Race Update and Recap

Good morning from the third day of the race. Here's an update on how things are going and a recap of the first two days.

Day One: We got off to a fast start of the line. We started seventh out of about 40 teams, and climbed to 5th by passing Twente and Sunswift, who broke down and took a wrong turn respectively. Unfortunately, about 200 km out of Darwin, we had a relatively routine tire change. In the rush of putting the motor back in the car after we seated the new tire, we accidentally damaged a mechanical component that held the axle of the motor from spinning. This means the motor's stator spun freely when we accelerated, damaging the wiring of the motor. Luckily, we were able to fix the issue, but we lost two hours on the side of the road in the process. We got back on the road after this and made it to Dunmarra for the night.

Day Two: Things went significantly more smoothly yesterday. We ran into a few obstacles over the course of the day, including a large cloud of smoke from a controlled brushfire, as well as some high-altitude clouds which messed with our insolation. Our motor had some hall-effect sensor issues at low speeds remaining from the first day, but they didn't prevent the car from moving at high speed, as the motor no longer uses these sensors. We still experienced a higher than expected power draw from the car, and much of the team was in a resigned mood and at a loss for where our power was dissapearing to. On the bright side, our array is working brilliantly, and we estimate we're producing about 10% more array power than any of the leading teams. We stopped for the night in Tennant Creek, where Paul and Sasha stayed up all night and completely repaired the motor.

Now, the current situation. The race has been stopped about 116km south of our current position, due to a huge brushfire that completely decimated the town of Barrow Creek and the surrounding area. Teams were stopped at Tennant Creek as they arrived yesterday. The fire cleared enough to restart the race this morning, and the teams are setting off according to the timing in which they arrived. This puts us at a departure time of 11:57 am. This is a blessing and a curse for us, strategy wise - if we had known that this would be the situation at Tennant Creek, we would have driven faster yesterday to improve our position in the race, since we would have time to charge this morning. In our current situation, our state of charge is better, our time is worse, but we get even more time to charge on the array stand as we approach solar noon. It's very complicated to find the balance that gives us a net benefit, but it works out to be close enough to even either way.

We'll be taking off from here soon with a full battery pack, so we can hopefully improve our position somewhat going forward. We'll keep you updated as we pass internet access points.