Solar Freaks

http://www.tassolarchallenge.org/?page=gallery

Just noticed these on the Tasmanian website, 2004 - the competition was in Perth that year yeah?

Marc, I was wondering firstly if you have any more photos and secondly did you compete that year?

Hey Redlands, I remember that year.
There was a certian WA team making CO2 bombs, with the left over Dry Ice they used to cool the panels with.

Redlands wrote:Just noticed these on the Tasmanian website, 2004 - the competition was in Perth that year yeah?

Yep. Murdoch University to be exact.

Redlands wrote:Marc, I was wondering firstly if you have any more photos and secondly did you compete that year?

I don't think I've got a whole lot more photos from 2004. I got the ones on the Tas website off someone else.

Yes, I did compete at the 2004 nationals. The track wasn't great to say the least and there quite a number of teams had real problems staying on. At certain points around the track the guides would scrape on the surface of the track while at others they were very nearly too high for the guide channel. It made things hard and we ended up having to scrape along a good section of the track to stay on.
Anyway, during testing the car had had that many crashes that by the time it came to racing, the gears had sustained damage and everything more or less just went down hill after the first "official" race.

On top of that I swear the panel powers were reading low that year and the one we had only came in at around 5W. In fact if you look at the car spec sheet from 2004 you will find that just about a third of the cars at the event had panels measure in at under 6W.
From memory, our panel had been somewhat tested in Tas and come close to 6W there (Ok, that had been an in-sun test). For some strange reason we didn't bring along any extra modules and so therefore had to race way under power.

I'm not saying we would have won or anything but the car certainly should have finished a lot higher than it did. Had the track not been so problematic and a 6W panel been used, a top 4 finish would very much have been a possibility.

Marc

BTW, Tony is that you in the Akubra in pic 5?

miseli wrote:BTW, Tony is that you in the Akubra in pic 5?

Haha yea thats me. I still got that hat BTW, wear it all the time.
I didnt even know that picture existed till now.
Wow i looked different 6 years ago lol.

TonyB wrote:Haha yea thats me. I still got that hat BTW, wear it all the time.

Haha. Bring it to WA.

miseli wrote:I don't think I've got a whole lot more photos from 2004. I got the ones on the Tas website off someone else.

How about 2007?

And thank you for shedding some light on the 2004 competition, I was just curious.

hahaha tony i remember u buying that thing dont no why though should be a good competition this year in perth though with hopefully some good light and fast times.