View of Infinium from the Lead, with Chase and the Semi Trailer in tow.

Lower surface of Infinium sits while the team charges at LeRoy JrSr High in LeRoy, Illinois

Team members (bottom to top) Eric Relson, Gerald Chang, Santosh Kumar, Dylan Keefe-Reitzell, and Sudeep Rohatgi hold the upper surface while charging at Saint Joseph’s High School in South Bend, Indiana.

After four days of mock race, covering over 750 miles across four states, the team is now making our return trip to Ann Arbor. With less than a week until our semi trailer leaves for Australia by boat, we have elected to forgo the final day of practice in order to ready ourselves for shipping out to Australia. We are all very pleased by the way Infinium and the team have performed on our mock race. Over the course of the past four days we have ironed out many of the kinks in our daily routines, fine-tuned our racing strategies, and have almost doubled the miles on Infinium to improve its reliability.

After our semi trailer ships at the end of this month, we will have all of August to test Infinium before it leaves for Australia in early September. Once in Australia, we will have one more dress rehearsal for the World Solar Challenge in the form of an additional mock race through the Outback. After the intense racing practice of this past week, we are one giant step closer to being prepared for the World Solar Challenge; with 93 days until WSC, we will have plenty of time to make the final leap.

After escaping some early morning fog, the team has made good pace down the road. We left LeRoy, Illinois in the morning and have already reached our control stops in Bloomington, Illinois, and Kankakee, Illinois. We pulled in to the stop in Kankakee just before 1:00 PM EDT and hope to make it to South Bend by the end of the race day at 5:00 PM EDT. Of course, we hope that the home of the Fighting Irish (Notre Dame) will treat us well despite the fact that we are wearing the colors of one of their biggest football rivals!

Update: We have ended the day in South Bend, Indiana, one block to the west of the Notre Dame campus, and only a few miles west of our control stop. We will spend the night in South Bend before leaving for our next stop in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

After a succcessful day of racing, the team is now in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Our Mock Race started at 2:22 PM (as opposed to the typical 8:00 AM start), so all who stayed up the previous night installing array modules could get some rest. We left the workspace for Fort Wayne, our first control stop, traveling at the speed limit for almost all of the day. Rather than ending the day at 5:00 PM, we set a finish time at 6:00 PM due to the afternoon start.

During the 138 mile drive across Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana highways, we pulled over only once–but only because our lead car needed to be filled with gas! We arrived in Fort Wayne at 5:42, for an average speed of 41.4 miles per hour.

Charging at the end of the race day in Fort Wayne, Indiana

Semi trailer parked at camp in the Fort Wayne Coliseum

Infinium sits in the rear of the semi trailer

Tomorrow brings us through Kokomo, Indiana and then on to Terre Haute, Indiana!