Day 9

If you don't already know there are two of us blogging, Arshed and myself Wei-Ren.

The titles with Day XX is by me and every other posts are by Arshed.

Anyways it's Day 9, 40 miles short of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.
The past two days have been frustrating because the weather has not been ideal for solar car racing. We had to trailer our car from Fargo, ND to Winnipeg yesterday. Today, we had to trailer from Winnipeg to Brandon as the whether didn't hold up for us and this is the longest leg of the race from Winnipeg to Medicine Hat. Tomorrow, we have about 370 miles to cover in 10 hours.

Arshed and I have been sitting in the third row of seats in the suburban working on strategy. We have very very little leg room and in the future a 15 passenger van would have been better leg room or better yet a custom cargo van for telemetry and strategy.

I jokingly suggested that we should have one of those Matrix operator rigs where we can see the numbers rolling from left to right instead of from the top to bottom.

As the strategists, we have been doing better than I expected. With no experience or previous instructions to go off, we were able to make some crucial decision. Arshed mainly works on our spreadsheet SOC predicted calculations, elevation and weather, while I work on making sure that our batteries are in check and speed control. Together we discuss different options for the current condition of the race. Arshed has been very valuable to the team.

The car is functioning pretty consistent with a 3 year old car with an old solar array and battery pack. We have had no problems since the first day of mishaps, otherwise we would have been right with Red River College and Iowa, smoking Kentucky instead of catching up with them.