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.