Formula Sun Grand Prix 2019— Day 5
So last night, I got a call while in bed asking if I was able to shuttle the first group over to the track tomorrow at 6am. I really needed sleep, but at this point it’s necessary so I said yes and then proceeded to miss two of my five alarms. I woke up expecting a list of people that I’d be waking up to take with me, but that didn’t happen so I spent about ten minutes trying to figure out who got any sleep and who I could wake up. We only left 15 minutes late, actually not bad for us at all considering I woke up most of the people that went with me at 5:55.We got to the RV park, which was extremely busy following the July 4th festivities and found our guys asleep inside the truck this time. Kevin stated that it was the worst experience of his life, but I’m sure it’ll get worse eventually. We packed up the trailer and brought our car back down to the pits around 7am, where we unloaded without mishap and set it up in the garage.
The issues to be fixed this morning were almost entirely electrical, primarily due to BPS. The sticker that sealed the programmer for our BPS came off yesterday after they completed scrutineering, and because it now looks like we took it off and made changes we need to reverify and go through BPS scrutineering again. It fell off and we ripped it trying to get it off the floor, but we can’t prove we haven’t changed anything. It was extremely fast and the mechanical problems were solved in a very short time period as well. During this time, I lost my tag. I thought it was lost underneath the car when I was crawling around fixing the aerobody panels, but I couldn’t find it. I went to HQ to have a new tag printed and this time got Butterfly as my title because in the previous two times I’ve attended my titles have been “Caterpillar” and “Mantis.” The trifecta is now complete, although about ten minutes after I got back with my new tag a scrutineer came over with my lost tag. He apparently found it flipping down pit road. That’s awkward.
Before we went out on the track we decided to do some practice laps around the paddock. During these practice laps the drivers noticed that the array was not charging our battery pack, despite the sun going strong and the temperature reaching 38 degrees. This launched a discussion about how much we care about our pride as a solar car, or if we want to run as a crappy electric vehicle on the track.
The team decided that we want to be a solar car, so electrical spent the next two and a half hours trying to determine where the disconnect was in the solarsense box. This box was installed yesterday so we hadn’t done a full set of tests on the new setup and it doesn’t work. Hardware reached a point where they were using pictures of the old box to try and reverse engineer the wiring to make the new one work, but it wasn’t going well. I spent some of that time wandering the pits and watching the cars pass by, or talking to other teams. This was an extremely depressing couple of hours, as we were so close to getting on but were stalled out by this one problem. Meanwhile a doggo got onto the track and had to be grabbed.
One absolutely wild moment that occurred that is probably a first time for all officials and track members is some idiot managed to get onto the track in his car through one of the pull-throughs and shot down pit road going maybe 100km/h holding up a peace sign to every team as he drove by, then went up the hill of Turn 1 and disappeared around the corner. The ensuing confusion was quite overwhelming as all the teams were looking at each other wondering who it was and the officials were also looking at each other in utter bewilderment. I’m not sure if they have actual plans for what to do in the event of a loose gas vehicle getting onto the track which could probably kill someone if they hit a solar car, but the track was immediately red flagged telling every car to stop. Officials ran down pit lane, locking down the garages as they went and after a few minutes the car showed up again in pit lane with a COTA truck on its tail. They stopped in the pits somewhere behind CalSol’s vehicle and after a moment officials made everyone evacuate the pits. There was a mad scramble to get back into the garages, with CalSol drivers jumping out of the car and running to the side and abandoning their car on pit road. There was a short conversation between COTA officials and the asshole before he took off again down pit road. Another COTA vehicle was able to block off the track access, forcing the guy to turn off the track and into the paddock where it raced around the parking lot and up the ramp to the exit with COTA in hot pursuit. Someone ran across the parking lot and jumped in front of the vehicle, but the guy gunned it at him so the person jumped out of the way and the chase continued out the exit. CalSol’s Twitch stream caught the guy’s entrance onto the track and his escape off the track, and apparently he posted a lap time of 4:30 which is about 30 seconds slower than the fastest solar car lap. C’mon man if you’re going to do something like this at least post a good lap time.
