Trip Stats

Summary

Riding off a conditional qualification for ASC 2018, we started the day knowing that we either had to make it to the checkpoint at Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer before it closed, or make it to the stage stop on time without trailering MSXII. The goal for the day was to get qualification out of the way, so we didn't need to worry about it the next day. We could worry about fixing other problems with the car after we had qualified.

I think a lot of us were pretty worried after seeing one of the other teams need a push to get out of the parking lot at Lewis & Clark Landing. However, we seemed to be fine and managed to drive a fair bit before hitting our first fault of the day—a BPS fault.

Throughout the day, we dealt with intermittent losses of throttle, which definitely made things interesting.

At about 2:30pm, we were about 2km away from the museum, and the most frustrating thing was that we could see it in the distance. We probably could've walked there in 30 minutes. And yet, we would seem to lose throttle about every 10 seconds, crawling and limping along.

It was pretty stressful for everyone in the convoy, since we all thought that the checkpoint closed at 3:00pm. I think we ended up faulting about 7 times in 200m before we finally were able to keep on going and make it past the finish line. Our observer knew otherwise, but due to race regulations, he couldn't say anything to us to tell us otherwise. But when we crossed the finish line, we were all super pumped and psyched that we had made it—we could deal with the other problems later as they came up.

After hitting the checkpoint, we had to wait for our mandatory 45 minutes in order to continue. Our Mechanical team decided to attempt to remove the hub nuts, but the wheel assembly just would not move. We ended up spending the rest of the day stuck in the checkpoint, before we ran out of regulation raycing time.