July 6 is coming to a close and that means day 1 of scrutineering has finished! Although for our team specifically all that entailed was registration and finding a place to work on the car for the afternoon. Our scheduled slots for examination are all for Saturday and Sunday.
Saturday will have our electrical and driver scrutineering sessions. The electrical session will consist of tests on our critical systems on the vehicle. Basically they are making sure that our motor works, that our lights work properly, and that the system as a whole will be safe throughout the race. The driver session includes making sure that all of the drivers follow regulations correctly and will be safe when they drive the car.
All of the teams ended up in a freshly paved parking lot right next to the race track at Monticello Motor Club. We set up shade tents, unloaded the car, and began working on Impulse. Brake lights needed to be checked, the hatch array was being tested for proper power output, an old board needed to be remounted to remedy a recurring issue. We also helped out the Principia Solar Car Team with our welder and generator.
Tristan and I were able to fawn over an Ariel Atom that was at the race track. For those that don’t know what an Ariel Atom is, it is a really, really, REALLY fast open top car. There were Indy cars, Porsches, Lotuses, Ferraris, and an old Austin Healy also at the track. For a car lover like myself, this was heaven.
Today was also our first experience with seeing so many other solar car teams in one place! There were such varied designs and stylistic approaches to the exact same set of rules. We all had a lot of fun getting to see how the other teams tackled the engineering challenges that we ourselves struggled over in the past few years. For example, the parking brake was consistently a difficult part to design for every team and it turned out that almost everyone had a different style in the end.
Wish us luck tomorrow at our first sessions of scrutineering!