A Great Australian Adventure (Part 7)

Day 7 began under heavy cloud cover, as expected. The team packed up camp, for the last time, and began driving with the car on the trailer. I settled in for us to be trailering the whole way to Adelaide, which was still 500km away at this point.

Amazingly though, as we got on the road, the clouds began to lighten, and before long we began to see bits of blue. The next hour or so saw the team turn into cloud patch chasers, with us trailering until we sat in direct sunlight, at which point we would find a place to stop and soak up as much of the sun as possible until the shifting clouds forced us to move on.

After an hour, we stopped at the side of the road; there was no need to chase blue patches anymore because it appeared the cloud cover had completely broken. Alisdair's unrelenting optimism had completely flummoxed the outback's weather system, and the sun shone down on our car.

We stopped in the bay for some time, and were joined by MIT and Eclipse - a team from Montreal. There was a festive mood in the air; one of the Eclipse team members had brought out a guitar and sang some songs as we waited collectively for our batteries to recover from being completely emptied.

This is a major gig in the outback; a sandy rest area, a man with a guitar and a megaphone.

Once we decided it was time to drive, Emil jumped in the car, and we were off.

Zoom zoom zoom.

The final stint was probably the best stint we did all race. The sun shone through a clear sky; there was no haze or bushfire smoke or cloud to hinder it, and the route leaned towards being downhill into Port Augusta, and so coupled with the fact that we didn't need to have any charge left when we finished meant that the car cruised at around 80 to 90 km/h, a fair old improvement on the 60 km/h we had been managing for the rest of the race.

When we got into Port Augusta, the array was feeding the most energy into the battery than it had ever done during the race.

The team reached the final control stop, jubilant. This was the way how I had wanted the race to end, with Endeavour rolling under her own steam to the finish, and by some miracle, this was the way it had happened. The road into Adelaide was closed to solar cars as of that morning by the South Australian police, as it was deemed to be too busy for solar convoys, so we put the car on the trailer and drove the rest of the way into Adelaide. We had always expected this would be the case as soon as we had to trailer the car on Day 1, and so for us, Port Augusta was the real finish line, and in my view, despite all expectations to the contrary, we crossed that line with aplomb.

Trailering the car up at Port Augusta. The real end of the race for us.

We trailered into Adelaide, and...that was it. We had crossed the continent of Australia, perhaps not entirely on solar power, but the team had pushed hard to do as well as it could, and I think we eked as much out of the car as it would give. All that was left was the ceremonial crossing of the finish line, and then packing everything up to be sent back home to England.

The final few metres...

I couldn't really tell you exactly what I was feeling as I crossed that line, with people cheering and clapping and waving us in. It was a mixture of so many different emotions. There was definitely a lot of pride at what we had achieved: at so many stages did I think to myself that we weren't even going to make the start of the race, and so to actually be walking across the finish line, with a working car, just felt indescribably good. It was a really happy moment. But I also felt a little sad that the whole thing was over; driving through the outback, camping at the side of the road, watching the beautiful sunrises and sunsets and trying our best to nurse this piece of machinery we'd assembled across those harsh conditions made each day a complete adventure, and I knew I would miss it when we finally finished.

I also felt like I had accomplished something really tremendous, and it was an extremely fulfilling sort of feeling. It's the sort of thing I can hold up to myself and say: "Look, you drove a solar car across the outback...anything else will be peanuts." It was also so real. Because, let's face it, when you receive a payslip with some numbers on it, it's satisfying of course, but this...jumping into the icy cold water of the fountain, with the blazing sun overhead, screaming my heart out surrounded by the whole team, knowing what everyone had been through to get to that point.

It was a primal moment of triumph. A once in a lifetime experience that reminded me what it was to truly be alive.

Screw pay checks, I'll have more of this please.

I leave you with some pictures from our trip. I hope you've enjoyed reading this series of posts!

Workshop at BOC.

Making sparks.

Testing brake lights.

CUER light painting!

Painting painting.

Cockpit view with the rear view camera on.

Hidden Valley pit garage.

