Hello, Solar Friends!

Principia’s Ra 7 is now fully qualified to participate in the World Solar Challenge 2009! We’ll be taking off from Darwin’s State Square at 8:41 a.m. tomorrow on our way to Adelaide. Let me tell you about our day today.

The qualifying began at 8:30, and the drivers were all required to attend a meeting with the race officials before that, so the team got started early with breakfast at the track at 6:30. We also began the morning as we always do, by reading the Christian Science Bible Lesson. On busy mornings like these, there’s too much work to be done on the car for everyone to settle down for a half-hour lesson reading. Our solution: we have a smaller delegation of people read each section over our handheld radios for everyone in the pit to hear as they complete their work on the car.

Around 10 a.m., we were ready to take the track with Tom Brownell behind the wheel. We had watched several teams qualify already, and we knew the routine. Each team was allowed a single warm-up lap around the track and a running start for their timed lap. After the timed lap, cars looped around to a slalom course set up in the middle of the track loop, followed directly by a braking test. Those three components – the timed lap, the slalom test, and the braking test – comprised the entire dynamic scrutineering and qualifier.

After our warm-up lap, Tom drove a qualifying lap around the 3-kilometer track in a time of 2 minutes and 35 seconds, averaging about 72 kph or 46 miles per hour. To give you some perspective, the slower teams were taking up to 4 minutes to complete a lap, and the fastest lap, from Aurora (a world-renowned Australian team), took only 1 minute and 53 seconds. We’re pretty satisfied with this lap time because it was only milliseconds away from our fastest practice lap yesterday. After just a single warm-up lap, that consistency is impressive! In the grand scheme of things, our lap time earned us the 12^th starting position tomorrow morning out of 32 qualified cars so far.

Unlike most other cars, Ra 7 did not move directly from the qualifying lap to the slalom test, for there was another team ahead of us, Helios from France, that had broken down during the brake test and needed to be cleared from the track. The wait was only a small bother to our team (we can imagine how hot Tom was feeling inside our black car in the Australian sun!), but this incident and others like it have made us even more aware of the need to realize the source of protection for every team we race with, not just ourselves. Race officials announced that this race has seen more accidents, problems, and delays than any other, and so we’d like your help in clinging steadfastly to the idea that God is the strength, protection, and power of everyone who lifts a wrench and every car that hits the track.

When it was our turn to navigate the slalom test, Tom and Ra 7 completed it with ease then came to a quick, smooth stop with room to spare in the braking test. And just like that, our team had officially qualified for the race. When the car returned to the pit, we quickly loaded it into the crate to take Ra 7 out for a spin on public roads.

Justin Sinichko and Peter Chaney both took turns in the car, testing out their speed and getting a feeling for the car’s altered steering and position in the lane. In order to gather efficiency data, they each also practiced holding specific speeds called out to them by the chase vehicle – 10 mph, 20 mph, 30 mph, and on up. That data, collected by Matthew Piatt and the telemetry system, will help us to make wise decisions about how to drive the car in varying power conditions such as weather and terrain. In all, we tested for roughly two hours and put another 104 km on the car.

Tonight, the team is busy making a few final alterations to the car. In particular, we’re replacing the wheel hubs, brake rotors, and brake calipers; tweaking the telemetry and a few electrical parts; and modifying the fairings slightly to keep the windows closed when driving at high speeds. We’ll also spend a good portion of the evening packing the crate and our own personal luggage. We’ll be sad to leave Darwin, our home for the past few weeks, but the open road is calling.

Tomorrow morning will be another early start to ensure that we’re all packed and prepared to take off at 8:41. We won’t be hosting a live radio show tomorrow morning, but you can still listen in for quick updates at the top of the hour on Principia Internet Radio. We’ll be back on the air on Monday morning (3:30 p.m. Sunday afternoon in the Midwest) to share with you our progress during our first day of racing.

Cheers,

Karen

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