Today we had our very first racing day! We had two time slots in which we could race, the first one already starting at 9AM!
The Shell Eco-Marathon is all about efficiency. The rules state that we must drive 11 laps on the circuit in a maximum time of 39 minutes. Since we participate in the UrbanConcept class, we have the added rule that we have to stop and start each lap, since we’re simulating a real city car. Before our start and after our finish, our hydrogen flow data and capstack voltage get measured. If we fulfilled all requirements, our attempt becomes valid and our data gets logged. We get 4 time slots and 4 attempts to finish all 11 laps. The team that has consumed the least amount of hydrogen is therefore the most efficient and wins the race!
This morning at 9 o’clock we had our first time slot and we set out to also get our first valid attempt. Since we really wanted to get a valid attempt first before driving the most efficient possible. This means we wanted to drive the full 11 laps in the maximum time of 39 minutes, so we drove very safe and without risks. This turned out really well and we could easily finish the attempt without any problems. Our attempt was the most efficient of all the hydrogen teams of today! So at the moment, we are on the top of the ranking!
After the successful attempt we celebrated it briefly, but got to work soon after that. We had a lot of changes we wanted to make to the car to try to increase the efficiency even more, which we deemed too risky to implement before the first valid attempt was set. One of the things we wanted to implement was a software update to the capstack software. With this update we could use effectively more capacity of the capstack. We also noticed during the first attempt that one of the cables of the motors was a bit faulty, so we changed this just to be sure this wouldn’t cause any problems during the coming attempts.
We wanted to take our time to get everything right and since the second time slot was 1,5 hours long, we didn’t get in line at the first possible moment. Unfortunately, when we were in line, one of the wishbones of the suspension of the car broke which we could fix quite easily and quickly, but caused us to have to return to the back of the queue. Since there were too many cars in front of us at that point, we were not able to start for a second time today. But luckily, we did not lose an attempt over this, so we will have 3 more attempts left for tomorrow!
Tomorrow the time slots will probably from 9:00 until 10:30 and from 13:30 until 15:30. Currently, we are still inspecting and testing the car to make sure every tiny thing is taken care of and works perfectly. If everything goes well, we will finish this on time today and we will start with an even better car tomorrow!
