Hello, Solar Friends!

Yesterday, the team took a well-deserved day off to explore the caves and rocky outcrops of Injalak, a traditional Aboriginal site. Our guide, Gary, showed us thousand-year-old rock paintings, told us story after story from Aboriginal beliefs and history, led us around the rock to the most breathtaking outlooks on his “paradise home,” and demonstrated the use of some of his own hand-made tools. We all enjoyed the hike and the history. (The trek across a crocodile-infested river in the van on the way to Injalak was a thrill, too!)

Today, we headed back to the shop to finish preparing for tomorrow’s early morning scrutineering appointment. We tackled a few big jobs. It took a team of several to clean and reinforce the shipping crate – after the mold and the shelf collapse – so that we can transport our car to the building where scrutineering is held. We also spent a good amount of time redesigning and modifying the lid to the battery box. Since the WSC regulations allow only 25 kg of Lithium polymer batteries, compared to NASC’s 30 kg, the whole pack was reconfigured, and the lid needed to be raised about a quarter of an inch for everything to fit.

Speaking of the batteries, they are the last piece of this puzzle that has finally come together. (Yes, Tom, John, and Matthew finally left the air conditioning and joined us in the shop.) With the battery pack assembled and installed in the car, the motor spun on its own for the first time in Australia around 9:30 tonight. That’s more than 10 hours before our scrutineering time – a better record than last summer in NASC!

Our last task before leaving the shop tonight was to load the car into our newly refurbished crate, ready to meet the technical standards of scrutineering. For more details on scrutineering, listen in to Principia Internet Radio on Wednesday and Thursday at 3:30 p.m. Central time. We’ll give you a rundown beforehand of what we expect and a report of our successes afterwards. That’s www.principia.edu/radio.

While working in the pit today, we were able to interact with the other teams some more in a spirit that our team has dubbed “coopetition,” or a cooperative sense of competition. Members of our team chatted for hours with students from MIT, Nuon, and Sunswift, among others, and we traded spare parts and advice with both Aurora and Stanford. (For more information on these teams and other participants, check out the Competitors page.) One of the parts that Stanford requested was a resistor not much larger than the head of a pin. It may literally have been the smallest favor we’ve ever done for another team, but it sure was important, both for its use in Stanford’s car and for the relationship we’re building with our fellow racers.

The other night, I highlighted the electrical guys as one easily over-looked portion of our team; tonight I’d like to tell you about our errand-runners, a.k.a. the logistics team. All the while we’re getting work done in the shop, Joe, Steve, Katie Farquhar, and Megan Brown are scrambling around an unfamiliar town, looking for the crazy things we request – super glue, a sewing kit, Exacto knives, drill bits, and of course, cold drinks. All of these things seem to be more difficult for us to find in Australia than they would be in the U.S., and our tireless logistics crew has gotten pretty familiar with the Darwin/Palmerston area. The work we accomplish in the shop wouldn’t be possible without their supplying our every need, so we’re supremely grateful for their spirit of adventure, discovery, and selfless devotion to the team.

The final exciting news for the day is to announce that we’ve added another person to the team traveling to Adelaide. Sten Palmer, a solar car alum who has come to Darwin to help out for a few days, has agreed to drive the Media van during the race! Sten was born here in Darwin, graduated from Principia in 2008, and now works in train control and as a volunteer firefighter in Port Headland, Western Australia. She’s a perfect choice for driving the Media van because of her experience with the team and some of her firefighter qualification courses in on-road driving, off-road driving, and road crash rescue, among others. We also joke that Sten is our “token Aussie” and that she’s an asset to the team because she’s used to driving on the left. Seriously, we’re grateful to have her help not just this week but during the race, as well.

That’s all I have to report for now. I’ve drafted this email on a yellow legal pad here in the shop to keep you up to date with everything going on here. (How many people can say they hand-write their email?) Stay tuned for the results of our scrutineering tomorrow evening, and in the meantime, explore the website – there are photos related to today in the photo album Preparing for Scrutineering!

Cheers,

Karen

P.S. One last bit of good news. I told you Brian Kamusinga had a bit of extra traveling to do to secure a return visa for the U.S. – mission accomplished.

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