A wet but interesting day. The cars this year are varied in design and exceptionally well made. Some cars looked pretty well finished, others (like ours), still had some work to be done. Archipelago’s timing system seemed to work perfectly, I think they will be emailing the recorded times to all the teams.
There was a radar gun on the course but I didn’t record the speeds. Off hand I think the maximum speed at the corner was around 37-39 kph, not really much different than last year, I was expecting someone to hit 40. I do know that Schneider Electric had the fastest radar speed. I think there are about half a dozen cars behind Schneider in a tight pack.
Our car ran unpainted and without bottom or axle fairings. I estimated that the un-faired portion of the total car frontal area was around 25%. Putting those fairings on *should* make the car faster. We also ran without wheel discs (we are using the heat shrink mylar wheel cover technique). Our wheels are larger than the ones we used last year, longer spokes, more air resistance.
Here a few pics of some of the cars… we didn’t get any pics of Carmanah’s car, but if you want to get an idea of what it looks like just glance at the blog’s masthead, ie last year’s Aspreva car (dig-dig).
canary notes 