2 August
day Four of the American Solar Challenge!
First, we would again like to thank McKendree University for the accommodations last night. We were able to work on Eos under lights in their parking lot as well as sleep on flat grass. Campus security and the police both came by to make sure everything was going well and to talk to us about our car. When we finally got to bed at 3:00AM, we all agreed that Lebanon could not have made us feel more welcome.
This morning, we decided we were going to need to drive fast to make up for lost time. We averaged 47 mph on the highways. We entered Missouri under an hour into our drive, and proceeded through St. Louis. After St. Louis, we got onto US-67 for 100 miles. From US-67, we got onto US-60, which took us the next 175 miles along our route. Both of these were four lane highways, so we could go at high speeds without worrying about building up traffic behind us.
The checkpoint was scheduled to close at 6:00 PM, and it came down to the line. We are eager to see if we were penalized for being late at all today, as it was very close at the end.
Ultimately, today underscores the upside of building our own components: we know how to fix them. While some of our components may be less reliable because we built them, we were able to adapt when something broke, which would have been much more difficult if we hadn't designed them in the first place. When we had to take our car off the road yesterday, we were nervous about how the night would end. But knowing our car let us fix everything that had encountered problems and then drive all day today without issue.
