Sorry I did not get to post during competition this weekend. I would had but our hotel didn’t have wireless and there was so little time it felt like!! So here’s what happened at competition and I’ll get some pictures up and let you know soon what the final results are (they still have not been posted).

Thursday

We arrived a little later than expected because we were working hard making sure everything was loaded on the trailer and accounting for everything that we might need. We found arriving late wasn’t the worst thing because instead of being in the Upper Padlock like planned, we got to be in the lower which meant a little less work pushing the car around We worked on the car that night making sure it would be ready for tech first thing in the morning. We also found out that we got a 15/15 on the cost report!! So we were feeling pretty well heading into Static day on Friday.

Friday

Well Friday morning started off well. We made it through engine tech with no problems and had fun waiting in lines (which weren’t nearly as bad as last year’s) to do our Tech inspection. First problem that was discovered was that the top of our roll cage was slightly more narrow than we had originally thought. We had to add in a new members in order to protect the driver but over all, not a horrible fix. We went through our design presentation fairly well and think we have figured out ways to make it better after watching some other teams. We placed 27th overall in design (70.68/75 on the report and 72/125 on the presentation). Back in Tech, we found out we had a few more problems than planned so it was back to the trailer to fix them. We eneded up not being able to make it back through the line Friday but knew we would be ready first thing on Saturday morning.

Saturday

As planned, we made it through tech first thing in the morning and passed our brake check on the first try. Now it was on to our Dynamic events. Thomas ran our acceleration event and our times were a 6.2 and a 6.3. This put us in the 30s on the endurance day placement and was a huge improvement over last year David did the Tractor Pull over different types of terrain and we made a pretty good time of under 10 seconds (like…9 something…can’t remember). Aaron did good on his go at the manuevability and only hit 5 cones! So I believe our final time was around a minute long. Our suspension held up well on the actual suspension part of the suspension event. The only trouble came was at the very end when our rear tire found a hole someone had dug earlier. This made us DQed on the suspension event but we’re still way above where we were last yaer overall in the Dynamic events. I’ll be able to put up our official rankings in the next few days.

Sunday

Finally, the day came for the Endurance Race. After a wonderful hour early start (to beat the weather) at 8:30 am…Thomas started us off to a good start with an average lap time of 10:40 when the throttle started messing up. We got the car back into the pits and replaced the throttle and then Thomas could pull around a 8:19 lap. Then Alex got in to finish up the race and with all the water and mud, our kill switch shorted out. This caused our motor to die before we could make our next lap. Once again, back to the pits but still only a minor fix. Alex got back on the track and our last problem came when a hole was cut in our tire along with a missing valve steam :/ Alex still managed to complete another lap giving us a final total of 8. We tried to get spare tires on the car but by the time we were ready to head back, there were only 5 minutes left in the race and they wouldn’t let us back on the track. That being said, we completed the endurance race with a final ranking of 46th. This put us one spot behind Georgia Tech who also completed 8 laps but had a faster average lap time. Last year, our car didn’t even complete the endurance race because of CVT issues.

Over all, our car did excellent this year and there was improvement across the board. I’ll be able to put up the final results soon and give a side by side comparison with last year! So I’ll be putting up some pictures so you can get an idea how the competition went and check back soon for results.

www.sae.org –>go to Baja competition at the bottom of the page to see some results.