Imagine standing at the startline of the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge, hearing the starting gun fire among the cheers of a rapturous crowd, but seeing your car failing to get away. It is one of the worst-case scenarios our team drafted in preparation of the defence our world title in solar racing coming October. It’s not an unrealistic scenario, since it happened to Nuna4 before. Still the team of Nuna4 was quite some steps further than we are right now. We are dealing with another worst-case scenario: no solar car…
The transport of Nuna8 to Australia is a difficult process, Nuna8 and all her accessories can be best described as ‘special cargo’. In previous events Nuna was transported in a special ‘flightcase’ through the air to minimalize travel time, as each day of travel means one day less of race preparation. However Nuna’s special flightcase has one problem, it only fits in a Boeing 747, one of the world’s biggest airplanes. The problem with that: Boeing 747’s don’t land on Darwin International Airport… Therefor Nuna8 has completed the last part of the journey (Hong Kong to Darwin) by boat, right on schedule. On September 13th Nuna8 arrived in the port of Darwin, but as I am writing this piece now (September 20th) Nuna8 is nowhere to be seen in the vicinity of Nightcliff Primary School (the primary school where we work) yet.
As we speak, Nuna8 is stuck at the quarantine department of Australian customs, where her whole flightcase has to be examined on bugs and sand. This process is taking a small week already, a strike of the harbour personnel on Thursday didn’t help either. Of course in the meantime we have been searching for a useful use of time for the whole team, already completing the tasks where Nuna was not needed.
Luckily there is some light at the end of our tunnel, as a visit of Mark, Jorden, Thijs and Wouter to the harbour helped us some further. Tomorrow we can stop by to unload each of the 500 items from the flightcase (also Nuna8) to load them all again once they have been approved. That’s no fun in the scorching Australian sun, but it is a job we are more than willing to do. The reward is that Nuna8 will be in our shed this Monday. From that moment on there is nothing stopping us from starting the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge on October 18th with a perfectly prepared solar car. Then all we can do is hope she’ll drive away without any problems…