Mock race redux

Blogger ate my last version of this post and left no trace. Proper behavior in the wilderness, but less helpful on my phone.

Mock race day one: started in Port Augusta and ended in Coober Pedy. We fell short of where we wanted to be due to headwinds but it was still a good test of our strategy.

The solar car almost hit an emu, and another ran between the solar car and chase.

Harry called out an emu as a bird on the radio; Max wisecracked that if Harry ever told us there was a lizard on the road, we should expect an alligator.

Mock race day two: down to Port Augusta and then north again. Ended about 50 km out of Port Augusta. Primary excitement came in the form of a full sized house coming down the road with a police escort. This is a normal enough occurrence that the race officials warned us about it at the driver briefing last time, but it's always an astonishing and impressive sight.

I was driving Luminos at the time so I don't have any pictures of the house, but instead I have a picture of another thing we saw on a truck on the Stuart Highway. This digger takes up one and a half lanes and also has a lead and a chase vehicle.

We camped on the side of the road for the first time and watched the Milky Way appear in the sky. The stars in the outback are incredible. I can't wait for calling during the race, when we will actually be in the middle of nowhere.

We had Luminos up on sawhorses for a mech check and a very strong gust of wind at the beginning of a storm blew her off the sawhorses and onto her left side. The sawhorses crumpled in the wind.

Luminos didn't have any tires at the time, so she landed on her left side. We called off the mock race so that we could do repairs properly during the day instead of hacking at night. In the end we got really lucky: the only damage was two bent brake rotors and a cracked taillight.

On day three we started at noon, after a morning of mech checks and repairs. I was in scout and we pulled ahead with the trailer to fuel up at Pimba. The trailer had one driver and no passengers, contrary to our usual protocols, but we thought this was fine because we had already been through that stretch of road three or four times.

This turned out to be mistake.

Scout headed out first to catch up to the team at the control stop in Glendambo, and trailer was supposed to leave five minutes later.

An hour later, at the control stop, we got a call from the trailer that made even Wesley facepalm. Jason had managed to drive south out of Pimba instead of north, and had driven 110 km before he figured out that anything was wrong. He was pulled over a whopping 17 km north of where we had started the day.

The Stuart Highway runs directly across the center of the continent. There are no turnoffs that our team takes. The gas station was on the highway. There was a giant green sign that says Darwin one way, Adelaide the other. Somehow none of this changed anything for our hapless trailer driver.

We changed plans and decided to spend the night in Glendambo. Wesley told Jason to not budge and Greg, Anna and I went down in scout to pick him up. We didn't want him driving another four hours and possibly into the night with an expensive car and our team's trailer, in light of what had already happened so far.

Greg drove back with Jason. I don't know what happened in that car.

I predict no end to the jokes about this in the coming days, but in the end nothing was lost other than hours of time and a lot of gas. It could have been worse.

Next time: cross-country driving!

Pictures: Touareg and trailer; sunset reflecting in the bubble, with and without photobombing; slothing around; the Stuart Highway at high noon, in both directions; a very large digger.