Late Updates!

Hi Everyone!

We've all been super busy for the last few days, but that's no reason to keep you all out of the loop, so we apologize. I'll start from where our last post left off...and try not to forget anything important!

Thursday: We continued our scrutineering efforts and got a yellow or green in every category (meaning we were good to go onto dynamic testing). The car still hadn't moved under its own power yet! We spent the rest of the day and night readying it for that task.

Friday: The car moved for the first time at 7 AM! We were thrilled but had to make it over to dynamic testing immediately. Our drivers hopped into the car with no experience and passed the tests easily! After that we returned to the scrutineering stations to obtain all greens, which we succeeded in doing. Keep in mind, Friday was the last day for qualifiers, which we hadn't even started yet. By this time it was a little after noon and we still had to get 125 miles in on the track to qualify. Our first driver, Matt Martin, qualified first with 16 laps, beating the track time record held up to that point. Electrical problems meant that he had a rough start, with many laps that did not have qualifying times. An interference with the electrical system was causing the car to shut off randomly, but Matt was able to adapt to the problem. He completed one of the 1.7 mile laps in just 2 min 15 sec, all while power cycling (shutting on and off) the car to bring it back online! We were very proud!

Erin jumped in next and did well. She was almost done with her laps when another electrical problem halted the car altogether. It had to be towed into the pit, where the problem was fixed quickly. After this, time was running out! Race officials suggested putting our third driver, Wade into the car so that he could at least get a few laps and have a chance to qualify, so Wade was able to complete an entire 2 laps in the time he was allotted!

...to be continued...