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LSEC:Can you tell us your experiences before, during and after the race?
SINAG:
The Invitation and Selection
“Oh! This is like Race The Sun! Well, okay, fine! I’ll join for the sake of it!” – was my only exclamation when I was asked by my professor on the project. And so the first meeting which was attended by a hundred eager students ensued and I realized with the full support of the sponsors that it was really serious. “Can you do this?”, they asked us and on deeds was our best answer to the opportunity and challenge. That was the test for the survival of the fittest.
The Making
Not easier than what we thought. We had to meet MWF (Monday, Wednesday, Friday) nights to decide on things- 3 wheels or not and how about the shell? The other ECE (Electronics and Communications Engineering) group had to work on the computer for the design. Interesting diverse ideas came out and one another sometimes had to give in for which was better.
August came and we supposed it was done.
We then had to test it. The first test was in MOA (Mall of Asia) then at SUBIC raceway and star toll way and we could not wait to see it geared perfectly for the race. Still, it just made us realize that many improvements had to be done. It was only late September when we decided that it was good enough entry and we knew for sure we had to continue working on it when we arrived in Australia.
We arrived on October 13th in Australia. The equipment arrived on the 14th and only the day after that the car came to our eyes again which was just 5 days before the “scrutineering”. Then came to mind again all the difficulties we had to get through in getting there.
It only took us 9 months of what should have been properly done by first timers in 2 years. We were, I would say, successful but had to make a lot of compromises as well. We needed time to look for the parts. We had to buy the batteries from Korea, the motor and motor controller from Australia. We could not run the car without these parts. We needed even to send the cells from Laguna SunPower to Germany to encapsulate them. Purchasing proved really tough and parts were very expensive. If we had more time, we could have made the car much lighter. Another thing was that we geared up the car to withstand the extreme conditions of which nothing really occurred in the real race. I remember when we were road testing in MOA, it was raining hard and we had to line up with the other cars in the traffic. Imagine the situation of Eric, the driver that time. Stuck in heavy traffic, raining hard, water filling up the car and he was shouting at us over the radio that if we could beat the red light we should but oops.. We had to stop. We had to follow the rules, the route. And to add to that, the car was highly conductive-hundred times than what is enough to take one’s life.
But it turned out we should have not worried much on the traffic conditions, water proofing and all else. We were too paranoid. When we reached Australia, the other participants did just the opposite. They designed theirs to best suit the conditions there.
All we needed to do at that time was more than preparing the car but to gear up our minds for the race.
The Race
What could be more interesting than what we were there for! The race – but a very friendly one it turned out to be.
If we had to jump off to the summary, the first two days of the race were the days we could say we felt we experienced the real victory because essentially it had all the obstacles that we could say fortunately kept us pursuing the rest of the race; it fueled hopes on our next days. They were, in short, the worst but challenging but happy days.
I remember that on the first day (21st) we had the scrutineering. This was their word for checking how ready your car was for the race and so they had real metrics too. They checked the weight of the car, the components, the electrical system, if it is equipped with communication devices that were constantly reachable by the support vehicles which consisted of the trailer and the lead cars, and up to the most trivial things. Nothing was their main concern but the safety of the participants. Nothing special but we passed this test.
We also had the brake test and the qualifying lap – but two extreme results.
We dashed to the point for brake test; people were dumbfounded of the car’s performance which we did not much realize the value except later –the car stopped to only a third of the requirement distance which was at 12.5 meters. It was the best braking distance. We could hear on one side the Philippine team cheering for us.
Then, came the qualifying lap. This was the opposite. Out of the 40 participants only 38 qualified. We were 3rd to the last. We finished the lap in around 5 minutes and 35 seconds which we thought we could have finished much earlier. The motor had a problem. It was running 90 kph, but unfortunately, it died down upon passing through the starting point. Eric had to reset the car. While restarting it, it was approaching an incline, where it suddenly broke down. Since it lost its momentum, starting it up crossing the incline was indeed very hard. We finished late because of this. Though, luckily, later we were able to isolate the problem.
The meat of the race has begun.
