Winning gold 70 percent of the time is pretty good. Winning with a new team and a new design each time is impressive indeed.

The Vattenfall Solar Team is a self-managed team of 17 students from the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands. Every two years, team members put their studies aside to design and build a race-car for the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge — a 2,500-kilometre race for solar-powered cars from the world’s leading technical universities.

The TU Delft team first competed in 2001 and won gold. Teams change every time and must design a brand-new solar car for each event. Vattenfall Solar Team has now won seven of the ten events in which it has competed.

During the most recent race, in 2019, the car went up in flames just before the finish line, so the team has a lot to prove when they compete in the Solar Challenge Morroco this month. Over five days and five stages, the team will race their radically designed, asymmetric three-wheel car — Nuna 11.

The goal — aside from winning — is “to inspire the world for sustainability and innovation”.

Citrix will be there to help.

We are a Gold Sponsor of the Vattenfall Solar Team and the students use Citrix ShareFile to help solve two major challenges: knowledge transfer between past and present teams, and securely sharing, storing, and syncing large volumes of data from the car during the race.

“You can imagine that during a race you are in the middle of nowhere — the Sahara Desert or in the mountains — and have limited connectivity, sometimes nothing at all,” says Tanya Spee, team spokesperson. “During the race, we use Citrix ShareFile to share our files, media content, and all our videos between our three media cars in the race and our back office in the Netherlands. That way, we quickly get out story out to the press and social media so that people can follow our progress day to day, or even minute to minute.”

The team also uses real-time race data on weather, road conditions, and car performance, correlated with historic data, to ensure their car is as efficient as possible.

In the competition, these engineering students must do everything themselves, from designing, building, and racing the car to creating their own IT environment. ShareFile is ideal for them because it’s so easy to set up.

“Having the right digital workspace technology has been more important than ever with designing and building our solar car during COVID-times,” Spee says. “ShareFile is playing a critical role. It will be instrumental in helping the team win again and in sharing our story with the world.”

The team also enjoyed another benefit. Citrix sponsors the Red Bull F1 team and we managed to arrange an online meeting between the TU Delft students and one of Red Bull’s chief engineers. The Dutch Red Bull F1 driver Max Verstappen also sent a message of support to the team.

https://twitter.com/citrix/status/1412758361842593798

The race starts on Monday, October 25, and finishes in Agadir on Friday, October 29. You can follow Vattenfall Solar Team’s progress on Instagram, Facebook and at vattenfallsolarteam.com.

Citrix wishes them the very best of luck for the race and in inspiring the world for sustainability and innovation.