Gang-gang. Remembering College's pioneering solar car

Monday's column gushed about the ANU's Solar Invictus (Invincible Sun) all-of-campus project that is employing a host of fine campus minds from various disciplines.

But in gushing about the project we passed on, naively, the ANU team's innocent guess that theirs was going to be the ACT's first ever entry in the fabled Challenge.

But our story jogged memories and it emerges that Lake Tuggeranong College competed pluckily in the 1996, 1999 and 2001 World Solar Challenges, as well as in a number of other solar car races.

The ANU's Solar Invictus people owned up to their mistake as soon as they became aware of it, pleading that of course lots of the ANU youngsters involved today are too young to have been able to remember Lake Tuggeranong's fine feats.

And David Edmunds, Tuggeranong's deputy principal at the time and co-leader of the college's WSC projects (though cranky with this mature-age columnist), cuts the Solar Invictus youngsters the same slack.

"They were no doubt too young to know what actually happened," he fancies, before going on to spell out for us what did actually happen.

"In 1995 a solar car was purchased and refurbished, and run by the College in the 1996 World Solar Car Challenge. As a result of a good performance in that race ACTEW, the main sponsor, agreed to fund the design and construction of a new solar car at the College.

"A new car was designed and built at the College in 1997 and 1998. The build included all of the fibreglass work, machining, the electronics, the drive train the telemetry software, the construction of the solar panel and myriad other associated tasks. Almost all of this work was completed in the College workshop. No work was completed on the car outside Canberra. The construction of the car took in excess of 10,000 student hours, and countless hours from the two team leaders, Stewart Clode and myself.

"The car completed its first race at Akita in Japan, where the team won a design award. ACTEW funded a documentary, The Road to Akita, on the construction of the car and its first race. This was shown in Canberra in 1999.

"The car then competed very successfully in the World Solar Challenge in 1999 and 2001. It also competed in two more events in Japan and the Australian Sunrace series that ran from Sydney to Melbourne via a circuitous route, and also from Sydney to Adelaide. We won one of those races."

In our picture taken by Graham Tidy of The Canberra Times during the 2000 Sunrace crew members are laying on the grass in front of Questacon. They're trying to energise the conked-out Spirit of Canberra vehicle by holding it, with its swathe of panels, up to what's left of fading sunlight.

"In all events, David Edmunds reminisces, "we competed against the top universities, beating most of them, including all of the Australian universities who competed and such international universities as MIT. To be fair, they sometimes beat us. I do not believe a school team ever beat us."

"Much of this may seem like ancient history, except to the 100-odd students who participated over the years, many of whom used their participation as part of their resume ... Around $1,000,000 in cash and kind was contributed to the project by a number of sponsors."

The ever-supportive Canberra Times seems always to have been supportive of the enterprise. In 1998, this paper's motoring writer Peter Brewer, in an item wittily headed Solar Flair, reported actually driving the Spirit of Canberra.

"Incidentally," David Edmunds continues, "only one or two teams ever had cells produced in their institutions. Most of us simply purchased the best cells we could afford and then incorporated them into the vehicle. I believe, from memory, we used 832 cells."

Yes, the Solar Invictus team is developing its own solar cells and, it's partly because the ANU presently has oodles of scholarly engineering expertise in this area that Solar Invictus has its hopes up.

We garnish today's column with yet another picture, this time from another angle, of the beautiful-from-any-angle EV being imagined by the ANU's Solar Invictus team to carry Canberra hopes in 2017's WSC.

And, consistent with today's theme of planet-friendly transport, and consistent with our promotion of vivid street art, today's column brings you a picture of an urban cyclist. He has just come across a very freshly painted (look at the spray paint cans) and like-minded friend. We don't know the artist or place but the image is from the street art blog of Ms Lovejoy.