Overtaking gave us an exciting feeling until one incident. It was not yet 5 kms away from the starting point when the car died down again. “Well…, this is it! We’re stuck here and this may mean we’re out of the race.”, Kaiser would say pessimistically. The car had automatic shutdown feature if the speed reached at a specific threshold. But soon, up we went again. For the first hour we have overtaken 5 cars -slower cars- and some of them got stuck on the road to do some repairs.
Just right after we have overtaken Michigan, our car broke down again. Michigan team won the recent American solar powered-car race. At some moment when we were already running, we saw Michigan team swiftly sliding through the raceway from behind us. “Hey! That was Michigan”, I said as it crossed our sight. “Team SINAG, can we pass you?”, they said, as was our customized courtesy call. “Ya.ya. Go ahead.” “You just crashed and was handicapped 2 days ago.. and how fast you have come to be!”, I thought to myself. It was a large car and as we heard it had a cost of $7 million.
We were gladly talking most of the times with the Malaysians. The other first world countries were far ahead of us. Over the radio, “Team Malaysia, can we pass you?” “Ahh..ahh.. Go ahead”. Their technical lead was a Pinoy and so as we were talking in our vernacular we were also thinking of what must have his companions thought of what we were talking about.
The roads weren’t that friendly to us but the competition proved to be. “Everyone wanted everyone to finish”, Eric would say. In the case of Venezuela, their car just arrived 2 days before the race and they missed their sleep because they still lacked some race gears like battery, brake fluid, and some other things. Much as they were in that situation, they did not lack the support of the other teams though. It happened to us. “E Mico ok lang ba binigay ko na ‘yong brake fluid natin? Nakakaawa kasi”, Kaiser approached me. (E Mico, is it alright if I have given our brake fluid? I sympathized on them.) “Half of me saying, ‘What the heck Kaiser that you did not ask my permission?’ and on the other hand, ‘Cge na nga, kailangan ng team e.’ (Well, I give in.. The team needed it.)”. I remember distinctly that the team of the University of Calgary was going constantly to the Venezuelans offering their help.
The dreaded steepest hill finally came to sight. It is where most of the cars ended and right there got home out of the race. We were so tense. We just burned out some a motor. We kept the speed at 70-75 because it might happen that we stopped right there at the peak of the hill. The opposite did exactly happen. The car couldn’t get its way a little longer. It was just 5 meters away from the peak when the motor broke down. “I can’t either accelerate or else we might just accelerate backwards.”, Eric, who was driving that time, said. We had to make a U-turn of about 6 kms.
It was a painful sight to see the other solar cars soaring the peak and on my thoughts they might have asked, “Where are these guys going?”, as we were headed in the opposite direction. This was very crucial. If a solar car doesn’t make it to this part, they either quit or they choose to continue but as a trailer which robs one team of its possibility to win. You will lose the kms and if you are a trailer you are automatically at the bottom of the ranking. We had to overcome this. On its 2nd run, as the car reached the bottom of the hill, it broke down again but anticipating it Eric was quick to reset it and thus restarting the car again. “Miraculously, it went back to 100% acceleration!”, Eric said. That was one of the biggest challenges.
Intriguing thing happened also to the wheels. We had to change the front wheels 3 times in just 80 kms. It developed patches for a normal tire with a rolling resistance supposedly to take 500-600 kms. We were wondering and we speculated that it might be because of the brakes. We decided to change it every after 80 kms until on the 3rd time the front left wheel just blew off. Every 5 mins of repair time seemed to have extended us to 10 and then to 20 mins. These minutes could have surely taken us far as basically if we were to get the basic computation, a car running at 60kph and would have to stop, it will lose 1 km a minute. Each time we stopped, we were at the least a team behind.
