Team Arrow Goes Like The (Solar) Wind
If, like me, you are so enmeshed with your electronic devices that you don’t manually follow things like “dates” and “times” anymore, preferring instead to rely on your thingy to bingle when something important is about to happen, you might have accidentally missed that today is the start of the 2013 Bridgestone World Solar Challenge, from Darwin to Adelaide.
I’m excited, because our friend, Chris, is part of Team Arrow – who won pole position with their efforts in the qualifiers. You can see him featured in the BBC’s Day In Pictures for October 2nd (photo four), wearing his favourite facial expression.
The race is expected to take six days, and the competition is apparently fierce:
Currently in 5th position- less than 90km to Katherine! Lots of position swapping @wsolarchallenge #WSC13 pic.twitter.com/bUtEUCNFy4
— Team Arrow (@teamarrowracing) October 6, 2013
You can follow along via the World Solar Challenge website, or (recommended) keep up with Team Arrow on facebook and twitter. Update: and thanks A for pointing out where you can find their end-of-day position summary as well.
I asked P if he wanted to grow up to be a solar race car driver, like “Uncle” Chris this week, but he said he’d rather be a naturalist, and went back to his ExxonMobil-sponsored water bird spotting…
…so we will put our hopes in T.
Update: result was 7th place overall, first of the Australian teams. Not bad for a first try! From Chris:
It was exciting stuff – we were cruising at 75 until swift made their move and we ended up sprinting the final hour at 90 – 100kph while managing the battery that had run flat the day before. I can certainly say that running the arrow at 100 is much hairier than a lotus at 200 and turbulence off other vehicles is a menace.
At one point we were 0.04 amps of draw away from triggering a shut down from the management system. Eek.
Very satisfied right now and it’s been an epic week.
Chris
Team arrow page with daily updates on position here: http://www.worldsolarchallenge.org/team/view/43
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Excellent! For those who just want the end-of-day summary.
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Yahoo they made it all the way and in style – well done to them. It has a certain Star Wars look .
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I can definitely see Star Wars now you mention it.
They did make it – apparently holding on to 7th by the skin of their teeth in the final sprint. Seventh place not too bad for newcomers at all!
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So cool to know a solar racer!
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The best part is thinking about which race-related theme songs will be most annoying when hummed at him.
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Is he one of the drivers?
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Yes, one of the drivers. According to twitter he started his shift for the day nine hours ago. They haven’t tweeted since, but I’m sure that has nothing at all to do with his skills behind the wheel.
Or maybe it does and he zoomed so far out of sight they didn’t have anything to tweet about any more?
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I remember seeing one of the first solar cars to be driven to Darwin in the early 80’s I think? It was a big day to see a solar car when you were a kid living in the sticks….how far we have come! I think T is all over it 🙂
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Yes, the race started in the 80’s (I was reading on one of the sites above) so we must be talking about the same event. The tech has definitely come along a bit. One day there’ll be a commercially-produced soccer-mum version (and instead of racing them 3000km from Darwin to Adelaide we could compete in an official school drop-off competition or something – like real life can’t be made more exciting).
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T’s looking very focused – that’s a long way to travel but I’m thinking plenty of sunshine.
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Yes, she could definitely be a junior team member, especially now she’s just about dropped her day nap. (At this stage it’s probably still safer if she takes a morning shift.)
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