For two years, engineering students have toiled over the Buckeye Bullet 2, the world's first hydrogen fuel-powered race vehicle. At the Bonneville Salt Flats, the car reached 201 miles per hour.
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Engineering students shot footage of the Buckeye Bullet 2 on its tenth test run, July 22.Engineering students shot footage of the Buckeye Bullet 2 on its tenth test run, July 22.
Transcript
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In 2004, a group of Ohio State students built a battery-operated car that flew through the Bonneville Salt Flats at 315 miles per hour, setting a new land speed record.
Engineering students working on a new race car set their sights on something elses: racing with the world's first hydrogen fuel cell-powered land speed race research vehicle, the Buckeye Bullet 2.
Students have worked on the car for two years. Not only have they had the chance to build a car from scratch, they've been able to rub elbows with from engineers from Ford, Ballard, and Roush.
Gerhard Schmidt, Ford's vice president for Research & Advanced Engineering, says the company gets a benefit too: "an opportunity to work closely with a prestigious university, which provides out-of-the-box thinking from student engineers and helps us recruit talented young people to work at Ford Motor Company."
The team competed in the Bonneville Salt Flats Speed Week, held August 10-17. They blogged--and sent video--from the road. Here are the highlights from Wendover, Utah.
August 8: "Greetings from Wendover, Utah"
The Buckeye Bullet 2 officially shipped out this morning on a motor transport carrier, along with a few of the team members driving with a trailer of extra parts, tools, and everything else but the kitchen sink to have on the salt flats with us. The rest of the team flew out this morning and is currently in the lovely town of Wendover, Utah, which is roughly 10 minutes away from the flats. We'll be taking care of some logistics here until the car arrives. Then we'll get everything ready to go through tech inspection, where the car will be checked by race officials for all of the necessary safety precautions.
August 11: "Getting Ready"
"We spent all of Friday prepping the car to go through tech inspection, as well as preparing it to be race-ready. Everyone spent the time to get their finishing touches on the car, and we even had a friendly visit from the officials to do a quick, informal inspection of the car to see if there were any problems they might see before we take it up for the real tech inspection, and they said everything was looking good. We are shooting to go through technical inspection early on Saturday morning. Well it's time to head to the salt this morning, so I'm heading out of here, hopefully good news to come from tech inspection today..."
August 14: "149 mph!!!"
"We just made our first run! The car worked great, parachutes deployed, and everyone was very happy with the performance of the car. We think a celebration is in order..."
August 17: "201.636 mph!!!"
"We join Ford in the ranks of fuel cell cars over 200 mph!"
"Two nights ago, we worked until about sunrise in a hangar out at the Wendover airport, which was the training site of the WW2 air force units that carried out the operations of dropping the atomic bombs over Japan. It was a very historic and inspirational feeling place to work."
"Today we captured some cockpit footage of our 201mph run (the last run we made this week). When you see it, you might get an understanding of how calm of a person Roger is. (Editor's note: Watch the video on the Buckeye Bullet 2 blog.) Going 201mph, he is able to calmly operate everything without even looking nervous. How he does it, I do not know."
(See more entries, photos, and video at the Buckeye Bullet 2 blog.)
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