Students lead way in solar car race

Texas Motor Speedway hosted the 14th annual four-day Dell-Winston School Solar Car Challenge on Tuesday, 14 July. Over 10 teams compete to be the most efficient, fastest and coolest sun powered car throughout the event.

The winner of this year’s race will be the one who clocks up the most laps round the track over the four days and as teacher Louis Glover stresses it’s about “consistency, not how fast you can go. It’s a tortoise and a hare race.”

These cool pieces of machinery come in a variety of shapes and sizes, three wheels or four depending on the designs of the student teams. Techniques used to power the crafts also varies greatly with some University teams choosing just one cell to power the car and others using multiple cells spread over the body of the vehicle.

Most teams attempt to conserve the most battery life by ‘flooring’ round the race track without applying the brake – trick petrol-drivers can use to conserve fuel.

However this event does not come cheap with solar cars costing up to US $10,000 to build. Glover explained that he maxed out 3 credit cards to get his team here and had to persuade his school to build double doors into his classroom to enable the car to move in and out. Yet he’d “do it again in a heartbeat!”

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July 17^th 2009

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