car race accelerates search for new dawn in solar When you are racing a car on the energy of a toaster, it is the fine details that get you across the finish line. Since high school, engineer Jay Manley has wanted to build a solar-powered car to enter the World Solar Challenge, a 3000-kilometre road race through the centre of Australia, from Darwin to Adelaide. For the past 18 months, Mr Manley and a team of students and alumni from the University of Western Sydney have designed and constructed the electric vehicle they hope will not only finish the course but win them the race. "I think we have a solid shot at winning this," he said. The UWS team will contest the challenger class, racing against 27 other groups from around the world, including experienced teams with professional drivers and budgets of up to $2 million. With student drivers and modest finances in comparison, the UWS Solar Car team see themselves as the "Aussie underdogs," who hope their innovative SolAce car will give them an edge. "We've built one hell of a vehicle and we're punching well above our weight," Mr Manley said. Everyone looks down on western Sydney but we're trying to change that. The event's director, Chris Selwood, said while there were some basic vehicle restrictions to even the playing field, including limiting the car's stored energy, the aim of the 20-year-old competition was to foster innovation. "It's fundamentally a design competition to get the best and brightest young people from around the world to develop the world's most efficient electric cars," he said. Challenger-class vehicles are limited to carrying a solar array with an area of up to six square metres, which could produce about 1.3 kilowatts of power. "Your microwave is more powerful than that," Mr Manley said. The power restriction meant the vehicle had to be highly aerodynamic to reduce drag, a major energy consumer, he said. The 26-person team also installed 16 specialised tyres that reduce rolling resistance, costing $9000 in total, and sent their solar array to Germany to be encapsulated with a protective film. "When light hits the array, some of it reflects off but is refracted back onto the film's textured prisms, which increases our efficiency from 22 per cent to 24 per cent," Mr Manley said. The challenge, held every two years, runs from October 6 to 13 and will take challenger-class teams between three and four days to complete. During the race, cars must maintain a minimum speed of 60km/h. At 5pm each day, teams must stop racing and camp overnight. In previous years, up to a third of participants have not made it to Adelaide.