After four days of mock race, covering over 750 miles across four states, the team is now making our return trip to Ann Arbor. With less than a week until our semi trailer leaves for Australia by boat, we have elected to forgo the final day of practice in order to ready ourselves for shipping out to Australia. We are all very pleased by the way Infinium and the team have performed on our mock race. Over the course of the past four days we have ironed out many of the kinks in our daily routines, fine-tuned our racing strategies, and have almost doubled the miles on Infinium to improve its reliability.

After our semi trailer ships at the end of this month, we will have all of August to test Infinium before it leaves for Australia in early September. Once in Australia, we will have one more dress rehearsal for the World Solar Challenge in the form of an additional mock race through the Outback. After the intense racing practice of this past week, we are one giant step closer to being prepared for the World Solar Challenge; with 93 days until WSC, we will have plenty of time to make the final leap.

After a succcessful day of racing, the team is now in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Our Mock Race started at 2:22 PM (as opposed to the typical 8:00 AM start), so all who stayed up the previous night installing array modules could get some rest. We left the workspace for Fort Wayne, our first control stop, traveling at the speed limit for almost all of the day. Rather than ending the day at 5:00 PM, we set a finish time at 6:00 PM due to the afternoon start.

During the 138 mile drive across Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana highways, we pulled over only once--but only because our lead car needed to be filled with gas! We arrived in Fort Wayne at 5:42, for an average speed of 41.4 miles per hour.

Charging at the end of the race day in Fort Wayne, Indiana

Semi trailer parked at camp in the Fort Wayne Coliseum