2022 Solar Car Challenge - Race Day 2

On July 18th, during Race Day 2 of the Solar Car Challenge, the CCA Solar Car Advanced Classic Division team placed 1st in our division. We were able to complete 124 laps at Texas Motor Speedway, which is equivalent to 186 miles driven over the six hours race period, averaging 31.0 miles per hour. In the process, we broke the old all time lap record of 111 laps completed in a single day for the Advanced Classic Division by nearly 12%! To put this amazing feat into perspective, this distance is the equivalent of our team driving this high school student built solar car from Fort Worth to Austin in a single day over six hours, powered on nothing but sunshine that our solar array gathered over a 24 hour period and converted into electric energy to charge the battery pack and power the car! Simply amazing!

The morning began with the team getting our car out of the garage shortly after 6:30 a.m. and getting the array set up on maximum tilt, so that we could continue recharging the batteries after heavily depleting them during the prior day's race.

Langan Moffett starts off the race driving the entire 4 hours of the morning leg of the race and consumed nearly 4 liters of water to make sure he stayed well hydrated! Max Dominiguez drove the car during the 2 hour afternoon session.

The energy management strategy for our car is based on the real time telemetry data that we gather from our solar car on a 3 second granularity and the solar irradiance forecast that we obtain for Texas Motor Speedway from Solcast. Solcast is an official sponsor of the CCA Solar Car team and has graciously provided us use of their powerful solar irradiance forecasting tool. Together, this data allows us to optimize the performance of our solar car over the course of the entire race day.

The Solar Car Challenge provides water to all team members during the race, here Ellia Rush is representing the CCA team during one of our assigned distribution time slots.