Spending six hours on your back on a steel frame, head and neck raised about 10 degrees, while you peer through a small dark screen and steer a solar-powered car at speeds of up to 65 miles per hour is “not that bad,” senior Carrie Bobier says.“You’re kind of sore when you get out, but it’s not terrible.”
Bobier was one of four drivers of Solstice, Stanford’s entry in the world’s longest solar car race, the biennial American Solar Challenge. Since 1990, Cardinal teams have been competing in the 10-day, 2,500-mile race from Austin, Texas, to Calgary, Alberta. In July, they notched their first victory: tops in the stock class.
Solstice, an iridescent dark blue beauty, bested UC-Berkeley by 22 minutes, which made it an especially delicious win for the 15-member road team. “The finish line was at the University of Calgary’s Olympic center, and we displayed the car on the ice rink,” says Brian Cheung, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering.
But it wasn’t all smooth driving. The first day, Solstice powered up at 6 a.m., then refused to start for the race that began at 8:15, thanks to a foul-up in the battery protection system. “It was a stressful morning with many profane words,” says team leader Eerik Hantsoo, ’05. The glitch: a loose connection—easily soldered back in place—that had unraveled during 2,000 miles of training.
So they were off—lead vehicle, Solstice and chase van—worried only about the risk that SUV and truck drivers wouldn’t see the low-profile Solstice. Then came the Texas thundershowers that leaked into the drivers’ laps and onto electrical circuits—and had to be mopped up with diapers an alum had advised the team to carry. Then there was the afternoon the chase van rear-ended Solstice, which had braked for a yellow traffic light. Crews had to rip off broken sheets of laminated solar cells, then wire and glue new cells in place. More profanity.
The chase van carried all the essentials. The strategy guy with the laptop that read data feeds. Two electrical specialists on the lookout for anything weird. The radio guy who was in constant communication with the driver. And one race observer, who penalized Solstice for going too fast through a couple of small towns.
Students built Solstice from scratch, starting in March 2004. They designed the body, then cooked the fiberglass and carbon-fiber shells in their garage on Stock Farm Road. Then came the suspension, mechanical and electrical systems, solar cells and lithium-ion batteries—“a little tricky to deal with,” according to Hantsoo. “If they get outside their happy voltage and temperature range, they have a nasty habit of blowing up and outgassing toxic fumes.”
On the road, they camped in parking lots or slept beside the highway. One trucker in Minnesota—or it may have been North Dakota—invited them home for showers and to sleep on his living room floor. Best of all, they didn’t have to survive on PowerBars, as previous teams had. Betsy Shelton, mother of strategy guru Addison Shelton, ’05, packed her camp stove and pots and hit the road with the team. “There was one taco night,” Cheung remembers fondly. “And then those pancakes in Winnipeg.”
On the final day, as the Stanford team clicked off the remaining 200 miles to Calgary, they were neck and neck with Cal. Shelton worried about the dropping power output from the array of solar cells. “We’re in Canada,” someone pointed out. “Maybe we’re not getting enough sunlight?”
As the game of chicken intensified—should they increase speed at the risk of not having enough battery power to cross the finish line?—Cal breezed past. “We thought we were hosed,” Cheung recalls. But just over the next hill, there was the Cal car, off to the side of the road with a frazzled, irreparable circuit board.
“It was the most stressful day I’ve had in many years,” Hantsoo says. But he’s signing up for more, as an alum adviser in 2007.