This Discovery was definitely not used as a Chelsea tractor.

Stopped at the end of the day.

Road Train!

Endless cloud.

The Stuart Highway (and cloud).

Nose to tail with Waterloo.

One beautiful sunset.

Another beautiful sunset.

Ashiya (JPN), Socrat (TUR), CUER (UK), Onda Solare (ITA), Eclipse (CAN), Anadolu (TUR).

The finish line!

It's a tradition for teams to jump in the fountain.

Future solar car designer appraises Endeavour?

Award for safety and professionalism. Lucy Fielding is happy to collect.

The winners.

Australia: Our clouds will blot out the sun!
CUER: Then we will drive in the shade.

So long Australia.

A Great Australian Adventure (Part 6)

Day 4 began quite well.

I took the first stint in the car. The weather wasn't great; there was sun, but also a lot of cloud cover. Despite this, Endeavour chugged along the Stuart Highway at a steady speed of around 50 to 55 km/h. This stint was somewhat different to the first one I drove. For starters, a rather startled insect of some sort had made the car it's home in the night and was now flapping around in the driver cabin, no doubt rather perplexed by the situation it had found itself in. Also, Endeavour began to experience strange power losses, where I would lose drive for four or five seconds before it would come in again. Sometimes it was more severe, requiring a complete reset of the car to get it going again. Fortunately, most of the times this happened it was possible to keep Endeavour rolling whilst the system reset and then pick up the speed again.

Clouds but sunlight. The outback is weird.

Sometimes, it sets fire to itself too...the outback is weird.

After my stint, Emil hopped in the car, and then proceeded to drive a perfect stint with absolutely no problems. A fickle thing, our Endeavour. After the control stop which we reached at the end of Emil's stint, I got back in the car and within thirty minutes she had broken down completely at the side of the road, refusing to budge despite repeated restarts. Very fickle. Perhaps it was because I'd said that those solar cells made her look fat, or something.

At this point, we were sitting under clouds, so once again the decision was made to put her on the trailer and get the car to Alice Springs, which marked the halfway point of our race.

After starting so well, I was gravely disappointed at yet another day where we had to trailer. The more frustrating thing was that the power losses seemed random and inexplicable, and left the electrical team scratching their heads as to the cause.

The usual end of day proceedings + confused Dan and Ed.

Surprisingly, after some time charging, the battery reported itself as full. And so, suspecting a loose connection somewhere to be the cause of the cut-out earlier in the day, Dan and Ed ran over the electronics with a fine comb in the evening.

We awoke for Day 5 to a nice clear sunrise, and set off with Tom in the solar car. I was in the Discovery, and since Endeavour seemed to be running sweetly, things were quite relaxed.

A relaxing sit.

By this point, the team had become pretty well oiled. The driving was relaxed and everyone knew what to do. It certainly wasn't like the tense and tumultuous Day 1. After Lucy's stint, we could see heavy cloud cover on the horizon; inwardly, I sighed. We had some inkling that the weather wasn't going to be great in the south half of Australia, but still, I had always nursed a hope that the weather reports would be wrong.

As Tom started on his stint, we could see rain in the distance, and then lightning. It seemed that the outback had gotten tired of sun, and had ordered a full blown storm for that afternoon.

Twas like driving into the mouth of (a very wet) hell.

Given that Endeavour is essentially a high voltage battery pack on wheels, and completely not waterproof, we were rightly concerned when it started to drizzle on us. However, we kept going as far as we dared, until the visibility became poor enough that Tom could not see, and then we pulled over.

Actually, this picture was taken in the Yorkshire Dales.

With rain lashing down, wind whipping all around and thunder booming overhead, we jumped out and hastily wrapped the tarp on the car, weathering the worst of the conditions. There was obviously no way we could continue driving under such conditions, so the only thing to do was to put the tarped car on the trailer and see if we could get out of the storm.

At this point, I thought I really had seen it all. The day grew dark enough that we had to use headlights, and Endeavour on the trailer was lost in a cloud of spray kicked up by the Discovery as we raced along the sodden road towards the light.