Honestly it was absolutely insane and everyone looked at each other wondering what the hell was happening for a while. Supposedly, he was spotted leaving the complex with cop cars on his tail so hopefully he got caught for that. This was easily the most unusual thing that I’ve seen across the three competitions I’ve attended. After the excitement died down and the cars were back underway, I talked to some more teams before lying down and taking a nap. I passed out in a pass-through garage, not my best idea since I got woken up by the rescue vehicle coming through and at that point I was pretty awake. While I was asleep, an ambulance got called to the track due to someone from University of Florida dislocating her knee. That’s two incidents in a single day.
Solar cars also had all kinds of difficulties today. At any given point there was at least one disabled car on the track and teams were plagued with issues throughout the day. CalSol sheared the bolts connecting their motor to their wheel hub (gee, doesn’t this sound familiar) and Kentucky had a module come off of their aerobody and flap around. There was one moment when five cars were stopped on the track, two on Turn 1 and one at the bottom. Principia had to wait for nearly six minutes because the rescue vehicles were busy on the other end of the track.
After a set period of time we made the call to just go onto the track without a functioning solar array. We packed the car up and got everything ready to go, but we moved about three inches before the drivers smelled something burning and bailed out of the vehicle. We opened the back and the burnt smell was very evident, but we had no idea where it was coming from. The next hour and a half was spent disassembling the PJB, motor controllers and checking the battery pack to determine what the issue was. We think this was caused by water dripping through the top of the car when we sprayed the array but opened the back of the car to do solar array hookup. This killed our afternoon. From 2–5pm we spent the time debugging and trying to figure out the problem. It was honestly extremely depressing, we were minutes away from getting onto the track and racing and were blocked again. Story of the competition so far to be honest. During this time, both Calgary and CalSol left the track. Calgary ran out of battery charge (it’s about 11kwh, our pack is 16kwh) and CalSol, as mentioned earlier, sheared their motor bolts. CalSol seems to be a more extensive issue as their suspension seems to be off. The driver rear wheel has about 20kg more weight on it than the passenger rear wheel, but they were still diagnosing when I talked to them.
At about 4:50, hardware declared that they had fixed the problem and we were good to go. Officials said as long as the white flag wasn’t up (five minutes left), we could get out on the track. Despite our efforts, we didn’t make it in time and weren’t allowed on the track. Again, so close yet so far. We vented by racing around the paddock for a while, almost got called out for speeding in the paddock (we already got a warning) but we can only put our efforts into tomorrow.
“Reminder, your solar car must be driving at walking speed”
Someone made a comment that we were all ready to go for tomorrow with mechanical and electrical in working condition except for our solar array. I must now skewer whoever said that because of course something went wrong. We decided to run some laps around the paddock in order to discharge some of our battery to see if it will fix our solar charging. During tests to see if motors would cut out, there was a pop and loud noises starting to come from the right motor. I was pissed. Very very pissed. Especially since it was the problem motor that I spent five hours hammering onto the car before. However it seems the sanding I did seemed to fix the problem as the motor came off easily and we found out that the motor crashed. The air gap slammed shut and destroyed the hall sensors, so we need to reharness the motor and space the air gap. That is going to be a tonight thing, but we decided to put the NGM 100 on instead so the car is mobile and ready to go for tomorrow. This is less than ideal, since we have two different motors on the car, but the car should be in working condition tomorrow. Also Kentucky blessed us with brisket and sausage and I was so excited since they have a dedicated team chef who’s parents own a restaurant and the food is amazing. Here’s to hoping we are on the starting grid tomorrow.
FSGP 2019 Leaders:
- Polytechnique Montreal (Esteban): 158 laps (79 today), Challenger class
- Calgary: 60 laps (27 today), MOV class
Waterloo: “S.I.U.E, ESTEBAAAAAN!”
Tyler: “It’s that point in the week”
