpoint, our left front tire punctured and needed to be replaced. We had to wait half an hour before we could change it; the repair had to cut into our actual race time.

At the end of the 30 minutes, our pit crew performed a very quick tire change. (We were allowed to prepare our tools ahead of time.) To leave the Control Point, we changed drivers again and put Tom back in the car, and Tom drove through the evening til the end of the race day at 5:30.

At the checkpoint, we learned our standing in the race so far. We had moved from our starting position of 12th up to 8th, though we had two teams right on our tail. The standings have changed a bit since then – we passed a team or two and were passed a few times as well – but our position is looking good for just day one.

At the end of the race day, we settled on the side of the road, threw up some tents, and got to work tweaking a few things on the car. Bob and Debbie Brownell cooked us the best meal we could dream of in the Outback – gourmet burritos! And as it is Sunday, we also took time out for church.

Now I’m writing this email as everyone is settling in for bed. When I finish, I’ll connect to our satellite internet link – a portable internet café, essentially, that we brought with us to Australia thanks to a generous donation from a company called CapRock who provides satellite communications to oil rigs. From my internet connection here, this message will travel to our solar car contact in the states, James Koval, a junior member of the team who’s taking care of business at home. James will send it out to you and our long list of supporters, then post it to our website, too. It’s such a production, I’m grateful for all the help I’m getting to get you your solar car news!

Speaking of our website, I have one last message for you from David Crabill, our web developer. David stayed busy keeping the site up to date while we stayed in Darwin, and there are a few fun new features. If you’ve visited the website recently, you’ve noticed our GPS tracker, showing you our exact position along the race route on the homepage. You may not have noticed the link on the right-hand side of the screen to the GPS tracking device itself. On that page, you can see a complete map of all the stops we’ve made so far, not just our current position. You can also use Google links embedded in our site to see the street view of the map – as if you were standing on the side of the Stuart Highway with us! David also wants to remind those of you who read these updates on the website – feel free to leave comments!

Cheers,
Karen

Principia’s Ra 7 is now fully qualified to participate in the World Solar Challenge 2009! We’ll be taking off from Darwin’s State Square at 8:41 a.m. tomorrow on our way to Adelaide. Let me tell you about our day today.

The qualifying began at 8:30, and the drivers were all required to attend a meeting with the race officials before that, so the team got started early with breakfast at the track at 6:30. We also began the morning as we always do, by reading the Christian Science Bible Lesson. On busy mornings like these, there’s too much work to be done on the car for everyone to settle down for a half-hour lesson reading. Our solution: we have a smaller delegation of people read each section over our handheld radios for everyone in the pit to hear as they complete their work on the car.

Around 10 a.m., we were ready to take the track with Tom Brownell behind the wheel. We had watched several teams qualify already, and we knew the routine. Each team was allowed a single warm-up lap around the track and a running start for their timed lap. After the timed lap, cars looped around to a slalom course set up in the middle of the track loop, followed directly by a braking test. Those three components – the timed lap, the slalom test, and the braking test – comprised the entire dynamic scrutineering and qualifier.

After our warm-up lap, Tom drove a qualifying lap around the 3-kilometer track in a time of 2 minutes and 35 seconds, averaging about 72 kph or 46 miles per hour. To give you some perspective, the slower teams were taking up to 4 minutes to complete a lap, and the fastest lap, from Aurora (a world-renowned Australian team), took only 1 minute and 53 seconds. We’re pretty satisfied with this lap time because it was only milliseconds away from our fastest practice lap yesterday. After just a single warm-up lap, that consistency is impressive! In the grand scheme of things, our lap time earned us the 12^th starting position tomorrow morning out of 32 qualified cars so far.

Unlike most other cars, Ra 7 did not move directly from the qualifying lap to the slalom test, for there was another team ahead of us, Helios from France, that had broken down during the brake test and needed to be cleared from the track. The wait was only a small bother to our team (we can imagine how hot Tom was feeling inside our black car in the Australian sun!), but this incident and others like it have made us even more aware of the need to realize the source of protection for every team we race with, not just ourselves. Race officials announced that this race has seen more accidents, problems, and delays than any other, and so we’d like your help in clinging steadfastly to the idea that God is the strength, protection, and power of everyone who lifts a wrench and every car that hits the track.

When it was our turn to navigate the slalom test, Tom and Ra 7 completed it with ease then came to a quick, smooth stop with room to spare in the braking test. And just like that, our team had officially qualified for the race. When the car returned to the pit, we quickly loaded it into the crate to take Ra 7 out for a spin on public roads.

Justin Sinichko and Peter Chaney both took turns in the car, testing out their speed and getting a feeling for the car’s altered steering and position in the lane. In order to gather efficiency data, they each also practiced holding specific speeds called out to them by the chase vehicle – 10 mph, 20 mph, 30 mph, and on up. That data, collected by Matthew Piatt and the telemetry system, will help us to make wise decisions about how to drive the car in varying power conditions such as weather and terrain. In all, we tested for roughly two hours and put another 104 km on the car.

