G'day Mate!
Principia Solar Car Team
Hello solar enthusiasts!
All the students have arrived in Australia. We are still awaiting the arrival of our beloved support crew Chris, Trey, Jen, and Bill who will all arrive on Thursday.
Yesterday, after dropping luggage at the bungalow-like accommodations, we headed to the Hidden Valley track. Our pits were already set up thanks to John, Steve, Garrett and Durham University, a neighboring team from the UK who helped unload our crate. We were able to go out on the track with John driving Ra 9 and the rest of the team in our chase vehicle. It was a great morale booster to see the car running so smoothly.
We experienced a bit of Australian culture when we went to Mindil beach, ate some local food from the market, and watched an Australian cowboy perform a whip show, complete with whips on fire.
Today, we spent the day prepping for scutineering. This involved mainly minor tweaks to adjust to the WSC regs including constructing covers for the trackers and relays. We also got some good time out on track (three 1/2-hour sessions) with Jackson behind the wheel. Later in the day, John and Joe performed a "mock" scrutineering on the University of Michigan's solar car, Aurum.
Tomorrow we have scrutineering at 1pm. For this race, unlike the American races, we will go through all of the scrutineering stations in one go, 'mate. We are fully prepared and don't anticipate any issues, so we should be green on all static scrutineering by tomorrow afternoon!
Please bear with us as the social media updates won't be as frequent as we don't have very reliable Internet, but I'll do my best. And don't forget to tune into our PIR radio updates at 4pm central time every day.
Until tomorrow,
Annika