I meant to post earlier, however, I didn’t get any pictures until yesterday and I didn’t want to subject you to another all-text blog post!

Sasha, Sam and I arrived in Darwin on Sunday and Nathan picked us up from the airport (on time! The three of us were incredibly impressed. Apparently he legitimately booked it from whatever town he was in earlier that morning to make it right as we were waiting for luggage.) We settled into our hotel and all showered because we felt a little gross after 24+ hours of travel.. We then immediately went in search of food only to discover that nothing was open between 4:30pm and 5:30pm 🙁 We met up with the team for dinner and were regaled with tales from their time in the outback. We went with them back to their awesome hostel for a bit. It’s on the main street of Darwin and has a pool with a waterfall and a bar and /far/ too many bros. Sasha and I left after an hour or so, since jetlag was catching up with us like no other.

On Monday, we ran a few errands (like getting internet!) before heading to the track. It is always really cool to wander around the track and see all the different teams. I ended up talking to Apollo (the Taiwanese team) with Sam and learned that their steering was a bit squirrely. We promptly connected them with a mechanical engineer on the Minnesota team who helped them debug their problem. We talked to them again and were told that the steering was now perfectly good up to 85kph, which is all they need for the race, so good news! It’s always fun to be able to help the other teams out in any way 🙂

We left to pick Michael up from the airport, dropped him and Nathan off at the track.. and the three Googlers went on some errands — mainly tent-buying for our time in the outback next week. We went back to the track and hung around talking to teams. Stanford is the most prepared its been in years.. so the team had very little to do! They were just sitting around waxing the car, mostly. Which is /so/ different from two years ago. I can’t even comprehend!

We had dinner at a surf and turf restaurant that was quite yummy… but SO SLOW! After an hour and ten minutes after we ordered, Sasha went up and asked what the expectations were on food delivery time. After being told it was 40 minutes, he mentioned it had been a good 30 minutes more than that for us.. at which point they sent the owner out to do some magic tricks to distract us. Haha!

Tuesday, we woke up early again and headed to the track to try to catch Stanford’s time on the track.

 

Greg and Nathan waiting for the car to come by again

Ian and Jason went around the track the first 30 minutes. Jason ended up driving a little too aggressively and spun out. They’ve been tearing up the Michelins in just a few minutes on the track, but that appeared to be what was happening with every team. There was also much discussion on dynamics and the proper racing lines and such. All the teams will do a hot lap and the times will be used to determine start order of the race. This can be fairly important, because you don’t want to be stuck behind a slow team coming right out of Darwin as passing can be fairly difficult in some places.

In the afternoon, the team decided to go Go-karting. Anna, Harry, Sasha and I decided to remain on the sidelines.. but we were rewarded with a solid few hours of incredibly hilarious entertainment! People on solar car teams tend to be fairly aggressive drivers.. so everyone was trying their best to pass everyone else. Except Greg. Who pretty much just puttered along with a long stretch of empty track on either side of him! Haha! After the first round he said.. “I could pass someone for a turn too.. if I wanted to go weee-ooo-weee-ooo-weee-ooo afterwards!” (spinning his finger around for effect).

The second round, Wesley, Sam, Darren and Nathan decided to try to waterfall start and actually race. Unfortunately, Greg managed to wreck absolute havoc and caused several people to spin out. Anna and I just about died laughing at him. It was good times all around. 🙂

All in all, it’s been a good time! The race is two weeks earlier, meaning the weather is /way/ nicer! Also, staying in a hotel means there are less bug bites. These are both really really good things. It’s also much more chill not being incredibly invested in a car. I mean, of course I want Stanford to do really well. But I’m not going to have my week completely ruined if something goes terribly wrong. With fingers crossed, however, nothing will go wrong! There’s been so much more testing that has gone into this car, that it’s very very likely everything will just go smoothly.