Students gear up for solar car challenge

MONTROSE — Their trip will take them to the famous Texas Motor Speedway for a four-day race. However, this is no ordinary race, nor are the cars and their drivers.

Sunshine Mountain Travelers is a group of Ridgway high schoolers who have Colorado’s only high school solar race car team. In July, they will take their solar car, which they designed and maintained themselves, to Texas to compete in the Dell-Winston School Solar Car Challenge.

Now that the snow has melted away from the school’s shop, the students were able to roll out  their car last Monday and start preparing for the big challenge.

The race lasts four days, said team adviser Tom Johnson. The students will race from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day, trying to accumulate the most laps to achieve first place. While not racing, the car’s solar arrays (panels) will charge the batteries. The challenge is avoiding breakdowns, keeping their vehicle light, maximizing the sun’s energy and avoiding draining the batteries, along with maintaining sharp drivers at all times to avoid any of the numerous problems that can arise.

To do this, the team has three drivers, currently the only three team members. However, Johnson said he is expecting more members when Ridgway eighth-graders graduate in May and are allowed to join the team. He said he encourages interested students to contact him.

The drivers include senior and four-year member Bryce Heywood, and 10th-graders and two-year members Evan Tilley and Lily Johnson. Each member also has their own role, which ensures the car and the team are ready to race.

Heywood is the team’s captain, Tilley is electrical captain and Lily is mechanical captain.

“My main job is alignment,” Lily said last Monday as the team worked on the car outside the school’s shop. Without proper alignment, many things can go wrong from driving the vehicle straight to using more energy than needed to make the laps.

Energy is huge, as the whole race depends on how energy is used.

“We want to use the sun and batteries right,” Heywood said. “We have to know how hard to push (the vehicle) without draining energy.”

The vehicle has eight batteries, which store the energy the arrays, which make up the whole top of the car, gather. Heywood said the team is considering going to 13 batteries, but they must be careful of adding weight to the car. The more weight, he explained, the more energy it takes to run the vehicle.

To avoid adding weight, the team works to maximize every piece of the car. It must have a roll bar to protect the driver, so the team has used the bar to also support the arrays, cutting down on metal on the car.

Last week, the team met with two engineers, Jorge Angehrn and Don Reed, who they call in to assist them anytime they change voltage, structure or power, Johnson said. The team is putting in a new motor and designing a structural motor mount, which will also be the tensioner. Heywood has been designing the mount using Microsoft Visio, a designing program much like AutoCAD. Again the group is using the mount for two things, so not to add weight. The car  weighs about 950 pounds.

The new single-motor should help the team gain efficiency because they lose friction.

Until the race, the students will be working every Monday to get the car up to par. As soon as school is out, the team will go to a three- or four-day work week.

However, fixing the car for the race is not their only challenge. The team also needs to get the funds to pay for their trip.

For the past year, they have been attending events, such as the Delta-Montrose Electrical Association fair, and helping groups such as the Black Canyon Car Club, to raise funds. Johnson said several corporations, nonprofits and cooperatives said they would assist with funding during the DMEA fair; however he has not received their contributions yet.

“We’re forging ahead because we know deep in our hearts they’ll come through,” Johnson said.

The group’s annual budget is about $12,700 to cover the cost of materials and parts for the car, plus food and lodging expenses and a $500 entry fee. The team needs to raise an additional $8,800 to cover the cost of solar-car materials and travel expenses in order to participate in the race in Dallas in July. Any donations made to the team are tax deductible.

This year’s race is expected to be one of the largest so far, with more than 24 cars participating. As competitors with the least expensive car from the smallest school district in the smallest county in the state, the team says they see no reason they won’t take home first place. The team competed in the race in 2006 and received third place in their division.

People interested in the race can visit www.winstonsolar.org/challenge.

The team will display their car and answer questions next weekend in Ridgway for the town’s annual Balloons N’ Varooms event, held May 9-11. To help the team make it to Texas, contact Tom Johnson at (970) 626-5934 or at jmc@independence.net; or make checks payable to: Sunshine Mountain Traveler, C/O Ridgway High School, P.O. Box 205, Ridgway, CO 81432.