An intense Qualifying

Similar to other race events, at solar car challenge the starting positions are determined through a qualifying. The qualifying is scheduled between the last scrutineering test and the start of the race. For the Solar Challenge Morocco 2021 this qualifying was held at Stade Adrar, a large football stadium in Agadir. Around this stadium is a road which was used for that matter as a small race track of 2.2 km length.

Affer a few testing laps the previous days, we were quite confident we could achieve a very good result in this qualifying, possibly even finishing with the fastest lap on the first place and thus, gaining the pole position for the race starting the following day. Our confidence was based on the facts that we knew we had an quick car as well as our professional driver Kevin with a lot of solar racing experience and motivation.

After the TopDutch and Vattenfall Solar Team, it was finally our turn and the whole team was really looking forward to the performance of our Covestro Photon.

The unfortunate incident

The time had come: Full concentration and all eyes on the Photon! After finishing the warm-up round we entered the timed qualifying lap with tremendous speed – pole position speed! The first few curves were flawless, Kevin took the ideal racing line and we were going a lot faster than the other teams.

After roughly half the lap the unthinkable happened: While accelerating after a corner the left wheel hit a recently cut tree stump on the road. The obstacle was hidden beneath some weeds and not visible for a solar car driver. The incident resulted in a broken left suspension, parts of the carbon fibre outer shell being damaged and not yet forseeable damages to the electrical system.

An accident is obviously always terrible but more than ever one day before the start of the race that was beginning the next day at 10 a.m. For us this meant that we had to split the team up into two crew, consisting of a repair group fixing the damages caused by the crash and another cleaning and packing everything for the upcoming race.

Keep your fingers crossed for us that we’ll get everything done in time for the race start. Greetings from the Stade Adrar where we’ll spend the night.

Update 30.11.2021 | The tree stump was fully removed and the organizers have apologized for the late removal.