[Update October 19th, 01:15 UTC / October 19th 20:45 NT time]
Solar Team Twente updated their website about racing day four. Shortly after the start Aurora passed Twente and could drive in sixth place for a while. Before the end of the day, however, Twente could make its move and passed not only Aurora but Ashiya as well, ending up in fourth place. The team spends the night near CP Coober Pedy. This means that they have a little over 850 km to cover before they reach Adelaide. With the cloudy weather that’s predicted for racing day five I doubt it’s possible to make that in one day.
Team captain Siebe Brinkhof expressed the team’s goal of trying to catch up with the number three, the University of Michigan team, but as the latter has only a bit more than 500 km to go before they finish and the distance between the two is around 200 km, it remains to be seen if that proves possible.
Their nice mobile app shows their battery as 50% full.
Nuon also updated their website (in Dutch). Nuon also had an exciting racing as they managed to close the gap with Tokai to 35km. Tokai’s satellite data seemed to indicate that they slowed down to under 80 km/h near the end of the day while Nuon kept up a high speed. Mind you: this tracker is not mounted in the solar car but in one of their fleet vehicles, so it’s possible (but not likely) that this data does not indicate the speed and position of the Japanese solar car.
If it’s true they slowed down, it could mean a number of things. Possibly the team is depleting their battery at a higher rate than expected, possibly they suddenly found out about the cloudy weather approaching (as far as I know, Tokai does not have weather car) and wanted to conserve their energy or possibly there is a technical problem. If anything, it makes the race more exciting.
Although Tokai still has the lead it is by no means certain who will finish first. We’ll know in less than a day!
Umicore also has an update, and is still aiming for 4th place. But with the cloudy weather in the south i highly doubt if their panel will produce enough power as their GaAs cells perform less efficient and the concentrators will hardly work at all with diffuse light.. I wish them a great race, but 4th place seems very far away for them.
On the WSC dashboard site the distance difference between tokai and nuon is just 17,1km
https://sites.google.com/a/worldsolarchallenge.org/2011-wsc-dash-board/leaderboard
That’s true, but unfortunately the WSC data have not been entirely reliable…
22 min ago they tweeted: “we hebben nieuwe informatie, we blijken maar 15 minuten achter Tokai te liggen… morgen nog spannender dus!”
Sorry, in english that is: “we have new information, we appear to be only 15 min behind Tokai… tomorrow will be even more exciting”
Underneath the time table stand “official timing”. It’s clear that Nuon is back in business to fight for fictory. Close solar racing http://youtu.be/4ZagpD6B-UM
Provisional results day 4: Nuna only 3 minutes behind at 2432 km!
This is too much. I can’t stand the tension anymore.:)
If there was live coverage a la Tour de France, I would stay up all night!
@Anne: You might get what you want. I will certainly stay up all night, or at least until Tokai and Nuon have finished and I’m pretty sure Diederik will do the same. We’ll have Tokai’s GPS locator beacon and maybe Diederik can keep in touch with Nuon by satellite phone, so we just might be able to give a live or near-live report.
Spread the word! (by twitter, facebook, forums, e-mail friends and family). Without boasting I can confidently say that here at solarwebsite.bl we are in a position to likely be the first to publish with any certainty who will have won the 2011 WSC.
It’s going to be mighty exciting!
Great work, Jeroen and Diederik.
At what (european) time can we expect the finish?
Anne, that would take a LOT of videocars with satelite connection on the go. Teams are spread out over more then 1000km by now and no way you can get live video from all of them. And even if you could, it will get pretty boring after a while i guess. But some more info and updates – with video, interviews by sat.phone, etc – from the WSC crew would be nice. It’s not that hard to have accurate live tracking and have someone bringing all the news together on one website.
I guess all Anne wanted, at least all I want, is live coverage of the top 2 teams, or at least a camera streaming live at the (time) finish line.
@Maarten: Tokai has around 500 km to go, Nuon a tiny bit more. They’ll start at 08:00 local time. It’s hard to say exactly what time they’ll finish but at (let’s grab a number out of the air) an average speed of 80 km/h that means 6+ hours of driving. Let’s put the finish around 15:00 local time (could be later if it’s really cloudy) and that’s 07:30 CEST. Mind you, that’s a very rough estimate, I’d be very careful basing any decisions on it! Anything might happen, it might be either sunnier or cloudier than expected, they might drive either (much) faster or slower than I expect, teams may have technical troubles…
If I’m certain of one thing it’s that it’s going to be extremely exciting.
go to bed ar 0:00, get the latest updates of the start and then wake up at 5:00.
@ErikH & Ward,
Of course I am aware that WSC is not the Tour de France. I was merely expressing my anxiety to follow the race as close as possible.
@JeroenH,
Thanks a lot for all the effort. You’re doing a tremendous job that doesn’t go unnoticed. Check out the links at the bottom of this article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/19/wsc_update_solarcar_day_4/