Nothing could be more serious than what we realized of what would have happened to us at the 2nd Control Stop in the town of Katherine. We lost brakes. Then we realized its unseen importance. The brake has been running for 9 hours with its brake lining in good condition until at this point. This Control Stop is another checking entry if the car could in best chance continue for the rest of the race. It is a polite action to stop just in front of the official. Ours did not. It almost hit the official. It did not stop. “I swerved it and then I realized we lost brakes.”, Eric recalls. “Everything is okay?”, asked the official. We knew we had to fix the problem. Our safety was their main concern. Then, it suddenly came to mind, “What if that happened in the hill? And other cars were tailing us? I refused to imagine.” “Things could have gone worse but I thanked God.”, Eric confidently said.
During the night, everyone was asleep, when we had to replace the tires and check the car. It was a problem on the tires and we were pressured to fix it as the strategists will question us. Three tires a day won’t keep us long to the finish line. On the following day, we decided to call on Aurora team thru satellite phone of how many tires they could give us. We had no choice. We got four and we had to pay for it for $150 each. We were scrubbing our hands dirty of the brake fluid like it was a lacquer thinner. Added to that we were like “taong grasa” (dirty beggars) not taking a bath for 3-4 days but we only had one choice, one thing in mind – to fix it. We even felt a bit disheartened as we were robbed off our sleep and to find out that much more no one cared for us. We were looking for a tent to take a nap but none was available only a synthetic mat. It did not finally bother us. We got our relief even just a few hours of sleep.
The rest of the race we were just driving 9 hours a day seeing dead kangaroos, taking pictures and enjoying the wild hot sun except some few incidents..
One night we were caught in camping area since the car kept blowing up destroying our strategy and we ended up in a TB disease control area. No water. No CR. All businesses shall be done somewhere. The moon was bright. We almost coincided with one another as were finding for the common spot. It turned out flashlights were very useful to alert somebody coming over to you. Then we were lucky to have refreshed ourselves at the end of the day.
Another victory was not long in coming. One of those days we had to get to Dunmarra Control Stop at 3 in the afternoon. We only had 6 mins to go or we are out of the race. “I was exorbitantly waiting for the car to appear! A car passed by..And another one.. None was ours. Until finally, it came off the shadow. “, Kaiser vividly recalls. “Inside, we were so silent..We were running as fast as we could but surely..Though, our professor considered a luck if we beat the cut-off time.”, Ivan said. “Slowly, 60 then 80 then 85..Wow! We haven’t travelled this fast!”, Ivan was thinking to himself. We arrived just 2 minutes before the cut-off time. No one could say how happy we were. We were more than willing to exchange it for all things else we experienced the days before. The other teams though made it there 2 days ago. Just how happy we were and just how bewildered the other people were.
We did not stop anymore except one day. We figured out that our tire problem was just an alignment problem and we managed to fix it. But this weird thing happened between Eric and a bug that got inside the car. Imagine yourself inside the car and there’s a big wild black bug flying around in front of your face as it was trying to get out of the car. Eric had to struggle on it until it just suddenly calm down thinking it went away. In just a moment, he felt as if something was running through his shorts. He screamed over the radio. He swerved the car and went off road. We had to stop.
I was sleeping then when this woke me up. I thought it was the tire again. Fortunately, I had more reason to get enough sleep.
The Victory
We arrived in Adelaide at 6pm on Saturday that week. The whole day had no sun but sandstorm. We were running only 30 kph so as not to drain the battery of the car. When we reached the finish line we did not even notice that we did. “It was like an empty thing. The champion team was already packing up. They arrived just Thursday. One of them approached us and we traded shirts with the feeling that we shared each other’s victory in the race in a certain sense.”
The Waves
What we’ve learned is the best benefit we’ve got. “We performed beyond our expectations...” We finished it and we even got a place. Everything was worthwhile – all the pieces of hard work. One would feel fulfilled and willing to share the experience. Before we were not as comfortable taking interviews and what we would only say, “Hope we could finish the race and nothing will happen.” It did and we’ve even got more perks.
LSEC: How does it feel to be part of SINAG? This opportunity could have been given to other students, but it was you who were given this opportunity to be a part of history.
SINAG: “I don’t believe in coincidences,” says Eric. “I think it’s really meant to be. Like me, I wasn’t supposed to be in La Salle.”
