With our first pass through scrutineering yesterday, and with our second pass and qualifying scheduled for tomorrow, today was quite a busy today. During the morning we worked on preparing our car for the track, so that we could make our last practice laps before the single-lap time trial. We were inconvenienced by one of our telemetry radios failing; however, our back-up radios are a different technology that we have used for many miles of testing, so we don't expect this failure to show up again in the future.

After we got Infinium rolling, we were met by Ford Australia's Global Green Challenge Team. Their eco-cars are starting in their respective class of the Global Green Challenge tomorrow, so they came and visited us at the Hidden Valley Speedway so we could meet each other and see each other's vehicles. Their eco-cars side-by-side with Infinium and our support vehicles was quite a sight!

After our quick meeting, it was back to the track to get in more practice laps! Our driver, Sudeep Rohatgi, has been able to achieve consistently faster laps each day, putting us in a good position relative to our competition. We did lose some time on the track after Infinium suffered a flat tire after going over a patch of grass. However, after getting back into the car, Sudeep was able to achieve a time that would have challenged for pole position in 2007--quite a feat for a car carrying 25 extra kg of batteries compared to the competition.

At the end of the day, we rolled Infinium through the garages and out into the track's parking lot. Once in the parking lot, we set up Infinium's concentrators for an evening charge to further test the system. We received quite a crowd of onlookers--many competing teams were curious about the system, of course. We will be testing the system once again tomorrow for sunrise, then making final bolt-checks before our qualifying run. While Infinium was certainly not designed to be the fastest car around the track, we are very pleased with its track performance so far, and hope that our qualifying result will set us up well for the race.

On Tuesday evening, facing a new round of storms headed towards Adelaide, the team left its base in Adelaide for our final test day before heading up to Darwin. We trailered the car up to Port Augusta, which put us just north of the storms and wind in Adelaide, and readied ourselves to test on Wednesday morning. The goal for Wednesday was to run one more day at high speeds, since our mock race was plagued by such bad weather. Wednesday's route had us driving north to Glendambo and then south back to Port Augusta. We were lucky to finally receive some sunny weather, so our pace for the day was brisk--we spent most of the time at or near the South Australian speed limit of 110 km/hr.

We completed the Port Augusta-Glendambo-Port Augusta route in the early afternoon, before the typical end time of 5:00 PM. After packing up Infinium, the team and the trailer went their separate ways: while the team headed north for Darwin, Infinium was trailered back to Adelaide. Infinium will leave Adelaide on Saturday, and we will all meet on Monday in Darwin, where scrutineering and qualifying take place.

Today, Thursday, we arrived at Uluru (Ayer's Rock) in time for a gorgeous view of the setting sun. After taking many pictures, we enjoyed dinner and such unique meals as kangaroo and Aussie burgers (with beets and fried eggs). The next few days will take us to other scenic sites in the Northern Territory as we head towards Darwin. We'll be sure to post more pictures once we arrive!