When we finally got out of the rain and lightning, it was still heavily overcast and it was nearly the end of the day. We decided to keep trailering until we reached Cadney Homestead, a remote truck stop where we made camp for the night. The idea was to cross fingers and hope for a better day on the morrow, and thus save as much battery in Endeavour as possible.

Cadney Homestead.

It turned out we weren't the only team to get caught out by the most un-Australian weather ever. Ten other teams ended up at Cadney, turning the quiet truck stop into a menagerie of solar car teams from all across the world. There was a jovial mood in the evening as teams swapped war stories and joked about the cloud, but it was still deeply frustrating. We all knew we could have done so much better if only there had been sun, and it began to seem increasingly unlikely that we would best the 2009 team's attempt of 1616 km. However, they did have perfect conditions for the whole race, and so that at least didn't bother me too much.

It rained the whole night, and when we woke on Day 6, the conditions were no different. However, we had a mostly full battery, and so whilst all the other teams opted to trailer out of Cadney, we decided to drive Endeavour till she ran flat, given that the conditions till the end of the race were predicted to be the same heavy cloud.

It was a very british thing to do, to give two fingers to the weather and drive a solar car when there wasn't any sun. I felt very proud as Endeavour slowly accelerated out of Cadney, and some of the homestead's residents turned out to wave us off. I also felt very sad, because if there was no change in the weather (and there was no reason to believe there would be), Day 6 would be the last day of driving the solar car. The worst thing for me was that we would go out with a whimper; an insignificant speck of a solar car team who had been ground down by the vast, merciless outback and were forced, with no battery left, to finally concede an ignominious defeat at the side of the road.

Eking out every last kilometre

And so it was. We lowered the speed in an effort to up efficiency, crawling along sometimes at 40 km/h or less and managed a full stint with me in the car. Then Emil hopped in and we carried on. It drizzled on and off, however we didn't consider it heavy enough to stop us. But finally, inevitably, the electrical team made the decision to pull into a rest area to put the car on the trailer and call our race to an end.

However, perhaps Emil had decided he wanted one last hurrah, or perhaps he had actually mis-heard and flicked the throttle by mistake like he explained later. As the lead car pulled into the rest area, he throttled Endeavour up to the max, gunning for freedom. Personally, I think he wanted what I wanted too: for Endeavour to go out in style before it was retired for good. The lead car was quick to catch up, yet Endeavour raced along, defiant, for a few hundred metres before the low voltage protection kicked in; we had run her flat, the car had given all it had to give.

We were done.

The drive to our next campsite, Lake Hart, was a very quiet affair. Not even the spectacular scenery could lift my rather damp mood.

It's actually a salt lake - there is no water down there.

Didn't believe me?

At the evening team meeting, Alisdair laid out our plans for if there was to be sun on the final day. I nodded along but honestly I thought it was a waste of breath; the cloud was thick and blanketed the sky as far as the eye could see, and the conditions were forecasted to be the same all the way to the end. And besides, I had mentally sort of come to terms with finishing the race on such a low note, and was now ready to get to Adelaide and back to civilisation, preferably as quickly as possible.

The end was near.

A Great Australian Adventure (Part 5)

Day 2 began with a 5.30am wake up call, peanuts compared to the 4am of the day before.

The team broke camp fairly quickly whilst the solar array was propped up to receive as much of the morning sun as possible. Unfortunately, the campsite was surrounded by trees, meaning there were copious amounts of shadow and precious little direct sunlight to generate energy from.

Given the state of our battery, we decided to put the car on the trailer and drive to the next control point, Dunmarra, which is about 631 km from Darwin. We unloaded at Dunmarra, with our electrical team estimating the battery pack would be about half full after charging for 3 hours on the back of the trailer.

Prepping the car at Dunmarra

I hopped in the car and we promptly got underway. The stint was tremendously exciting for me, as it was the first time I got to drive the car in the race, and it sort of hit me as we pulled out onto the Stuart Highway that this was it - I was in this car that we had built, driving across the outback in the World Solar Challenge.

