2005 World Solar Challenge
Darwin > Adelaide 25th September
- 2 October 2005
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We had a slow morning, mainly because we were all up until 2 am welcoming new members of the team; David Sims-Williams and Daniel Mills. The great overnight news was that our team strategist Peter Pudney will be joining us on Wednesday. He has been leading an electric vehicle design program in Adelaide which may have been entered in the Greenfleet Class of the Panasonic World Solar Challenge but last minute electronic problems have made that impossible. So, Peter is back on the Aurora 101 team for the 2005 Panasonic World Solar Challenge.
But, Hidden Valley was also pretty quiet. Most teams that have made Hidden Valley their headquarters are working on finishing parts of their solar cars or equipment needed on the run to Adelaide. MIT, the hard luck team, were making good progress on repairing their damaged car. Sunstang were making new wheel surrounds. Team number 66 from Taiwan was adding new solar cells to their array. The Belgian team Umicore needed Jack’s help to sort out tire mounting techniques and so on.
The Aurora 101 team went back to fine tuning and lowered the car on its suspension, sacrificing some of the suspension travel. Kon rechecked the solar panel wiring and was the test driver for the day. In fact, when he did get out on the track he put together three or four laps at speeds better than the best qualifying lap of 2003. That was 2 minutes, 14 seconds set by Mark Gilligan to win pole position in the 2003 WSC.
New teams to arrive at the track were TIGA from Japan, the third Taiwanese team Apollo, and the Southern Aurora team from Hamilton. The mighty University of Michigan group had just one lap of practice, needing to iron out problems.
Finally we will also see the race favorite team Nuna at the track. |
