Everyone's looking forward to summer, sun, and solar car! It's pretty stressful right before final exams, but team members are still simultaneously preparing for two major events: the 2010 American Solar Challenge and the 2011 Global Green Challenge. For the engineering division, this summer is all about preparing Infinium for ASC2010 and the designing the new car for GGC2011.

Infinium experienced several minor changes to her mechanical systems to comply with ASC regulations. The brakes are considerably larger and a ballast container is being made (The race in Australia allows ballast to be in multiple locations, ASC does not). Meanwhile, the new electrical engineers are getting acquainted with Infinium's electronics. They are making sure everything runs smoothly, as reliability is key to racing well.

Looking further into the team's future, the aerodynamics division is starting designs for the 2011 car. It's an exciting time because we are the solar car team - at the core it's about designing and racing a super efficient car that runs off sunlight. The engineering division as a whole has been analyzing all the shortcomings of Infinium, and improvements will start with the aero body.

Concept models are being produced in CAD, but not one design is being focused on because we are waiting for the 2011 regulations to be released. Every two races the rules dramatically change (in 2007, the solar cell area reduced from 9 to 6 square meters and the driver was required to sit upright) and we don't want to waste effort and man-hours. Aerodynamic shapes are being drawn up, but performance analyses are halted due to licensing issues. The student version of the CFD software we use limits the accuracy of the results and we hope to fix the problem soon.