Welcome. Welcome to an overview of SunStang's first steps in our first competition in 7 years. Let me tell you, it has been quite the journey getting here. We've travelled so far, literally and figuratively, to get to this point, but we've also made so much progress while we've been here in Austin, Texas. A testament to this is the lack of communication we've had: busy hands means limited typing.

DAY 0: Arrival

The vehicle left London with two team members, Dan and Omar, on Saturday morning. What happens when you strap two male engineers in a truck together for 30 hours? Not a whole lot, actually. They did manage to wind up at a solar car competition though.

I joined them several hours later and we got to work immediately. Not before our GPS took us on several colourful detours. Which wasn't all that bad, because we happened to pass right by a parking lot where there were more of our kind: MIT and SIUE had set up camp in a lot by their hotels and were working hard to prep before scrutineering. It was pretty exciting getting a glimpse at what the next several days would be like. We chatted with the teams, and heard mention of the dreaded Hill. We'd heard of it before, of course, but it was only a ghost story to us...

DAY 1: SCRUTINEERING #1

The Circuit of the Americas is a 3.4 mile Grand Prix track, for Formula 1 racing. This summer and a few others, it has been home to the Formula Sun Grand Prix, a race for collegiate teams to showcase their design skills. The paddock parking lot was full with trucks and trailers for the solar cars from all over the U.S., Canada, and even as far as Iran. And beyond the trailers, into the garages were...Solar car teams! With real life solar cars! It was like like finally finding your herd. Hearing phrases like "maximum power point trackers" and "array" and "ballast box" thrown around like normal was strange and kind of cool, considering I've never heard them uttered outside of our shop at home. 

There was so much activity to take in, so many amazing designs to take a look at. We will definitely learn a lot just by looking, but even more from talking and interacting with the teams. Unfortunately, we spend the entirety of Day 1 preparing the car for scrutineering. So we didn't get a chance to soak it all in. But luckily for us, our first scrutineering event was not scheduled until Day 2, so we could put a lot of work in on Day 1.

The garages open up onto the pits, and the track. And at the very beginning of the track, a little ways down from our garage #15 was...the Hill.

**Note: Objects in image are more terrifying than they appear


That wall of concrete will be the second "hurdle" (that's more than a hurdle, that's a mountain) that SunStang will have to overcome. The first, is scrutineering.

DAY 2: SCRUTINEERING #2

On day 2, we unfortunately didn't make it to most of our scheduled scrutineering, except for driver weigh in. My bag of ballast weighs about as much as some teams' cars.

Despite not completing scrutineering yet, we have made quite the statement with our 3 person crew. But we are not alone! We've heard that these solar events are such a great learning environment, because everyone is willing to help. But we couldn't believe how true it was. We had a lot of help with tools and supplies, and actual manpower from MIT, University of Calgary, and Oregon State! It was very kind and considerate of them all to take time out of their days to help out a team in need. 

Tomorrow is the final day of scrutineering. We have a lot of work ahead of us, but we're looking forward to it. Because no matter what happens, what we've accomplished in the past two years and the past two days is amazing in itself.

To quote a distinguished Canadian poet, "Started from the bottom, now we here".

-Ayeda