Unfortunately, the team was unable to finish the race yesterday stopping 10km north of Port Wakefield. Through out the entire day the team battled Nuon for second place which including at least 6 lead changes. The team was able to pull into the Port Augusta checkpoint 5 seconds ahead of Nuna 5. Shorty after leaving the check point Nuna 5 over took Infinium, but a couple minutes later Infinium moved back into second place. Nuna 5 matched Infinium's speed and then eventually passed and put some distance between the two cars.

As time in the race day was coming to an end, it looked like Infinium would finish the day four minutes behind Nuna 5.  Unfortunately, the team ran out of momentum trying to make it up a hill, and was forced to push Infinium to the top and take a 10 minute penalty. This penalty combined with the lead Nuon has created, will almost certainly mean a third place finish for Michigan.

Our hats go of from the team from Tokai University who ran an incredible race with their amazing car. We would also like to congratulate Nuon on their successful recovery and race. They certainly made the last leg very exciting for us back at home.

Lastly, I would like to congradute our team in Australia on running an amazing race. Everyone in the States is so proud of how well the race crew performed. The team should be crossing the finish line this evening. I encourage everyone to follow Infinium into Adelaide using the GPS tracker.

After spending the previous day performing tests at the Royal Flying Doctor Service's emergency landing airstrip, we set out this morning for Adelaide and the finish of our Mock Race. Our starting location was approximately 50 km north of Glendambo, leaving us around 670 km (418 mi) from the finish of timing outside Adelaide. We started at 8:00 AM with sunny skies at last--quite a relief after the weather of previous days.

Although we had only a small amount of energy left from the three cloudy days before, along with a threat of more clouds in the afternoon, we were able to cruise at over 90-95 km/hr (56-59 mph) in the morning. Thanks to the forecasts of our meteorologist, Chris McMeeking, we were able to track the clouds well ahead of Infinium. In the afternoon, when we were sure that we would not run into significant cloud cover, we started to cruise near the speed limit of 110 km/hr (69 mph). After three days of miserable weather, it was encouraging to be able to travel closer to race speeds.

We hit our control points in Glendambo and Port Augusta, and finished at the end of timing outside Adelaide with time to spare before the end of the race day. Best of all, we had perfect reliability on the car, with no time on the side of the road! Each of the divisions on our Race Crew truly deserves praise for their part in today's success: Engineering, for ensuring the car was reliable enough to last through the grueling mock race; Strategy, for tracking such unpredictable weather and managing our batteries through the cloudy days; and Operations, for keeping our whole team going through five long days and four nights in the Outback's ever-changing conditions.

With exactly three weeks until the Global Green Challenge starts, we have readied Infinium and ourselves for the trials of the Outback and will now turn our focus to the final details of our race preparations.

-Steve Hechtman, Race Manager

The team's Australian Mock Race started today from the outskirts of Adelaide, South Australia. While the Global Green Challenge will start from Darwin in the Northern Territory and end in Adelaide, race regulations prevent us from traveling on the race route in the Northern Territory before the race. Therefore, our Mock Race is from Adelaide to the Northern Territory border and back, a distance of 2435 kilometers (over 1500 miles).

Today's race day started just after 11 AM--while the first day of the race starts at 9:00 AM, we were delayed in our car preparations due to our batteries not arriving from the US until Monday. Nevertheless, we started out from Adelaide and were instantly met with cloudy weather. Starting with a full battery pack, we were able to move at a reasonable pace; however, with no end to the clouds in sight, we had to move forward cautiously. It would be unfortunate to run out of energy in our batteries before we could get to the sun of the Australian outback to recharge.

This being our first running of the car in Australia, we did run into a number of minor electrical gremlins that put us on the side of the road three times, and had to bleed our brake system while pulled over as well. The likely cause of the electrical problems, a loose connection within our battery control modules, was diagnosed while examining the batteries at the end of the day, so we hope not to encounter this problem again tomorrow.