CARS

RACING; Here They Come, as Fast as the Sun Will Carry Them

By COURTNEY BARRY (NYT) 1221 words

It is also a pretty good place -- bright, flat, empty and hot -- to test a solar-powered race car being prepared for the seventh World Solar Challenge, the super bowl of solar racing under way this week and next in the Australian outback.

That was what brought nine high school students, who have been preparing for the race for for two years, out to a parking lot at Round Rock at the crack of dawn on a Saturday on Labor Day weekend. But not much racing was going on.

Nacar and Formula One fans know that 500-horsepower monsters can be hard to keep running. The same is true, it turns out, for fuel-free vehicles that consume no more power than the average hair dryer.

''Whatever can go wrong will go wrong at the worst possible time,'' said Matthew R. Tunnell, 19, who is a student and the captain of the solar-racing team from the Winston School, a private school in Dallas.

The big wrong at the moment is a short circuit, a simple-sounding problem in the delicate wiring of a solar vehicle. A similar short circuit once cost a solar-race team a month of correction time, said Dr. Lehman E. Marks, a solar-car designer who is also the director of the Winston School team.

This time, it took the team about 100 hours to track the short, and 150 more hours to fix it, said Michael D. Foree, a Winston student and the team's electrical specialist.

Other work had to be done, too, a long list of things to be tested, adjusted or fixed that had the boys sprawled in jeans, oily T-shirts and cowboy hats across the parking lot of the Marriott hotel where they were staying. The steering-wheel dampener had to be tightened so that vibrations did not rattle the driver around inside the 1-by-4-by-2 1/2-foot driver's compartment.

The team has dealt with worse. In the summer of 2002, while the team was preparing for the Dell-Winston Solar Challenge, a race held each year at the Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth, a short circuit set fire to the array of solar panels on the rear of the car, Mr. Tunnell recalled. There was a fire extinguisher handy -- but nothing came out of it. The students ended up putting the fire out with their hats, he said.

Then, four days before the race, all the brake cylinders blew. Where there's a will there's a way -- in this case, a quick trip to a go-kart shop, whose owner someone on the team knew. He replaced the carefully designed braking system with a go-kart set.

They still won.

All of which underlines that while the car's fuel is free, nothing else about it is cheap. Dr. Marks estimates that for the Winston model, total costs for car parts ran about $40,000; an additional $100,000 was needed for various team costs, including transportation and lodging for race events. Winston, like other school and university teams, has generous corporate sponsors: Dell, AstroPower, a solar energy company, and Fossil, an apparel and watch maker, all contributed equipment or money.

Two years went into making this year's car, one year for designing, based on several previous models, and one for building and testing.

In Australia, the students face about 30 competitors, mostly from universities around the world, in the 10-day, 1,800-mile challenge that began last Sunday and ends Oct. 28.

The Winston car weighs about 600 pounds, Mr. Tunnell said. The car entered by M.I.T., by comparison, weighs 410 pounds. While car weights may vary, drivers must each weigh in at 180 pounds, meaning that the Winston racer must be packed with 37 extra pounds with the reedlike Mr. Tunnell behind the wheel.

Its surface is covered with 1,080 solar cells, whose cost range from $10 to as much as $400 for the most-efficient cells.

The most efficient speed for the Winston team's car is about 34 miles an hour, said Jon Crim, another student and the mechanical specialist for the team. Most solar cars average 40 miles an hour, but some can reach 60 miles an hour. Though such speeds pose little danger, drivers are often distracted by a haze surrounding the vehicle, Mr. Tunnell said. ''The light reflecting on you is very hypnotizing,'' he said. ''It's kind of like being in a trance.''

Toward the end of September, the Winston team had disassembled the car into 142 parts to ship to Australia. (In previous races, other race cars had been sent intact, only to be damaged in transit, so this car was built to be taken apart and reassembled.) Before the car is raced, it is ''scrutineered,'' the racers say, by judges looking for deviations from engineering or design standards.

There are numerous claims as to who invented solar racing, but most enthusiasts credit Hans Tholstrup, a Dane who, with an Australian partner, Larry Perkins, drove the first solar-powered car, the Quiet Achiever, 2,517 miles from Sydney to Perth in 1982.

Mr. Tholstrup organized the first World Solar Challenge race in 1987. Three years later, General Motors organized a Sunrayce, in which 32 teams of college students drove sun-powered cars from Florida to Michigan, according to Dan Eberle, the director of the American Solar Car Challenge, the race that grew out of Sunrayce. The 2003 competition in July followed parts of Route 66. Plans are under way for the next race, in July 2005, and Mr. Eberle said that race organizers were scouting out possible road sites from Mexico to Canada.

Who has the best cars? That is debatable, said Chris D.Selwood, a solar-car expert and the event director of the Australian race. ''In terms of the World Solar Challenge, it is generally accepted that some of the best electronics are designed in Australia, some of the best motors are made in the U.S., the best batteries in Asia and some of the best solar cells laminated in Germany.''

Mr. Selwood said that the race was meant to promote innovation as much as to crown a winner.

''It's really a brain sport, not a blood sport like motorcar racing,'' he said. Another way to look at it, he said, is for the race to be called ''V8's on Prozac.''

CAPTIONS: Photos: HOT STUFF -- The Winston School's solar car at the Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth in 2002, above. Crew members, below, replace a blown tire during a recent practice run, while the team's captain, Matthew Tunnell, right, readies to race. (Photographs by Mark Matson for The New York Times); (Photo by Robby Parkinson)