Farewell Houston, next year....

Awards ceremony

Competition is over!  Final results are second place diesel prototype, second place E100 prototype and first place urban concept!

E100 fine-tuning

E100 team makes a few adjustments to the their car on last day of competition!  Trying to see if they can better their mileage from yesterday!  A prominent college professor of one of our rivals commented to me on how he loved to see our team! Elbows deep in the car. He proceeded to point across the way to his team, sitting in a circle visiting with work they could be doing.  Thanks Alden for the good show! Thanks Bos for all the efforts! 

The venue

We have been at the George R. Brown Convention Center.  The streets in front of the convention center and surrounding the park are blocked off for the event.  A qualifying run is ten laps around the track(6 miles) with 24 minutes to complete.  Brake checks are done again before & after each run.  Transponders on the cars record the laps and times.
Our hotel is in the bottom center of the pic.

Sunday morning

The team is up and ready for action again today.  The urban concept vehicle is already in the starting queue.  Runs start at 0830 followed by prototype runs starting at 1000.

Evening in the pits

After an awesome fajita supper, we are making a few adjustments on each car to try to improve on our mileage for our runs tomorrow.  Placings still stand as before with both prototypes in second place and the urban concept in first.

Urban concept

Starting line video

After its first qualifying run, the urban concept car is in first place!  Should get one more run in yet today also.

Mid-day results

Currently in 2nd place with both the diesel and E100 prototypes.  All cars will get the opportunity for two more runs this afternoon and tomorrow as well.

Race day

Urban concept car test runs...now with GoPro video!

Click for video

Diesel prototype test runs

Click here for video

Friday

Today starts with a group picture at 0815 and the track opening for practice at noon.

A few more pics from yesterday....

A few downtime pics

The road is long...

A couple of advisors...obviously having a deep technical/engineering discussion.

Even the hardest working team leaders need a break

Award winners

Two of the team had their essays selected as winners of a contest sponsored by Ferrari.  They won airfare and hotel stay in Houston and a Shell gift card.  Today, they spent a few hours at an engineering seminar.

Technical inspections

The teams are currently working their way through tech inspections.  There are nine stations that need to be passed before the cars can go onto the track.  Cars are inspected for size, weight, seatbelts, fuel, driver visibility and all sorts of safety features.

The team is up and ready to roll...

We have arrived...

The team arrived in Houston this afternoon and is settled into the hotel for the week.

We have three cars this year... A diesel and an E-100 in the prototype category and new this year is an urban concept car, basically a street legal vehicle with a diesel engine, built from the ground up.

Tomorrow starts at 0800 with registration, safety meetings and driver and crew registrations.  Each team member and driver are registered to a car with bar-coded ID bands.  Tech inspections start at noon.