University of Michigan Solar Car Team headed to global race this fall
ANN ARBOR, Mich. (CBS DETROIT) - The University of Michigan Solar Car Team will return to the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge this fall after the biannual race took a four-year break due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The last time the team competed Down Under was in 2019 when they placed third in the 1,800-mile race.
The team has been hard at work on its newest car, Astrum, which they hope will earn them a repeat podium finish in the competition this year.
"We have a team of 21 full-time over the summer," said race manager Will Jones, a rising senior at U-M. "We're here Monday through Sunday from 8 a.m. until probably too late in the night."
The racecourse stretches from Darwin to Adelaide, spanning the country from north to south.
"It'll be about a 30-hour race," said Jones. "We're hunting for every single second that we can to get that car across the finish line as fast as possible."
Jones said participation took a hit due to the pandemic, but it gave them the motivation to push the limits of the design.
"It's really an opportunity to reinvent ourselves, and we really let nothing go untouched on the car," he said. "In the past, sometimes we'd take things that worked well, and we'd put them right on the car, and we'd be good to go. This car is effectively brand new from past teams and past cars, and we've really pushed the limits everywhere on the engineering."
The team is completely student-led, and anyone is welcome to join.
"It is just an engineering team, but at the same time, we have business students, we have operations students, I'm a communications student," said head marketing specialist Bonnie Zhu. "(It's) very, very multidisciplinary – you don't have to be an engineer to join, because this is just a huge process."
A large part of that process is funding the project. Jones says the team operates on a $2.25 million budget through fundraising and in-kind donations.
The new design features three wheels instead of four – a first for the team's lineup of cars.
Founded in 1989, the Michigan Solar Car Team has made 17 cars, has had podium finishes seven times at the Bridgestone World Cup, won the American Solar Challenge nine times and won the Abu Dhabi Solar Challenge in 2015.
Many of the team's members will be deferring a semester to travel to Australia more than a month ahead of time to prepare for the race and undergo inspections. It's something they said they're willing to do to accomplish a goal years in the making.
They will be one of two American teams racing against 50 teams from around the world, and the race begins on October 22.