The team successfully completed scrutineering, which is essentially an inspection process. All systems on the car are inspected to ensure they comply with regulations. This includes checking the size of the array, weight of the battery, electrical isolation switches, and other safety items. Overall, the process was very smooth. We are very satisfied to have reached this point, as qualifying is the only remaining milestone until the race!

Crew Chief, Gerald Chang explaining Quantum's suspension to an official

Quantum looks very official now with the Veolia World Solar Challenge signage on the rear fairing. We will also be adding our latest round of sponsors onto the fairing in the next few days.

Race Officials apply the Veolia World Solar Challenge Logo to Quantum's rear fairing

Stay tuned for more updates, and Go Blue!

Infinium has completed all scrutineering inspections.  The next event will be the Formula Sun Grand Prix (FSGP) which will not start until Wednesday.  In the meantime members of race crew have been assisting other teams to help them complete scrutineering.  Hopefully all teams will successfully move on to compete in FSGP.

After the second day of scrutineering, Infinium is almost done!  Today the remaining drivers were officially weighed and ballasted.  Infinium passed the mechanical inspection, and currently has one minor issue with electrical system to clear up.

In the afternoon Infinium moved to the dynamic testing course.  Driver Ryan Mazur demonstrated Infinium’s ability to make a u-turn.  Ryan then moved on to complete the figure 8 test, slalom, and brake test.  Driver Cecilia Yung also completed the slalom and brake test.  Currently the only team’s to receive all green or blue (minor issue to fix) are the University of Calgary and Michigan.  The University of Minnesota an Hochschule Bochum are almost through scrutineering as well.

Tomorrow morning Infinium should pass the electrical inspection and the support vehicle inspection.  Hopefully Infinium will pass through all of scrutineering  tomorrow afternoon.

Infinium went through the first round of scrutineering today, receiving passing marks for both array and bps (battery protection system).

Team memebers Nick Dahlin, Ryan Mazur and Jordan Feight observer battery scrutineering.

Tomorrow morning Infinium will be weighed and should receive a passing mark for body/sizing. 

Tonight the team is making some minor mechanical adjustments to Infinium, and modifying the battery pack’s ventilation system which will hopefully lead to passing marks tomorrow.  There was not have enough time to finish the driver scrutineering portion this afternoon, so that to will be finished tomorrow.  Hopefully, we can begin dynamic scrutineering tomorrow afternoon.

Tonight the team will be camping under the star at the Motorsport Ranch.  Hopefully it won’t be too warm!

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.

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.

Infinium arrived with the semi trailer on Tuesday afternoon, shortly after when race officials publicized time slots for scrutineering. We were scheduled for Thursday (Today) at 2:30 PM, giving us all of Wednesday to make final preparations for the inspection. On Wednesday morning, we swapped out many of our mechanical parts for our race set of parts–each part we design has a given fatigue life, so after over 3,500 miles of testing, many were in need of changing. After swapping out these components, we gave the car a shakedown by running some laps around the Hidden Valley Raceway track. We were impressed by Infinium’s speed around the track, and feel that it should qualify much better than Continuum did.

On Wednesday evening, we enjoyed dinner with the group of parents and team supporters led by Chuck Hutchins (Chuck is following the team on his sixteenth race, and we are the ninth team that he has traveled with!). It is great to have such an enthusiastic group of supporters here, and a pleasure to have so many team parents around. After dinner, half of the team returned to the race track to prepare for scrutineering, including the installation of our concentrator system. Up until this point, we had been running without concentrators in Darwin, so no team had seen our new development in person. Many who had heard about the system had yet to see it, so the time for the unveiling of the system was near.

Today’s scrutineering was set up in a number of different stations, including stops to inspect items such as logos and numbering, array size, vehicle weight, mechanical, electrical, batteries, and support vehicles. After having each team member sign in, we lined up behind the cars that were already scrutineering so that we could proceed through the stations one by one. We had no major problems during scrutineering, and have only two minor changes to make before our vehicle is cleared for qualifying: first of all, we must make a slight modification to our parking brake mechanism, and secondly, we must re-locate a switch that isolates the battery pack from the rest of the vehicle. We feel confident that we can make both changes tomorrow, so that all of our systems will comply with race regulations and will be ready to qualify on Saturday.

Go Blue!