South Australian Border to Coober Pede: 390km
Today was an almost perfect day.
We got good charge last night, and more again in the morning, almost fully charged again. We were ready to set off on the dot of 8:00am when we noticed one tyre was a bit low. We did the photo 8am start anyway, then pulled up a few meters further on to change the wheel, 10 minutes and we were away!
Yesterday we averaged 49kph, starting with a full charge, and with very good sun. If we could keep that average up we could make it to Coober Pede in 8 hours, plus time for the 10 minute Kulgera control stop, driver changes, and any other stops. Fortunately today was most downhill, where yesterday involved a lot of slow uphills. Today we tried to keep the speed up going uphill to minimize lost time. Possible but not easy.
The day started with good downhill, mainatining 50-55, with little battery use. The solar power picked up quickly allowing us to conserve the batteries for later in the day when the road got hillier and there was a band of cloud forecast to come through.
We continued to maintain good speed, with little battery use through the driver changes at Malar Bore and Kulgera, without any breakdowns, and only a few conveinence stops. The cloud was on the horizon, but kept away from us. The solar power never reached the extreme highs of yesterday, but still reached 1200W, and held high late into the afternoon with the sun staying above the clouds and and light reflecting off the clouds. By 3:30 the battery was still good and we only needed 45kph average to make Coober Pede. The road was getting hilly and we were using up to 800W from the batteries plus 900W solar getting up the short hills, but we needed to keep the speed up to make it. As we passed the point where Solar Fern broke down in 2007, 50 km from Coober Pede, that battery was starting to drop, but with good solar at 4:30 we were on target.
We arraived at 5:04pm. marked it and called it the Finish line
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Sounds like you finally got a day of great solar racing in without breakdowns etc.
ReplyDeleteI have been looking at the results of the race so far. Tokai totally blitzed it. I hope the organisers don't take that as an excuse to shorten the race time allowed even more otherwise we will have to power our trailers with V-8s!
Cheers
Barry
Tokai are amazing. The team has always been a tail runner high school team, but since they won the SA race they have got big sponsorship. Their cells are the best research grade GaAs cells in the world from Sharp, the body was made by Yamaha, with sponsorship from Panasonic and many others, and run by the university. This is virtually the return of the corperate team.
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