Nuon, Tokai maintain six-race rivalry Day Two of the World Solar Challenge has ended with only a handful of the vehicles reaching the checkpoint at Ti Tree, north of Alice Springs. The leading vehicle remains Nuon from the Netherlands (1,340 km covered), followed by Tokai University (1,332 km) and Team Twente (1,295 km). Stanford and the University of Michigan …
What impresses me quite a bit is that the comparatively clunky looking affair of KoGakuin University is getting along pretty nicely with all the other supermodel-slim cars. It somehow suggests that the airfoil design isn't the only way of doing this and makes me think that Cambridge, had they not cracked their car, would have had a fair chance.
Speeds are set by a computer, not an accelerator pedal. If, then, a speed limit breach is observed, it's likely to arise from the support crew missing a transition from 130 km/h to something slower as the car approached a town. ®
I'm genuinely surprised. The article makes it sound as though speed is entirely controlled remotely from a separate vehicle. Can the solar car's driver override the external control at all? What if the solar car and support vehicle become separated (by road-trains, for example)?
Surely the solar car must have a brake pedal for safety?
Bootnote: To relieve the mind of a commentard who can't understand why a racing car would be fined for breaking the speed limit: the entire event is run on public roads, and receives its permit on the condition that contestants follow the speed limits.
As another commentard mentioned:
From the article the "race" sounds more like a "rally", where your timed over certain sections and lose time of you arrive late, but are much more heavily penalised if you arrive early to a time control/checkpoint,
So call it a solar rally then! Racing, by definition, is getting to the endpoint as fast as you can! From Wikipedia:
A sport race is a competition of speed, against an objective criterion, usually a clock or to a specific point. The competitors in a race try to complete a given task in the shortest amount of time. Typically this involves traversing some distance, but it can be any other task involving speed to reach a specific goal.
The organizers are free to call the event whatever they want. In fact, they call it "World Solar Challenge", not a race and not a rally. The participants are also free to call it whatever they want it, and they seem to call it a race quite often.
If Wikipedia disagrees, too bad. I am sure you wasn't expecting it to provide accurate and authoritative answers to everything, did you?
If Wikipedia disagrees, too bad. I am sure you wasn't expecting it to provide accurate and authoritative answers to everything, did you?
Nope, so I checked out the Oxford dictionary as well: (http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/race?q=race)
a competition between runners, horses, vehicles, etc. to see which is the fastest in covering a set course
My gripe is, if it is not technically a race, then stop calling it one. The organisers are correct in calling it a challenge, so report on it as a challenge then...
>a competition between runners, horses, vehicles, etc. to see which is the fastest in covering a set course
Which is exactly what is happening in this event, is it not? See who gets to each checkpoint first and, in the event that the course isn't completed, classifying the non-finishers by qualifying distance covered.
It's an endurance race not a flat out sprint but it's being classified like a race.
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