What followed was a really nice stint in the car. Ed, the electrical team member who was on telemetry, and I worked together closely to keep the power consumption completely neutral - i.e. using only what energy we could draw from the array. In order to do this, he monitored a graph and was constantly on the radio telling me to speed up slightly or slow down slightly, and I would adjust the throttle as needed.

Two and a half hours later, we stopped to change drivers to Emil. My back ached, my bladder was feeling rather full and I was sweaty and tired, but that didn't stop me from having a huge smile on my face as I jumped out. It was a great stint.

Unfortunately, the rest of the day didn't turn out so well. Emil got underway, and then we suddenly drove into a huge cloud bank, which actually turned out to be the result of a bush fire.

Bush fire

Needless to say, with the sky completely overcast, the array was getting absolutely no power, and with the battery already mostly depleted; there was no choice but for the team to put the car on the trailer and carry on from there.

After clearing the worst of the cloud, the sky was still hazy. We stopped early to point the array at the sun, hoping to gather as much energy as we could. After the good start to the day, it was frustrating that once again we had to put the car on the trailer, and although the sunset was spectacular, it didn't make for ideal conditions as far as charging the battery was concerned. Thus ended Day 2.

Day 2 sunset

Day 3 picked up pretty much where Day 2 left off, with patchy cloud and the team waking up before the dawn to get the array pointing at the rising sun. As the sun climbed higher, the clouds began to dissipate, although there was still a lot of haze around.

Levitating screwdrivers: a good omen...

However, conditions were good enough to drive so Lucy got in the car and we set off. I was pretty jealous of her as the stint proved to be a really good one, and not only was the car working well; the road was joyous to drive, with lovely winding turns and plenty of downhills which Endeavour flew down. Before we knew it, the team had arrived in Tennant Creek.

It was an extremely busy stop, with lots of teams waiting around. It turned out that because bush fires had caused road closures, the race was effectively put on hold for four hours. This was a godsend for us, as it allowed us to get four hours of charging in what was effectively midday sun. By the time we were released in the late afternoon, the battery was full.

The final stint of the day took us to Devil's Marbles, a spectacular collection of outback rocks. But not only was the scenery good, our moods were good too; Day 3 was the first day we completed fully on solar power. The car also seemed to be working well, although it required a change of tyres which was swiftly completed before the sun had set. Dinner that night was a barbecue, which was well received; nothing like a kangaroo sausage after a long hard days drive.

Devil's Marbles indeed.

The Campsite

My abiding memory of this night however, was of playing the Corn Cob game. It was a game involving several corn cobs which were left over from dinner. In the pitch darkness of the outback night, we decided that a competition was to be held to see who could throw their corn cob furthest into the outback. However, with no visual aids, the only way to judge was to listen for the soft thud as tasty snack food met outback dirt. Perhaps that we played the game at all was a sign of the mental degradation that was a natural result of spending all day cooped up in cars with one another and getting very little sleep, but it was hilarious.

This night was also memorable because of the fact that three mantis' found their deaths (indirectly) at my hands. One flew into left over cooking oil and died, another flew into the washing up water and died, and a third...I don't remember how it died, but it did, probably from flying into something it wasn't supposed to. As  Arjun, our lead car driver so eloquently summed up: "For insects that know kung-fu, they fly like retards." Tru dat.

The most important thing though was that it felt like our luck had finally turned. We had dealt with sloppy shipping companies, car crashes, broken steering wheels, road trains and hills and a flat battery and it seemed finally that the weather was turning good and we would be able to get some trouble free days to really rack up the solar kilometres. I was seriously looking forward to Day 4, where I would get the chance to drive again.

A Great Australian Adventure (Part 4)

4am, Sunday 16th October 2011.

Having gotten less than two hours of a fitful sleep, I eased myself out of bed and rubbed the bleariness from my eyes; there was no time this morning to be lying around. I gathered my things with as much co-ordination and composure one could manage at that hour of the morning, and stumbled outside into the pitch black grounds of the hostel. The sun had not yet even begun thinking of breaching the horizon.

