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Dr. Paul Hirtz, (S&T solar car alum, race official, and Assistant SDELC Director), shown here waving Michigan past Medicine Hat's start line apparently left his passport in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada the other day. While he is desperately trying to get his papers together for tonight's drive to the Montana border, we suggested he simply follow the solar car caravan to the border.
That way all twenty of us can swear we have never seen him before in our lives.
It would be too easy to say that Michigan won the race as usual. but of the last five American Solar Challenge races you could just as easily say that the score has been Mighty Michigan 3, Missouri S&T 2.
S&T upset Michigan in rainy '99 and shattered the Wolverines' Route 66 record in 2003; Blue won '01 (with then-UMR breathing down its neck), '05 (with Minnesota, MIT, and S&T close behind), and now '08, holding off a heroic charge from S&T progeny Principia.
The Miners ran across the ceremonial finish line in 7th place, joined by S&T Provost Kent Wray, the guy in the white hat (in more ways than one).
The final rankings are: Michigan, Principia, Bochum (Germany), Waterloo, Minnesota, Calgary, and then Missouri S&T. Rounding out the field finds Iowa State, Red River, Arizona, Kentucky, Queen's, Northwestern, Dunham (England), and finally heroic Oregon State with its lovable home-built plywood trailer and $60K day-to-day budget. Oregon State finished ahead of Texas-Austin, MIT, and a long list of other notable institutions that came up short and weren't able to get a car in the race. You can find the actual race times (and plenty of S&T provided photos) at americansolarchallenge.org.
S&T's decision to trailer Monday afternoon, even under sunny skies, worked out to be an excellent strategic decision because they were able to pour just enough energy into their battery pack to keep their grip on 7th place and run ALL of Tuesday's final stage under SMVI's power, even though roughly 40% of the Medicine Hat-to-Calgary route was not very sunny. They must have calculated their power just right because Solar Miner Vi coasted across the finish line on electrical fumes. No power left at all, they tell us.
The '08 Miners has a rough year but still managed to complete the grueling, sometimes sunless race, in the middle of the pack, taking 7th place out of 15 teams to hit the road. Their lack of experience (except for Chris Pieper's race-time leadership and '05 alum Tim Robillard's sacrifice of his vacation time) meant that when things went wrong the students were less likely to understand the myriad of electronic hints that Solar Miner Vi threw at them. When array connections broke the students mistook the lowered output as a result of cloudy weather rather than the broken sub-array connections that were discovered on the last two days of the race, and who knows how long the sub-arrays were compromised. When your array is incomplete you are racing (fighting?) with one arm tied behind your back, and no amount of battery excellence will save you. S&T's decision to manufacture their own circuit boards in-house may also have held back the team as there were hundreds of potentially fault connections that could have been been the reason for their telemetry and turn signals problems. The crew has already started a long list of things to change in the next car, so there has been a tremendous amount of learning that has taken place, and that's what S&T's experiential learning programs are all about.
This was a year that many schools fielded inexperienced teams because of the three-year gap in state-side racing, and at least another dozen schools (some quite well-known) didn't even get their cars completed in time or make it through qualifying trials in Texas. The late announcement that Toyota's sponsorship rescued the event shrunk a two-year build and test cycle to a mere 7 months. S&T's solar superstars barely got the car finished in time and had no where near the hundred (thousands?) of miles on the car necessary to work out all the kinks. During this race nearly every top-grade team, such as Minnesota, Bochum or Principia, had sudden breakdowns that kept the runner-up order in constant turmoil, so even if you've completed your shake-down testing there is still no absolute assurance that you'll sail through at top (legal) speed.
The University of Calgary will host the awards ceremony at noon today, and as soon as all the t-shirts are traded and hamburgers consumed, S&T will hit the road to Great Falls, Montana for the night.
They'll arrive Friday evening in Rolla and clean out all their gear before disappearing until semester's start in three weeks.
The weather for today's return trip? Cloudy! Go figure..........
Somehow it is a fitting end to this race that we have lot of clouds today. This has been the least-sunny race since the '99 rain-fest from D.C. to Orlando won by upstart Missouri S&T, the first of our TWO national championships.
