MALAYSIAN VARSITY TEAM CONTINUES IN WORLD SOLAR CHALLENGE RACE

From Syed Azwan Syed Ali

ALICE SPRINGS (Australia), Oct 27 (Bernama) -- Malaysia's Universiti Tenaga
Nasional (UNITEN)'s solar car, "Solar Ranger", retained its position at 15th
place on the second day of the World Solar Challenge (WSC2009) race across more
than 3,0000km of the Australian continent since last Sunday.

As at 5pm Monday, the UNITEN solar car recorded a distance of 633km at
its second checkpoint, after recording 318km at the first checkpoint in
Katherine, about 320km from Darwin.

Solar Ranger started at 24th position from the Parliament House in Darwin.

At the time this report was written, a solar car from Japan, the "Tokai
Challenger" was leading the race, ahead of the defending champion, Nuna5 from
the Netherlands, by more than 100km.

Tokai Challenger recorded 1,494km at the second check point compared with
Nuna5 at 1,211km, which was in third place behind the Japanese car and the
United States of America Michigan University's "Infinium" .

CAD engineer from the Solar Nuon (Nuna5) team, Jesper Wentink, said Nuna5
experienced technical problems on the first day resulting in the team to be left
behind an hour behind Infinium and Tokai Challenger.

"The Japanese team is really good but our chance haven't gone to zero," he
said when met by Bernama on Monday at the Nuna5 stop area, about 40km from Alice
Springs.

He expressed confidence that Nuna5, which can travel at a maximum speed of
120km per hour, would end the solar car race on the fourth day as targetted by
the team.

According to the race regulation, every solar car has to be in the race for
nine hours everyday and to stop by the Stuart Highway, the main route of the
race, at 5pm everyday.

The solar car race from Darwin to Adelaide involved 32 cars from 15
countries. The race will end at the Victoria Square, Adelaide, on Friday.
-- BERNAMA