Alisdair and myself drove the Discovery to Hidden Valley Raceway, hitched up the trailer with Endeavour and then towed it to the starting grid outside parliament square in the centre of Darwin. Even though the darkness was still absolute, there was a thrum of activity as the other teams were all unloading their cars and making last minute preparations.

By the time we had been directed to a parking spot, it had begun to lighten, and the pre-dawn glow of yet another seemingly cloudless day greeted Endeavour as she rolled off the trailer. By the time we had pushed the car to it's starting position on the grid, the sun had jumped above the horizon. It was something like 6am, and the square was still mostly empty of the general public, just the bustle of team members preparing their machines and early bird media crews buzzing around the big names such as Nuon, Tokai and Michigan. Thankfully, we were ignored for the most part; I was pretty hungry and probably wouldn't have reacted very well to being interviewed.

With the car on the grid, we made last minute preparations such as radio checks, taping on the fairing covers and a quick test to make sure the car actually worked, and then it was off to get a rushed breakfast from a convenient burger van and to wait it out till the start.

As the sun rose higher, the crowds began to form; fascinated members of the general public, press crews and team members made for a extremely exciting and bustling atmosphere.

The start line

Polesitters. Team Twente.

Busy grid!

Michigan!

As we were 30th, we were among one of the last teams to get underway. When the time came, Tom, our first driver of the day, strapped himself in and then we were brought forward to the starting line, where a few  words were said about us by Chris Selwood, the event manager. Then, a flag was waved and we were off!

Since Alisdair, Lucy and I were to be in the Discovery for the first stint, we dallied around Darwin for a little while in order to buy some needed items (such as toothpaste for me!) before we hopped in and set off after Endeavour. From previous discussions, we knew that Endeavour would be attempting to stick a 60kph constant speed strategy until we had further information regarding the energy balance between how much the motor was taking out and how much the array was providing.

Even so, we were surprised by the amount of teams we'd passed in the Discovery before we caught up to Endeavour. It seemed we'd made up at least six or seven positions, one of which was on the race leaders - Team Twente, who stopped just ten minutes into the race with some sort of glitch or gremlin. However, they soon flew past again.

Twente zoom zoom zoom.

After navigating the roundabouts and traffic lights of Darwin, the Stuart Highway opened up into a two lane carriageway, and the convoy settled into it's first stint of running. Things appeared to be going well, with us sticking to our 60 kph plan which would see us complete the whole race on solar power if nothing went wrong. There was occasional cloud cover, but apart from that, the sun was good and the day was a typical Darwin 37 degrees - nearly ideal conditions for solar driving. Unfortunately, due to a blown fuse on the chase car, we were unable to get telemetry readings regarding the net power usage of the car.

About 90km out of Darwin, a sudden radio call from Tom informed us that he had lost power. The convoy pulled over. It was a little bit of a sickening feeling, but I crossed my fingers that it was not a major problem. By the time the car had pulled over however, the fault had somehow righted itself, which provided a mystery for the electrical team to chew over. In the meantime, we got back on the road and continued driving.

Passing a stopped team

We tried to push Tom's stint a little bit longer due to the unplanned stop, however, just before we were about to change driver, Tom reported another complete loss of power. This time it turned out to be a bit more serious. The convoy pulled over and we took our safety positions, with me on the rear safety flag. Dan and Ed worked furiously to try and diagnose and fix the problem, which turned out to be a failed inductor on the steering wheel, which had literally fallen off due to the heat and vibration.

Dan doing some roadside troubleshooting (followed by roadside soldering).

With some creative thinking, they patched in the old steering wheel to use for throttle control - meaning the driver now had two wheels with them in the car - one for steering and the other for throttle!

The whole process of fixing the driver controls cost us about an hour, meaning that as we got underway we were faced with a difficult decision: the race is made up of control points, which have a closing time that the teams have to make. Otherwise, they are forced to trailer their cars because if you miss two consecutive control points then you are disqualified from the race and thus cannot do any more solar kilometres. On the first day however, the event organisers stipulated that the teams had to reach Katharine by 3pm, otherwise they would be forced to trailer.

