28 July

Final day of the Formula Sun Grand Prix

Today, we began our day again at 6:00 AM with the normalization of our array. When our battery was returned to us by the race officials at 7:00 AM, we immediately hooked our array up and started charging.

At 9:00 AM, the race started. The sky was cloudy, but there wasn't any rain yet. We knew we would probably get rained on around one PM, so we wanted to get as many laps in on the dry pavement as we could.

We started the day aggressive, and Kory Soukup was able to pull out efficient and fast laps. Unfortunately, the cloud cover also limited our power intake.

When the rain came at 12:30 PM, we kept running Eos until 1:00 PM, when it first ran low on power. Eos took a pit stop to charge in the rain and eventually returned to the track, after which Kory drove Eos for a couple of slow laps before stopping to charge. After charging for several minutes, Eos would return to the track for a couple more laps.

The sky gradually lightened after 3:00 PM, but it never fully cleared. By 4:25 PM, we pulled Eos off the track for a long charge before releasing her one last time for a slow lap then a fast lap. Our second to last lap included this charge time and lasted almost 40 minutes before our last lap, which lasted two minutes and 48 seconds.

At 5:00 PM, the final race day ended. We finished fourth with 386 laps. We were the only cruiser class to pass through scrutineering and will be the only cruiser driving the American Solar Challenge this year, though several other teams have mentioned that they are planning to join us in the Cruiser Class soon. We are excited to see that other solar car teams take the practical aspect of our sport as seriously as we do and we hope that we will all be able to learn from each other.

While the race was going on, the race crew that was not in our pit was packing up our camp. We were working hard to get all of our tents collapsed and bags under cover before the rain hit.

After the race, we finished packing Eos and headed out to Ohio, where we will have an exhibition with the other competitors at the Cuyahoga Valley Career Center tomorrow.