Tonight, the team is busy making a few final alterations to the car. In particular, we’re replacing the wheel hubs, brake rotors, and brake calipers; tweaking the telemetry and a few electrical parts; and modifying the fairings slightly to keep the windows closed when driving at high speeds. We’ll also spend a good portion of the evening packing the crate and our own personal luggage. We’ll be sad to leave Darwin, our home for the past few weeks, but the open road is calling.

Tomorrow morning will be another early start to ensure that we’re all packed and prepared to take off at 8:41. We won’t be hosting a live radio show tomorrow morning, but you can still listen in for quick updates at the top of the hour on Principia Internet Radio. We’ll be back on the air on Monday morning (3:30 p.m. Sunday afternoon in the Midwest) to share with you our progress during our first day of racing.

Cheers,

Karen

Just before 3:00 this afternoon, we heard the sweet sound that makes every solar racer smile, the soft click of our motor, as Justin Sinichko gently accelerated out of the pit to take the track. After a morning of battery charging and telemetry testing (not to mention re-packing the crate), we spent about three and a half hours this afternoon giving our drivers some practice on the track at Hidden Valley.

Since we passed static scrutineering yesterday, we had a full day of testing before tomorrow’s dynamic scrutineering and qualifier. Dynamic scrutineering for this race consists of a slalom test and a brake test, and the qualifier itself is just two additional laps around the track, one to warm up and then one timed lap. The team with the fastest lap time will be the first to leave the starting line on Sunday, so much of our driving today was aimed at learning the curves of the track and practicing maintaining a safe and swift speed.

As I said, Justin drove first, then Peter Chaney and Katie Farquhar each drove a few laps. Justin took another turn in the car, and then Tom Brownell finished out the day. Ra 7 was out on the track for a total of three hours and 20 minutes and traveled about 112 kilometers. And she was performing beautifully for all four of our drivers. At one point, Joe Ritter tells me, the chase van following the solar car around the track had to speed up to 110 kph in order to catch up with our speeding car, whose tight turning radius and smooth handling left our rented 12-passenger van in the dust. At the end of the day, lap times determined that Tom will be our driver to qualify the car tomorrow and vie for the best pole position.

As the car returned to the pit just before 6:30 p.m., it slowed to a brief stop at the top of the pit lane. A crowd had gathered at the rail to watch our car zip by, and John Broere passed a few info cards out the passenger side window. As the car continued slowly down the pit lane, other team members and visitors rushed up to our chase vehicle to collect more info cards. Everyone was interested in our car and excited to read more about her specifications. If you haven’t seen for yourself just how eye-catching our car is, check out our Ra 7 photo gallery. She’s a beauty!

Around midday today, the last couple members of our team finally joined us in Darwin: Bob and Debbie Brownell (Tom’s parents), who will be driving the scout vehicle and keeping the team fed during the race. In the scramble and excitement of Thursday’s scrutineering success, I also forgot to announce the arrival of Ken Pratt, another solar car parent (though his son Kevin has long since graduated) and the driver of our truck and trailer. We’re fortunate to have dedicated parents like Ken and the Brownells to help us meet our goals and keep the team functioning. Plus, they’re a lot of fun to have around!

After such a successful day of driving, all 21 of us piled into a Chinese restaurant on the main drag in Darwin for a family-style meal and a rousing round of karaoke. Mark Evans and Ross Vincent started us off with the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun,” and the fun (and noise level) only escalated from there. Pictures of this and the other events of the day are posted in the photo album Testing. We’re all tucking into bed with high spirits and full bellies, ready to take on the track – for dynamic scrutineering and qualifying – again tomorrow. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Cheers,

Karen

P.S. My guest on the next live radio show will be Sten Palmer, our “token Aussie,” who’s going to give us a few lessons in how to speak Australian. Tune in to Principia Internet Radio at 3:30 p.m. Central time on Friday afternoon!

Great news to report today: we have passed scrutineering for the World Solar Challenge! All that remains is the qualifier on Saturday, and we’ll be ready to race.

This may come as a shock to some of you who are familiar with solar racing and followed along with our progress through NASC scrutineering last summer. For NASC, scrutineering lasts a whole week and involves several iterations of inspections of just one aspect of the car at a time. The scrutineering for WSC is quite different: the car cycles through every scrutineering station all in the same appointment, so the whole process takes only a few hours.

You’ll remember that the last thing we did last night before leaving the shop was to pack the car into the crate to transport it to the building where scrutineering is held. We arrived at that building – a large air conditioned space called the Foskey Pavilion – around 7:30 this morning to unload the car for our 8 o’clock appointment with the officials.

First off, we had to register our team members and outfit the car with the official race logo. This year, the World Solar Challenge became part of a larger competition called the Global Green Challenge, which incorporates other experimental and electric vehicles as well. Ra 7’s rear fairing now sports a giant green sticker advertising the Global Green Challenge where our NASC logo used to be.

Next, the body and array of the car were weighed and measured to make sure that we were within the regulations for size. While Ra 7 was breezing through the body and sizing stations inside the pavilion, our support vehicles were going through their own inspections out in the parking lot. Mark Evans, our head safety officer, ensured that our vehicles were equipped with safety equipment, first aid kits, traffic control equipment, and all of the required signage. Principia has long been known in solar racing for its safety, and last year’s team earned the Safety Award, so a quick pass in this station was not surprising.

