Today was a great day for the maize and blue!

Quantum qualified in the top of the pack, placing 3rd overall. This is a very strong start to our goal of winning the Veolia World Solar Challenge. The top qualifying times are separated by only 0.8 seconds.

1st Twente (Dutch): 2:02.20
2nd Nuon (Dutch) : 2:02.50
3rd Michigan: 2:03.01

Quantum poised and ready to take on the best of the best at the Hidden Valley Race Way

The exact starting time for tomorrow’s Veolia World Solar Challenge is determined by the qualifying position, with the leader starting exactly at 8:30 AM. The remaining teams will start in order of their qualifying position, staggered 1 minute apart.

We expect cloudy skies tomorrow which will make our race strategy critical to our winning potential. We hope you will follow along on our dedicated portal at www.umsolar.com/wsc and at the University of Michigan’s site http://solarcontrols.engin.umich.edu/ Live tracking, chat, and a constant stream of picture and updates will be available to bring the best of the challenge to the globe

Go Blue!

The Team arrived and set up camp at the Motorsport Ranch in Cresson, TX yesterday evening. We will be camped here at the track for the next week as we and 15 other solar car teams work to pass the scrutineering and qualifying events. Some time last evening was spent meeting the other teams that also arrived early. It’s been fun to meet students from Calgary, New York, Germany and Taiwan who are as passionate about solar cars as we are.

After an event kick-off meeting was held this morning, the testing began. We will start off with battery scrutineering this afternoon and plan to have all static and dynamic tests completed before Wednesday, when the Formula Sun Grand Prix qualifying event will begin.

Egress Practice Makes Perfect: Infinium driver Cecilia Yung practices egressing from the solar car. Regulations require that all drivers are able to exit their vehicles without assistance in ten seconds or less.

Infinium has completed its hot-lap with a time of 2:09.95. We were delayed in our running due to a number of on-track incidents before us, including a broken wishbone suffered by Umicore. Umicore has already completed their repairs, and it sounds like there should be no lasting damage. They will be able to complete another hot-lap, but we’re not sure whether it will count for starting position. With Umicore and Nuna both repaired, it should be exciting to face these and other top teams at full-strength.

In the challenge class, we believe we will be starting sixth. The teams ahead of us are, as we know it:
Aurora
Nuon
Bochum – BoCruiser
Tokai
Stanford

If Umicore starts based on their next lap time, we expect them to be in the top 3. We are excited that Infinium qualified so well, since our high-efficiency motor and large battery pack are ill-suited for track driving. With a 3000 km race ahead, we should have plenty of time to pass the teams in front of us.

Official starting position will be announced at 3:00 PM Darwin time today (1:30 PM Eastern Time–Darwin is 13.5 hours ahead of US Eastern time).

We are at the Hidden Valley track for qualifying, which is going on as we speak. We successfully passed scrutineering this morning, and are now awaiting our turn to take our hot lap around the track.

Some top times (unofficial) from the track so far:

Aurora 101: 1:53
Nuna 5: 2:02
Tokai University: 2:07
Stanford: 2:09
OSU (Japan, adventure class): 1:58

FH Bochum’s BoCruiser pulled into the pits with a problem–we’re not sure whether they will receive another hot lap or not.

With our first pass through scrutineering yesterday, and with our second pass and qualifying scheduled for tomorrow, today was quite a busy today. During the morning we worked on preparing our car for the track, so that we could make our last practice laps before the single-lap time trial. We were inconvenienced by one of our telemetry radios failing; however, our back-up radios are a different technology that we have used for many miles of testing, so we don’t expect this failure to show up again in the future.

After we got Infinium rolling, we were met by Ford Australia’s Global Green Challenge Team. Their eco-cars are starting in their respective class of the Global Green Challenge tomorrow, so they came and visited us at the Hidden Valley Speedway so we could meet each other and see each other’s vehicles. Their eco-cars side-by-side with Infinium and our support vehicles was quite a sight!

After our quick meeting, it was back to the track to get in more practice laps! Our driver, Sudeep Rohatgi, has been able to achieve consistently faster laps each day, putting us in a good position relative to our competition. We did lose some time on the track after Infinium suffered a flat tire after going over a patch of grass. However, after getting back into the car, Sudeep was able to achieve a time that would have challenged for pole position in 2007–quite a feat for a car carrying 25 extra kg of batteries compared to the competition.

At the end of the day, we rolled Infinium through the garages and out into the track’s parking lot. Once in the parking lot, we set up Infinium’s concentrators for an evening charge to further test the system. We received quite a crowd of onlookers–many competing teams were curious about the system, of course. We will be testing the system once again tomorrow for sunrise, then making final bolt-checks before our qualifying run. While Infinium was certainly not designed to be the fastest car around the track, we are very pleased with its track performance so far, and hope that our qualifying result will set us up well for the race.