AMES, Iowa - Team PrISUm raced and raced and raced around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Friday.
The racing went so well, Iowa State's solar race car team nearly doubled its lap count from the first day of this year's Formula Sun Grand Prix for student-designed and student-built solar race cars.
"We were driving around the track the whole day and going fast the whole time," said Evan Stumpges, a team leader and a senior in mechanical engineering from Pauma Valley, Calif.
Stumpges, who drove the team's $250,000 racer during the morning shift, said there were only a couple of small problems with the car all day: a tire blew out and a brake light wasn't working right. But the repairs didn't take much time and the team was able to pile up 164 laps for the day.
On Thursday, lengthy repairs to a cracked frame tube kept the team off the track for hours. That meant only 83 laps for the day.
Friday's good day at the speedway allowed Team PrISUm's Anthelion (the car is named after the rare halo that can appear opposite the sun) to move up two spots in the standings. Anthelion now stands in fourth place with a total of 247 laps. The University of Minnesota is leading the race with 398 laps.
Stumpges is hoping for another long day of running during the last day of the grand prix on Saturday. But, the Indianapolis forecast is calling for more rain than sun.
And so the team has been doing its best to use the car's solar array to charge the car's battery pack. If there's no sun, the team will have to run the car on that pack.
But a solar race car really needs a full tank of sunshine to keep up a good race pace. So the entire solar car paddock is hoping this is one of those times the forecasters get it all wrong.