'08 won't be our year, obviously. Yesterday's standings have us in a respectable 6th place, considering that nearly all of the faster teams have been running in the Australia's World Solar Challenge in the non-NASC years. There are also several listings where the higher-ranked team has a longer elapsed running time than lower-ranked teams, so we are are confused in that matter. The Miners have fielded a simple and reliable mechanical chassis that has run beautifully, but the electrical side hasn't held its own. Late yesterday they found that three sub-arrays had somehow lost their connections so the car has been running on only 70% of its potential power. They don't know how long that has been the case because they were attributing the low power to so many cloudy days. Add to that the gradually shrinking battery back and you'll understand the Miners may be arriving at Calgary on solar fumes, so to speak.
We'll have more from the S&T Gypsy Caravan in the morning.
The Solar Miner VI crew had high hopes of running all 300 miles to Medicine Hat, Alberta today, and were well on their way to doing it. No breakdowns, no clouds, no rain, no traffic, no nuttin'.
They were maintaining just the right speed that would put them into Medicine Hat around dinner time, and were running in a loose pack of Waterloo, Bochum, Minnesota and Calgary so it really seemed like racing. Why then, did they pack it in? Very simply they could have run all day but that would have left their battery pack too low to recover in just a few evening hours, and that strategy would have forced them to trailer tomorrow to the eventual finish line. Embarrassing choice, that.
S&T has had to make this choice several times on this race. Our best showing was the run to Sioux Falls, when they placed more importance in getting to the stage point just under the wire. The strategic cost they paid the following day was that clouds prevented them from rebuilding the pack while they were running. Not only did it hurt them that day, but it put them in a hole all the way to Winnipeg and even on to Brandon, Manitoba.
Tomorrow we'll head to the finish line in Calgary, 187 miles away, if we remember correctly. Michigan appears to have vanquished the field, as has oft been their history. As of early this morning Principia had a very slight chance of catching Big Blue, and it looked like Hochshule Bochum, Waterloo, Minnesota and Calgary in that order were going to be the bridesmaids (again). Today's racing threw that book out the window when Principia suddenly vanished from the radar and Waterloo was flying along VERY strong. Rumor had it (and trust us, this event LIVES on rumors until the standings are published each morning) that wundercar Principia hit a big pothole and was sidelined, but the RA VII crew arrived in Medicine Hat around 7:00 p.m., quite late for such a fast runner.
Continue reading "Miners Sprint Well Under Clear Skies, But Trailer In To Race Another Day" »
We haven't had time to recognize all of the other teams in this event, but the Brits from Durham University have finally been spotted on the road. Durham, possibly along with Oregon State and its shoestring budget, has had the toughest time on the race. They've done had a lot of trailering because of various problems, but they've kept their ubiquitous stiff upper lip. We wonder if they'll party like their '01 English counterparts did at the end of that race. Hope so, 'cause they will have earned it.
It is a cool, quiet morning on the Canadian prairie, and there is strange unbroken shade of pale blue from horizon to horizon. No one seems to know what to make of it.
At least one Miner nearly came jumped of his sleeping bag when a freight train rolled by at 2:00 in the morning. We promise you, when a train roars by just 50 yards away, it sure feels a LOT closer in the dark.
The Miners will head back toward Regina a few miles, set up the car and charge exactly where they stopped last night. They should be through Regina's check point shortly after nine, past Moose Jaw by early afternoon, and into Medicine Hat, the race's final stage point by suppertime. If they don't make that they'll have to trailer in to participate in tomorrow's last stage start, and it probably won't be until then that we'll know what the race standings are. We hope the final standings will have S&T at the head of the middle pack, but there us no way to tell at this point. We are sorry to report that Principia's amazing run at race leader Michigan will probably fall short, as Ra VII is reported to be 60 miles farther east than S&T. Principia has run a very clean and organized race, and should be considered the event's best performing team, in our opinion.
Just so we don't forget, we want to recognize the contributions of Jennifer Claybrooks of Mizzou's Hydrogen Car Project. The Tigers' demonstration car was one of several that didn't manage to qualify for this tremendous race, so she joined the Miners and proved a ray of sunshine when it was most needed.
Lastly, we thought we'd post a photo of Jennifer, because without her help.............