A field of 37 solar powered cars from 20 countries began a 3,000 km journey from Darwin to Adelaide on Sunday in the 2011 Veolia World Solar Challenge.
Solar Team Twente from Netherlands started in pole position after qualifying trials put them just 3 seconds ahead of their compatriots, Nuon Solar team. Team Twente qualified with the fastest lap time of 2.02.2 minutes and an average speed of 85.43 kilometres per hour.
The University of NSW team started in 4th position, Aurora from Melbourne in 12th and TAFE SA lined up in 22nd place.
The Aurora team has participated in every World Solar Challenge and has an impressive record of record of 1 victory, 4 seconds, 1 third, 1 fifth and 1 sixth. The current Aurora car is powered by Sunpower silicon solar cells, a CSIRO/Marand in-wheel electric motor and Saehan Enertech lithium-polymer batteries.
UNSW Solar team’s Sunswift Ivy Mk2 is rolling on a set of new lightweight carbon fibre wheels for the race and TAFE South Australia is competing with its new solar powered car, the Solar Spirit.
After the first day, the race leaders were Tokai University (Japan), Nuon Solar Car Team (Netherlands) and University of Michigan (USA) respectively. The Aurora team were in 4th position, UNSW in 9th and the TAFE team had not yet reached Katherine. By the end of the first day, the three leaders were in the general vicinity of Newcastle Waters, a property in the west Barkly region of the Northern Territory.
On each day, teams can travel as far as they can until 5pm in the afternoon.
Those interested can watch the cars travel down the route via satellite tracking from the event’s Control Room page, although at the time of writing, the organisers state a Google related outage is preventing the display of tracking data; a problem the parties are working on.
