A Great Australian Adventure (Part 3)

On the face of it, although the grid position for a week long solar endurance race is hardly important compared to say, the grid position for the Abu Dhabi grand prix (where despite the ridiculous straight and 2x DRS zones, the top 10 positions on lap 2 were the top ten at the end of the race), I was still mighty excited about it as my phone alarm went off at some ridiculous hour in the morning (5:30 I believe).

This meant that, despite the fact that in England I find getting out of bed difficult until it's well past noon, on that Saturday I had no trouble shaking off sleep. I headed to the track along with the rest of the drivers and our team manager, Alisdair, for the drivers briefing which commenced at an early hour in the morning. I think it was 7.30am, or something like that. I forget. It was hardly the highlight of the day, even if there was a massive spider which we disturbed from its early morning basking.

After the briefing was over, it was time for the qualifying session, which consisted of a timed lap around Hidden Valley Raceway along with a slalom test and a brake test. I for one was feeling rather nervous about the brake test, given that Endeavour is a pretty heavy car. I was also feeling rather nervous about the timed lap, given that the suspension arms were rubbing on the wheel rims under cornering - not unlike the sort of thing which could lead to catastrophic suspension collapse if the forces were too large. Basically, I was feeling a bit nervous, but it's always good to have a bit of nerves, I guess.

All 37 teams that were to be competing this year milled about in the paddock and pitlane, waiting for their car numbers to be called out. There was a buzz in the air - I think for everyone it was an anticipatory moment - we would all get to see how our cars finally matched up to each other on the track after the months and months of work that had been put into each of our challengers. I was not expecting us to be one of the earlier runners to go given that we still had to have the stickers for Endeavour signed off as the replacement ones had only been affixed late on Friday. Whilst we waited, some of the big guns put in their laps, with team Nuon leading the way.

The pitlane teemed with people

Surprisingly, we were called up a lot earlier than expected - sometime around 8:30. I jumped in the car and strapped myself in. I had to fight down a little bubble of excitement as I flicked the switches and began to trundle towards the end of the pitlane; I knew that I had to keep my blood cool and to drive a conservative lap to avoid damaging the car in hard cornering, the first of which was not helped in any way by the spectators standing along the pit wall turning to take pictures as the car slipped past them.

Leaving the garage

Waiting for go.

It took another five minutes of waiting at the end of the pitlane before I was given the go ahead, and throttled up to max to trundle onto the circuit itself. There was now nothing but the track - slightly distorted by the canopy, the car - a mass of squeaks and vibrations and motor whine, and me. Endeavour isn't really the nicest car to drive by any means, and I think even as solar cars come it's not that good; trying to hustle it around a racetrack was rather like trying to wrestle a whale into a postbox, but at that moment, it felt pretty damn cool.

I pushed as hard as I could, listening for the slightly muted rub of metal on metal that I knew indicated when the rims were contacting the suspension and so drove the lap trying to keep on the threshold of that. The rubbing sound would let me know when I'd reached the limit, and beyond that there was the lovely smell of burning rubber, which I did sniff after taking the lovely downhill double apex left hander a bit too quickly, but c'est la vie.

Solar zoom

After the timed lap came a short slalom test which was cleared without difficulty, and then the braking test which was also passed without difficulty. I was surprised how well Endeavour braked - doing it in half the prescribed length, and I'm told the scrutineer was surprised with how many cut cable ties and other bits of junk came flying out of the front fairing as a result of the sudden stop. Anyway, with everything cleared, I trundled back into the pits and the team set about getting the car on the trailer and with the final packing for the race. Later, we found out that we had qualified 30th, with a time of 3:11. Pole went to team Twente from Holland, with a time of 2:02.

Packing was a fairly arduous process, given that our tools and equipment were spread between two places, and also because we were fairly tight on space as the van we rented was not that big. There was also a lot of other stuff to pack, including food supplies as well as personal belongings (and many people had brought fairly large suitcases). I packed until just after noon along with several others sorting out the toolboxes and everything else at Hidden Valley Raceway before we stopped at the hostel for lunch, and then went to another WSC meeting in the afternoon. At the meeting, we were told such things as: "don't drive on the wrong side of the road" and "road trains can kill you to death", and we were also assigned our first observer - a Malaysian man who turned out to have a serious chain smoking habit.

As we left to go to our workshop at BOC to grab the rest of our things, disaster struck. Our support van - the one which would carry the bulk of the things like the food, water and jerry cans for fuel as well as all the spare parts and so on, had it's back window smashed out as it was backed into a truck at the parking lot. Late afternoon on a Saturday meant that all the rental places were closed, and at any rate, there was no money left in the account to pay for the damage.

The 'oh crap' moment

Who needs windows anyway...

With no other choice available to us, we decided to patch the window up the best we could. Some creative thinking led to the liberal usage of vinyl wrap, duct tape and a sign stolen from our pit garage at Hidden Valley to improvise a rear windscreen. It was then cleared with the authorities in Darwin, who fortunately allowed us to drive with our temporary window down to Adelaide.

Engineering at it's finest

With that crisis over, the packing continued. It was interspersed with dinner, a lovely lamb kofte made by our resident chef Oli A, and staring at a distant thunderstorm. It was perhaps 50km away, but still it was a dazzling display of nature as forks of lightning streaked between the clouds, lighting it up from the inside like a flickering lamp wrapped with fluff. I said at the time it was fairly ominous, and had I known then what was to happen during the race, I'd have said it was a foreshadowing of things to come.

The night wore on. We were originally hoping to be packed fairly early, and thus be able to be well rested for the start on Sunday, but with the incident with the van taking up so much time to sort out, it began to look like some of us wouldn't get any sleep at all. We sent the two solar car drivers who would be driving the first shifts to bed (Tom and Lucy), and the rest of us laboured on. The packing process was complicated by the fact that we had a lot of stuff to pack, and a very limited amount of space to pack it in. This meant we had to be pretty intelligent with the way we packed to not only maximise the usage of the space we had available, but to make sure items ended up where they were needed - for example having some spare tyres and toolboxes and multimeters with the chase car and so on.

Midnight came and went. Drunk people floated on by, wondering as to what the hell we were doing. Then, another disaster; I misplaced the key for the chase car. This nearly drove me half mad with panic, as there was no way we could enter the race without a chase car, and there would be no time tomorrow morning to get a replacement key as we would be leaving too early: we had to find it or else we couldn't race. I nearly despaired as we frantically searched; how would I be able to live with myself if I let the team down by something so stupid and simple? Luckily, fifteen minutes later saw it found nestled snugly underneath some stickers in the back of the lead car. A few deep breaths later to settle my racing heart and cold sweats, and I turned back to one remaining task at hand - getting everyone's personal belongings into the back of the Land Rover Discovery. It was basically a 3D game of Tetris, and it ended up turning out that we had just enough room for everything that needed to go in (with some squeezing and shoving and cursing). A timely stroke of luck.

Exhausted, I collapsed into bed at around 2am, setting the alarm clock for a 4am wake up call. Tomorrow was race day. Tomorrow, we would start this epic adventure. It dawned on me, just as I began to drift off, that it would be an adventure; we would be out in the middle of nowhere, sometimes perhaps a hundred kilometres from the nearest medical aid or food or water. This wouldn't be like traipsing around Dartmoor; if things went wrong badly out here, the consequences could be dire.

I couldn't wait.