Infinium has completed its hot-lap with a time of 2:09.95. We were delayed in our running due to a number of on-track incidents before us, including a broken wishbone suffered by Umicore. Umicore has already completed their repairs, and it sounds like there should be no lasting damage. They will be able to complete another hot-lap, but we're not sure whether it will count for starting position. With Umicore and Nuna both repaired, it should be exciting to face these and other top teams at full-strength.

In the challenge class, we believe we will be starting sixth. The teams ahead of us are, as we know it:
Aurora
Nuon
Bochum - BoCruiser
Tokai
Stanford

If Umicore starts based on their next lap time, we expect them to be in the top 3. We are excited that Infinium qualified so well, since our high-efficiency motor and large battery pack are ill-suited for track driving. With a 3000 km race ahead, we should have plenty of time to pass the teams in front of us.

Official starting position will be announced at 3:00 PM Darwin time today (1:30 PM Eastern Time--Darwin is 13.5 hours ahead of US Eastern time).

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.