On the 10th of June 2015, 3 students from Henderson Secondary, Allen, Ivan and Xavier, participated in the annual National Junior Solar Sprint competition which was held at Singapore Polytechnic. Before the competition we received our racing car from Singapore Polytechnic which we had to modify.
There are two main categories which are the aesthetics and the speed. We aimed to get a good placing for the speed category. There are two main factors that affect the speed of the car, which are the weight and the aerodynamics of the car. Since we are not allowed to modify the chassis of the given car, we must be careful about the materials that we use for the car as we must monitor the weight of the car.
The materials that we can use include corrugated plastic, cardboard and light weight balsa wood. Among the materials, we decided to use corrugated plastic because of its flexibility and its light weight. We spent one week to build our first prototype and brought it for a test run at Singapore Polytechnic. Mr Low, one of the lecturers in Singapore Polytechnic suggested using a substitute for corrugated plastic.
Soon it all came down to the competition. Everything went smooth and we were faster than most of the other cars that we were up against until we were up against the champion car. We thought that we would not be able to make it to the finals but to our surprise we did. In the end, we got the 2nd place!
