CalSol, the UC Berkeley Solar Vehicle team is finally off on their race across Australia. The teams have lined up and as of 8:30 AM the race has begun.
The team will have fairly limited internet access from here on out. The map we have embedded on our site should update roughly daily as the team uploads their location data. For some real excitement check out the race’s official map showing updates from all of the teams using a satellite tracker. Watching from Berkeley I can see all of the teams streaming out of Darwin right now.
UPDATE: the official race tracker has been down due to traffic overflow, so try out this slightly enhanced “mirror” version I set up instead. When it can’t get up to date data it’ll show you our last known position instead.
Our team’s qualifying time started them 13th out of all of the teams involved. Pretty good if you ask me, considering they say they weren’t up to full speed at the beginning of the lap. All of the teams are staggered by about 1 min at the starting line so CalSol is already on the road. It looks like we’ve progressed to 8th place. Go Bears!
I’m sure the team will try to make daily updates on the news blog, but for short current updates you should check out the team’s Twitter account.
Lastly someone didn’t take time zones into account when putting a countdown clock on the website. I’m sorry if there was any confusion.