It’s actually happening for the Top Dutch Solar Team belonging to the UG, Hanze, and various vocational schools. The team has arrived in Morocco, where it will participate in the Solar Challenge Morocco 2021 on October 25.
The Groningen team, consisting of twenty-one members, is currently staying at a hotel in the city of Agadir. ‘We arrived early to take care of everything. We need to set up a workshop with workbenches and everything needs to be displayed’, says Aymar Berkel, team captain and engineering management student at the UG.
The most important part, the car, is still under way. ‘We’re hoping the container will be here in a few days. Then we can work on getting the solar car ready for the race.’
Dutch flatlands
The tests in the Netherlands went well, but the rainy Dutch flatlands can’t be compared to Morocco’s sweltering mountainous terrain. ‘Those mountains present the biggest challenge. We have to make sure the solar car can handle them and how they’ll affect performance. We obviously haven’t been able to test that in the Netherlands’, says Berkel.
The team still have time to do all this: the race will start on Monday, October 25. Eight teams, from the Netherlands, Sweden, Estonia, and Morocco, among others, will then embark on the five-day journey.
Costly effort
They’ll travel a total of 2,500 kilometres through the desert and the Atlas Mountains. Berkel: ‘There will be more traffic than we would’ve encountered in Australia, so we’ve had to focus more on situations in which we’ll be passing other cars.’ This would be a relatively simple manoeuvre for a ‘normal’ car, but a costly effort for a solar car.
Aymar’s team is certainly not short on help: another ten former members will be coming to Morocco over the next few weeks.
Berkel says no one is getting overexcited just yet. ‘We’re all fairly relaxed. I think we’ll start feeling it when the container arrives. We have to finish, test, and fine-tune the car in a very short amount of time.’ The car should be finished by October 23.