Inside, it was the drivers who were tested next. Tom Brownell, Peter Chaney, Katie Farquhar, and Justin Sinichko – the same team of drivers we had in NASC – weighed in, registered their ballast, and received the special green wristbands that identify them as our drivers. All of the drivers also had to demonstrate that they could exit the car in under 10 seconds (the egress test), and half of them also demonstrated ingress, or getting into the car in less than 15 seconds. These might seem like odd things to test, but each serves a specific purpose. The egress test is clearly useful should an emergency arise; it is important for all of our drivers to know how to get out of the car quickly. The ingress test is a new addition this year, and the goal behind it is to simulate getting into a normal car.

WSC created a few regulations this year that encourage teams to make their cars more practical, in fact. In addition to ingress, the regulations also require a 27-degree seating angle for the driver. In the past, solar cars have been designed as flat as possible to have as much cell area on the top of the car as possible. Inside these flat cars, drivers lay almost entirely horizontally in order to look out the windshield, and for Principia cars at least, they had to drive with two joysticks at the hip because they could not fit a regular steering wheel. Now, drivers must sit upright and steer with a wheel in front of them, more like a regular car.

Our drivers were quick to prove their ingress and egress skills, and our custom-designed and hand-made steering wheel checked out, but we ran into a snag with the seating angle. Despite the fact that our seat was designed to meet the required 27-degree angle for NASC (and did pass that station in 2008), race officials here found the angle to be 29 degrees, with our drivers reclining just a bit too far. The car progressed to the next scrutineering station, but it could not pass until that angle had been corrected.

Next, with a driver in the car, we had to demonstrate the turn signals, brake lights, and horn; measure the driver’s eye height and the protection of the roll cage; and prove that our hand brake could physically stop the car from rolling should the mechanical brakes fail. Here again, we ran into a bit of a hiccup. When our driver pulled the handle for the parking brake, a wire snapped, and the mechanism did not function as we’d planned. This was one more small problem we would need to sort out before we would be allowed to race.

Progress through the final three stations – mechanical, electrical, and batteries – was slow and quiet. Our team’s typical protocol for scrutineering is that only two or three people are present with the car while the inspections are taking place. The other team members stand out of the way and keep quiet; we don’t want the race officials to feel crowded by a team of 20 students all eager to answer their questions at the same time. In the Foskey Pavilion, this arrangement was easy because there was a mezzanine above the scrutineering floor where team members, other teams awaiting their turn, and visitors could watch the inspections without being in the way.

The mechanical and electrical inspections involved John Broere and Tom Brownell answering the officials’ questions as they scrutinized every bit of the car. It’s their job to make sure the cars are safe to drive and road-worthy, but they are also highly qualified engineers in the field who have great advice. We were not required to make any major changes in these areas in order to pass scrutineering, but we were fortunate to hear the officials’ suggestions for how to improve our car, and we’re grateful that they took their time double checking our work.

At the battery station, Ra 7’s last stop in her journey around the pavilion floor, our battery configuration checked out, the correct battery pack weight was confirmed, and the officials sealed our pack to prevent future tampering. Our final hang-up occurred at this step, though. We’ve split our battery pack in two: the main pack and a small sub-pack that runs the Battery Protection System, and we had not foreseen the need to seal the smaller sub-pack in addition to the large pack. (To seal the pack, officials thread fine twine through holes in the battery box sides and over the tops of the battery cells to prevent teams from trying to gain extra power by switching out battery modules.) The sub-pack still needed some tweaking, so we were not prepared to seal it at that time.

We had essentially three problems to fix: the seating angle, the parking brake, and the battery sub-pack, along with a couple other minor adjustments, before we could officially pass scrutineering. And so, the team set to work. We toted tools and materials in from the vans, working quickly and quietly in a corner of the pavilion floor. In no time, we had the car ready to scrutineer again (all except the batteries). On the second round, Ra 7 passed every test. The battery sub-pack still needed work, but the car itself was ready to be loaded back into the crate and returned to our shop. All we had left to do was to finish the battery work and return to the Foskey Pavilion with that small box before 5 o’clock – the rest of our scrutineering was over!

We left the building triumphant (and it was fortunate we felt so upbeat since we were heading back out into the heat of our un-air-conditioned shop!). The whole scrutineering process took only a few hours, and we were able to meet every requirement quickly and smoothly.

Tom and John spent the afternoon finishing up the battery sub-pack, and by 5:00 p.m. we had officially passed scrutineering for WSC. With that milestone behind us, we’re looking forward to testing the car on the track tomorrow and then qualifying the car and proving its dynamic handling on Saturday.

Looking for photos? Check out the photos page for the photo album titled Scrutineering. Our webmaster, David Crabill, has been diligently adding new albums nearly every day this past week to show you our progress.

And don’t forget, you can hear more details about our progress from me and other team members every afternoon at 3:30 p.m. Central time on Principia Internet Radio. The show is live at that time – it’s 6 a.m. for us! – so you can call in questions, too. We’d love to hear from you!

Cheers,

Karen