Trip Stats

Summary

Apparently, Minnesota decided to replace one of their motors with a backup the night before the stage start, since they believed that it had become demagnetized, and was causing them problems in providing torque and hurting their efficiency. They also went without the rear wheel fairings on, since they were concerned about their motors overheating, and decided to go with 1 passenger in order to reduce weight. I believe Onda Solare also did the same thing, choosing to go with 1 passenger. In our conversation with Minnesota, one of their team members mentioned that they also had a back-up strategy, which was a U-Haul flat-bed truck that they had rented just for the stage. In case they had to trailer up the hill, then they could take advantage of that time and use it to charge.

Some of the convoy members had scouted the first bit of hills the previous night, and so we had some idea as to what to expect. We were pretty confident that we could make it up the hills with a single passenger, and so our strategy basically was to get as far as possible, in order to build up a buffer for the next day (should anything go wrong). We started off the day with breakfast, which was French toast and strawberries. There was a little bit of confusion prior to the race starting, as we tried to figure out where all the car keys were located.

We picked up a 1 minute penalty when we stopped on the side of the road because we had to do a hill start after pulling over for a traffic dump, and had to push the car for < 45 seconds. To be honest, that probably wasn't the greatest call, since we were still on the "Big Climb", and the traffic dump probably could've waited until we crested the hill. Apparently, according to one of our later observers, one of the teams was considering just picking up 2 minute penalties and pushing their car all the way up the hill in 45 second bursts, since they weren't sure they would be able to make it up (which would've been better than trailering).

The actual race day itself was pretty uneventful. To be honest, things were more eventful on the support vehicle side, where the trailer managed to blow a tire.

The only notable event really was the fact that at the checkpoint, the 3D printed part at the end of our trunk props that we used to adjust our rear array broke, and our array came crashing down after a big gust of wind blew. Thankfully, some nice guy who happened to be walking past our car noticed, and caught the array as it was falling before any serious damage was done. Our 3D printed holders that we used for mounting the poles in the side of the car's trunk had also broken at some point earlier in the race.

We stayed at an RV campground that was right beside the offsite location for a Super 8 motel, and ordered pizza for dinner. Some people camped outside, while others slept inside the motel room. The ASC officials that were following us (Byron Izenbaard and Brian Call) wanted to use our grill to cook some steak that they bought off a farm, so we ended up having some steak as well. The team also finished off the alcohol that we had gotten as a celebration for passing scrutineering (while the ASC officials looked the other way). We attempted to get an ultimate game going with PrISUm, but those plans ended up falling through, and everyone just rotated through the shower in the hotel room before passing out.