GREENPOWER CHALLENGE

I have been helping a local school with their "greenpower" racing cars. Greenpower organise a national series of electric car races for schools (years 7 - 11) www.greenpower.co.uk

The school I help is Sandbach High School for girls. www.cauc.co.uk  Along with a colleague from work, Richard Kenney, we were drafted into the team to try to give them more power from the standard issue motor & batteries. We designed and built a converter to do this, but it quickly became apparent that this was not a power or speed contest, it was an efficiency contest, and the key was aerodynamics. A car called "Maxx Factor" was being built when we arrived & this duly was equipped with our controller and got to 37th place in the 2005 national final.

During 2005/2006 I designed a car called "Brian" which got to 13th place in the National final that year - we were starting to improve.

Brian is designed to NASA aerofoil low-drag profiles in plan and side elevation, with totally enclosed wheels. It has neutral weight distribution and the drivers really like it as they sit comfortably with great visibility, brakes and handling.

2006/2007 saw sweeping rule changes which outlawed most of the fastest cars. Brian had been designed anticipating the changes - in this case for safety's sake; there was no way I was going to design anything with the atrocious driver visibility of some of the cars. During that season we made a series of improvements to Brian which saw it getting to 5th place in that years national final. At last we were among the "big boys"!

For 2007/2008 I designed a new car, "Zebedee" to build on everything we had learned from Brian. This was a MAJOR job, the body was built  by a proper 3 stage process (buck - mould - body) so it was late in the season before it was ready to race. The major innovation in this car is the way the outside of the wheels is flush with the outside of the car, giving the advantages of external wheels (low frontal area, good stability) and internal wheels (low drag). The weight distribution was brought forwards for packaging reasons, giving better braking at the expense of heavier steering. We were able to use dynamic airflow to cool the motor and its controller.

It qualified easily for the final, coming 2nd in its 1st race, it won the next and then won the final by nearly 2 laps. Meanwhile Brian had its best racing season ever with 2 heat wins, a sprint win, a 2nd and third place, and 2nd place in the new F24+ race series (by less than 0.5 seconds in the final) and fastest lap or the lap record at EVERY venue it visited.

OK - I know it's just a schools competition, but it's a popular national championship & I'm very proud of the team's and my achievement in winning it. The Final at Goodwood racetrack has 80 teams qualifying  (from hundreds across the country) and we pretty much cleaned up on the trophies in the 2008 final; 1st in F24; 2nd (by a whisker) in F24+; Best engineered car; aerodynamics award & Fastest lap (by a massive 15s)

What's left to achieve? Well, we don't yet have a "platinum distance award" for exceeding 125 miles. Only one has been achieved before & the regulations have changed since then to slow things down... But that's the target for 2009 Note July 2nd at Rockingham Zebedee covered a record breaking race distance of 144 miles. This was the 2nd ever platinum distance achieved by an F24 car; however we exceeded it by nearly 20 miles! We also exceeded 60 miles in the 90 minute F24+ race. So - new targets for 2009: Win back to back national finals and become the first team ever to win the final from position "1" on the grid (this seems to have been jinxed in the first 10 years of greenpower...)