After the second day of scrutineering, Infinium is almost done!  Today the remaining drivers were officially weighed and ballasted.  Infinium passed the mechanical inspection, and currently has one minor issue with electrical system to clear up.

In the afternoon Infinium moved to the dynamic testing course.  Driver Ryan Mazur demonstrated Infinium's ability to make a u-turn.  Ryan then moved on to complete the figure 8 test, slalom, and brake test.  Driver Cecilia Yung also completed the slalom and brake test.  Currently the only team's to receive all green or blue (minor issue to fix) are the University of Calgary and Michigan.  The University of Minnesota an Hochschule Bochum are almost through scrutineering as well.

Tomorrow morning Infinium should pass the electrical inspection and the support vehicle inspection.  Hopefully Infinium will pass through all of scrutineering  tomorrow afternoon.

The Team arrived and set up camp at the Motorsport Ranch in Cresson, TX yesterday evening. We will be camped here at the track for the next week as we and 15 other solar car teams work to pass the scrutineering and qualifying events. Some time last evening was spent meeting the other teams that also arrived early. It's been fun to meet students from Calgary, New York, Germany and Taiwan who are as passionate about solar cars as we are.

After an event kick-off meeting was held this morning, the testing began. We will start off with battery scrutineering this afternoon and plan to have all static and dynamic tests completed before Wednesday, when the Formula Sun Grand Prix qualifying event will begin.

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.