Final Day

The night before leaving Medicine Hat, we double checked our official times and there was a huge error with our trailering penalty. This error was significant as the new corrected overall time put us about 3.5 hours in front of U of Kentucky, our closest competitor. We got this corrected Tuesday morning.

We started with a 40% full battery pack on Tuesday morning because we had pushed the car close to its max. Arshed and I had accounted for good clear weather before the race started at 9 so we could as least get a 65-75% state of charge (SOC) in our battery pack.
Unfortunately, the weather turned out opposite to what Arshed and I, with 8 days of weather forecasting experience, expected.

Nevertheless, we left at 9.30 am and crawled towards Calgary where the sun was better. We stopped about 10.30 am and charged back up to 55% SOC and continued on. We kept crawling towards the finish line.

The weather was splotchy towards Calgary which drained our batteries down to where we had to stop. We had 100 miles to go at that point. It was 1 pm and we had 3.5 hours till the finish line closes. We decided to trailer so we could at least cross the finish line with our car.

Alas, we did not make the finish line with our car. We were very disappointed to not able to get a picture perfect finish. Traffic conditions and the truck running out of gas at the last minute were a few of the things that prevented us from reaching the finishing line on time.

That night, we saw some of the Kentucky guys and asked them whether they made it all the way on their own power. They said that they had to trailer from 30 miles out of Calgary. At that point, Arshed and I knew that we had beaten them.

Here's the official final standings.


1 2 University of Michigan 51:41:53
2 32 Principia College 61:38:45
3 1 FH Bochum Solar Car Team 63:47:55
4 24 University of Waterloo 64:00:06
5 35 University of Minnesota 65:41:48
6 65 University of Calgary 75:42:53
7 42 Missouri University of Science and Technology 81:20:36
8 9 Iowa State University 91:12:59
9 95 Red River College 92:15:02
10 8 University of Arizona 98:26:12
11 3 University of Kentucky 100:33:24
12 100 Queen's University 106:36:20
13 11 Northwestern University 113:58:11
14 175 Durham University 134:07:06
14 256 Oregon State University 145:20:00

We're still the #1 WILDCAT!