Sorry I haven’t updated you all since Darwin! The internet has been very intermittent, and we have mostly been spending our time on it trying to catch up on all the news from the race. Here’s a quick rundown of the days.

 

Sunday: The race started on Sunday.. and Stanford managed to snag the third starting position due to our awesome track time — 2:07 driven by Ian Girard. Ahead of us was Team Arrow at a ridiculously fast 2:00 and Team Kogakuin at 2:06. Michael, Nathan, Sam, Sasha and I were at the starting line to wish the team good luck and watch all of the other teams start. We stuck around until Tokai left (quite a few cars behind Stanford due to oversteering during their hot lap, which resulted in them needing to make a five-point turn). They were having some slight difficulties, giving Chris Selwood time to wax on about them being the previous champions.

 

We finally left Darwin about an hour or more behind the teams and spent a good few hours trying to catch up with the leaders. This involved passing all of the other teams, which just reinforced how grateful we were that Stanford had managed to get a good track time and avoid all the passing that Nuon and Tokai needed to do. There are several parts of the road during which it is impossible to pass, so you end up stuck behind a slower car for quite a while. We met up with the top teams at the first control stop. At that point, it was Twente, Nuon, Stanford, Michigan and Tokai. From there, the Googs car started booking it. We were hoping to make it to Devil’s Marbles that night, which would put us about 12 hours away from Uluru. At around 4 pm, it became clear that wasn’t about to happen.. so we ended up pulling into a caravan park about an hour north of Devil’s Marbles. I was a little bit bummed, because I didn’t remember Devil’s Marbles from my previous trip, so I was looking forward to getting a few pictures! We did get to pull out our tent for the first time.. and since the weather was gorgeous, we ended up not putting up the fly net and could see thousands and thousands of stars while still in our tent. Sunday was also the day Sam coined the phrase “fortress of softitude” in reference to me burying myself in three pillows.

Monday: We were hoping to make it to Uluru by sunset, so we knew that we needed to wake up fairly early. We managed to roll out at about 6:20, which was a little worrisome, since Google Maps was telling us it would take 13 hours to make it to Uluru. I knew we needed to stop at Alice Springs for some more supplies as well, which made it highly unlikely that we’d make it to Uluru by 6:45 for sunset. Apparently Google highly overestimates the driving times though, because we ended up making great time to Alice Springs, where we picked up lunch. We managed to make it to Uluru by 4:30 which gave us plenty of time to explore the cultural center, walk around the base a bit, and then set up for sunset.

Uluru is really beautiful, and I’m glad that we managed to make it out there! It has a ton of significance to the Aboriginal people in Australia and there’s a story for pretty much every nook and cranny. We ended up going to the sunset viewing spot at around 6:00 and sat and waited for the sunset. We also made pasta while we waited. 🙂 Sasha set up a time-lapse, Golshan took many many photos of Uluru turning red as the sun set and me? Evidence that I’m a portrait photographer and not a landscape photographer? There I was at Uluru… and I was taking silhouette photos of Golshan and Sam. I did get a few of Uluru too though 🙂 We wanted to stay until the stars came out, but the park closed at 8:00pm and we still needed to make it to our campground so we called it a night after some photos of the moon and Venus.

 

 

Tuesday: I really really wanted to make the sunrise at Uluru so I told everyone that we had a hard deadline of leaving at 5:50 to make the 6:19 sunrise. I voted to drive off and leave whoever wasn’t ready and come back and pick them up. I relented when /everyone/ was running late. We managed to roll out at about 6:05 after some effort on the part of me and Sam to wake up Golshan. 😛 It started with letting the air out of his sleeping pad, progressed to unzipping his sleeping bag, and ended up with Sam punching him. About an hour later at Uluru, I asked if he was still upset with us for waking him up, to which he promptly answered yes. I laughed at him and asked which he was most upset for — the deflated sleeping pad, unzipped sleeping bag, or punching. His response, “I don’t know… they’re all such good options!” We didn’t manage to get any photos of the sunrise.. but we did manage to be driving past just as the sun was rising, so it was still pretty good. I’m just a /little/ bit bitter and will probably keep on making fun of the three of them for making us miss Uluru’s sunrise. 😛 Here’s some more evidence of my portrait photographer-ness. Also, a photo of Nathan taking a photo of Rachel’s stuffed hedgehog Hog in front of Uluru!

After about an hour at Uluru, we headed back to our campsite for breakfast.. I also stopped to take some portraits of Nathan and Sam, because the light was just too good (like garage light!)

We then promptly booked it to the next control stop in Kulgara… which is a teeny tiny little town that literally has a gas station and motel. We were about an hour ahead of Nuon, but we stuck around until Stanford made it. We hung out with the official and I helped him write up the timing board in my super girly handwriting 😉 We got to see Nuon’s incredibly efficient control stop team work. They had about six people taping up the seams at the same time and finished in approximately 5 seconds. We were /very/ impressed. They were far enough ahead of Tokai that they actually took an extra five minutes to charge instead of leaving immediately. This is usually never a good tradeoff. Tokai was twenty minutes behind them and confused us greatly by wiping down their array before driving off. Twente was next (about an hour later) and about 40 minutes behind them was Stanford. We were briefly considering waiting for Michigan — their parents asked us to say hi to them since they had decided to head off to Coober Pedy to do some opal shopping. We heard, however, that they had had major issues and were now in 8th. We followed along with Stanford until they camped for the night. We hung out with them as they did the array stand charging and heard some entertaining solar car gossip. We them bummed some food off of them. Ian’s parents have been following the team the entire race and doing the cooking. A couple of us spent half an hour sitting on the Stuart Highway which is completely safe because you can literally see and hear cars about 3 minutes away.

Wednesday: We had camped about 50 km from Marla. We woke up pretty much when the team did at 5:30 and hung out with them as they did morning charging. We also got delicious potatoes and eggs for breakfast, along with both tea and coffee. Yum! We headed out a bit earlier than the team and stopped in Marla to update the blog and run a few errands. We then drove straight for Coober Pedy.. and got a few minutes before Twente left and just right before Stanford. Stanford gained twenty minutes on Twente this morning (putting them 26 minutes behind) and Twente also ended up leaving their control stop a little late after apparently taping their door down due to the incredibly high winds. If this information is accurate, it is /incredibly/ against the rules and also really unsafe. If something goes wrong, the driver needs to wait until the door is untaped before they can get out, which is extremely sketch. About 100km out of Coober Pedy, we finally caught up with Twente and were planning on clocking them to see how fast they were going when we realized they had pulled over on the side of the road! They managed to make it a fairly short stop though, because they still pulled into Glendambo 14 minutes ahead of Stanford. The rest of the day was spent refreshing the GPS trackers and watching Stanford slowly inch up on Twente. They are now less than 20km back and we’ll have an extremely tight race for third tomorrow!

This is by far the best Stanford has ever done in WSC, which is incredibly exciting. Our car is the most reliable car we’ve ever built, due to being the most well-tested. Our motto this race has pretty much been.. conservative, but reliable. Looking forward to seeing Stanford cross the finish line! Whether they get third or fourth, I am incredibly proud of the entire team 🙂