Our goal this year was to complete the whole race on solar power, and as such, we definitely didn't want to trailer. However, we also weren't sure whether we could sustain a faster solar speed than 60kph as our telemetry had not been working. We decided to give it a go anyway and set out with Lucy trying to maintain a steady 70kph. This speed would, given no other problems, allow us to get to Katherine with literally minutes to spare.

As we got back on the road with Lucy, I didn't feel too worried; sure, we had faced quite a big setback in terms of time, but I was confident that the team would still be able to make the Katherine checkpoint, which would be one of the tightest ones to make.

We continued along the Stuart Highway, being overtaken by road trains (very scary), and overtaking other teams which had stopped (very gratifying). One thing we learned quickly that our assumption that the outback was flat was pretty much wrong. Of course, by no means was it like Scotland, but it was fairly undulating, and that made it hard to maintain a constant speed as the weight of our car meant we struggled up the hills only to shoot down the other side. I felt that we definitely didn't manage to optimise our power draw on the first day; going up hills too fast and going down even faster, but that was expected, given the inexperience of the team. Despite all this, it felt like we were making good progress.

We had been warned beforehand that out of Darwin, there was one "big hill", which the whole team was looking out for. However, even though we were prepared for it, when it finally hit us, circumstances conspired against us to make Endeavour grind to a halt in the middle of the road!

First, a road train pulled out in front of us on the downhill stretch before the hill, and then, it was baulked by another solar car team which had stopped in the middle of the road. It braked suddenly, and we were following close behind which meant that we lost all momentum just as we reached the foot of the hill. From there, it was a painful losing battle against gravity as I watched from the driver's seat of the Discovery; Endeavour's speed slowly dropped, and then it slowed to a crawl, and then it could go forward no more.

Radio messages buzzed frantically as Alisdair and Tom jumped out of the Discovery to push Endeavour to the side of the road. I jumped out as well, before being reminded by Tom that leaving a car parked in the middle of the Stuart Highway probably wasn't a very good idea. At the side of the road it became clear very quickly that the only thing to do was to continue pushing the car to the top, which Alisdair and Tom set out to do. The key thing was to get the motor out of six-step mode, which is a start up setting that isn't really ideal for hill climbing, and that meant going above 20kph or so; a full out sprint up a hill in the Australian heat. Alisdair and Tom managed it with aplomb and the car began speeding up slowly again as it crested the steepest part of the climb, though I was worried one or both of them would have a heart attack as they climbed back into the Discovery, panting for their lives.

A torturous climb

Crisis over, we resumed convoy driving, except that with the time lost on the hill, we realised we had to increase the cruising speed again, upping it to 75kph.

Some time down the road, we stopped for another driver change, chafing at the lost time. When we rolled out again, we realised we had to up the speed to 80kph. We were literally racing towards Katherine. Even at that point, I held hopes that we would be able to make it by the skin of our teeth; and once we got there, the half an hour mandatory stop would give us time to recharge the battery a little before we continued on.

However, it wasn't to be, and around 80km away from Katherine, Tom reported another loss of power. This time, it wasn't to do with any particular fault; we had run the battery flat.

I've thought a lot about that first day, wondering whether if we had driven the car a little bit more efficiently we would have been able to eke another 80km from it. However, as much as I wish it, I doubt that whatever we did would have been enough; our car was just not efficient enough. We either needed to not have the fault with the steering wheel, or we needed a better car. It was a crushing blow to say the least; all that effort expended in preparing the car for the race and on the first day of asking, we fell short of the mark. It was a bitter pill to swallow.

Car is trailered, team is unhappy

We trailered to the Katherine control point to check in, and then after our 30 minute mandatory stop, carried on trailering to a nearby campsite around 381 km from Darwin. Work was done on the car to make it usable with only one steering wheel (the old one, unfortunately), along with other various electrical bits and pieces. A lovely chicken stir fry helped to cheer everyone up somewhat after the deep disappointment of the afternoon, and the team began to refocus on our new target: to beat the 2009 team who managed 1616 km on solar power.

Camped at the end of Day 1