“I cried when I was in first year. I did not pass ECE - UP (University of the Philippines-Diliman). That was a blow on me because I am from Philippine Science High School. When I talked to our Dean and the Chancellor of La Salle, I told them I’m so lucky they accepted me in this university and they even granted me a scholarship. Kaya suwerte talaga ako.”
Ivan says, “I also am not supposed to be in Mechanical Engineering. I like Industrial
Design, and I also am not so good in Math. But I still took Mechanical Engineering.”
Mico says, “We put ourselves in this position to be a part of SINAG. For instance, from my high school, there are only seven who went to engineering, and I’m the only one who took mechanical engineering. I made a choice. At the start of the project there were around a hundred volunteers. And as time went on, one by one, they backed out... It’s really hard work: you have to keep up with the schedule, etc. It’s really survival of the fittest...You have to work twelve hours a day, even during weekends.” Mico continues: “SINAG took your life, it’s like you have to sell your soul to SINAG. That’s why, in the end, it’s worth it.”
LSEC: Filipinos are proud of SINAG because it’s a national symbol that we can produce our own, and also because it’s a product of “Filipino home-grown talent” and it shows our ingenuity and capability to stand shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the world in terms of developing new technologies. We all know that our country is known primarily as a service country (e.g. OFWs, call centers, BPOs, domestic helpers), and not as a manufacturing country. Do you think that SINAG is a first step, and a significant one, to a manufacturing Philippines? Or SINAG plays more of an advocacy to use alternative sources of energy such as solar power?
SINAG:
“I think SINAG is not the first step towards manufacturing (it’s kinda far-fetched from that idea), the thrust of SINAG is to encourage our country to look for renewable sources of energy. Our country has a lot of natural resources. We can’t rely on Petrol forever. We need to look for other sources. That’s why DOST, DOE and universities are focusing their energy to find alternative sources (e.g. Hydropower),” says Mico. “That’s the point of the Solar Power Challenge: to encourage many countries to join the movement.”
“Looking for other sources is part of worldwide concern and effort to raise ‘green’ awareness,” says Kaiser.
“Towards a manufacturing Philippines, maybe in the far future, but not soon. The usual misconception of people is to think that we can now manufacture our own car. Ah...No. We can’t have a solar-powered car next year. It will take a while. Probably, in the next generation.” adds Mico.
Says Eric, “It’s really just to promote solar power as an alternative to fuel. No one uses solar power here in our country. If you go to Australia, they use solar panels...”
(Yes, the ‘green revolution’ is really part of the global agenda. This year’s Nobel Peace Prize awardee is Al Gore, the staunch environmentalist.)
LSEC: This project also shows the success of the cooperation between the academe and the industry: we can say, in a simplistic way, that the academe conducts research and the industry the sponsor. What role does each one play specifically for this project? At the very least, SINAG shows that this kind of set-up, following the Silicon Valley model, works.
SINAG:
Mico: “The industry is our sponsor. They are the ones who provide financial support. Someone has said, ‘Solar car doesn’t run on La Salle, it runs on money.’ It’s really an expensive project, damn expensive. The contribution of the academe, on the other hand, is the manpower – building the solar-powered car itself. Within the academe, there are also many roles – marketing, research, design, budgeting, etc. The students played a very significant role: they made the electrical circuitry, the shell and the design of the car, following the advice given to them by the professors, and they also fabricated it. The administration helped us out in our academics, made special arrangements for us in processing with the security office, etc. May kanya-kanyang tulong ang mga students, administration at faculty.”
Adds Eric: “Everyone’s happy. We got memories, and learning experiences. The sponsors got their money’s worth...”
“La Salle is happy," the team says, "It’s truly a significant year for La Salle. SINAG is like a 'capping' for La Salle. It’s really our season. We won the basketball games in UAAP... And now, SINAG. We performed beyond everybody’s expectations. We finished SINAG and not only that, we were able to garner a place!”
“It’s really an amazing feeling to see yourself work for an entire year...your one year’s worth of work, yung pawis at dugo mo at pera na ginastos mo, there it is...it is a success. You feel fulfilled, you feel gratified.”
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