Solar Team Eindhoven, last year’s world champions for solar cars in the Cruiser Class, hasn’t succeeded in prolonging this title on a European level with their car Stella Vie. In a very rainy race, Solar Team Twente became the European Champion in the Challenger Class, Lodz Solar team won the Cruiser Class. Stella Vie scored the maximum amount of points on the presentation and became third in the fastest lap in 3 minutes and 28 seconds.
In the real 24-hour endurance race, One of Stella Vie’s components turned out to be not as waterproof as expected, which caused issues throughout the race. The engineers worked the whole night on fixing Stella Vie and managed to get her back on the road again so she could finish the race.
“Rain or sunshine, we had a great time at the European Solar Challenge this weekend”, the team writes on its own blog. “It may have been the rainiest race in the history of Solar Challenges. This presented an extra challenge for the solar cars but also showed that solar cars have an incredible range even when the weather is not like Down Under.”
The ups and downs of the challenge this weekend were a great learning experience for the new team members, the crew writes. “The team present at the European Solar Challenge was a combination of experienced and new Solar Team Eindhoven members. The more experienced team members took the chance to show the new members the Solar Team mentality and workings of a Solar Challenge.” The new team is currently preparing itself for the World Solar Challenge in 2019.”