The first day of the competition was set aside for passing the safety and technical inspections, as well as getting the drivers accustomed to the race track. For those of you who are superstitious, this day also happened to fall on Friday, April 13, which may explain many of the bizzare phenomenon which occured repeatedly while we were trying to ready the car for inspection.

The first sign was that our spare battery was dead. We initially thought that it was a problem with the leads, since the battery itself showed 12 volts, but the voltage at the leads fluctuated wildly. However, when we swapped the leads with our main battery, the problem remained, so we traced the problem to the battery cell itself, and tried to recharge it. Once our charger showed full charge, we tried to hook it up directly to a lightbulb to discharge it, but it did not shine at all. At this point, we realized that there was a thin crack in the battery's plastic container, through which the battery's acid probably leaked out, rendering the battery unusable. Strangely though, there was no sign of leakage or corrosion in our equipment... the acid seemed to have disappeared into thin air! (Either that, or the battery acid leaked out a long time ago, but we just didn't notice.)

We quickly purchased another battery to remedy the problem, but by this time the engine demons began to express their wrath. It all started when we were adjusting the carburetor to run smoothly, since the engine seemed to be missing strokes at random intervals. Suddenly, the engine surged, and there was a loud BANG, then everything stopped. When we tried to restart the engine, the starter motor experienced no load, so we knew that something was definitely wrong. However, it was only upon opening up the engine that we realized the extent of the devastation. The connecting rod was completely shattered, and the head gasket was leaking too. After begging around, we finally found a new crankshaft, and some gasket material, and installed them in a few hours with the help of the Rose Hulman Efficient Vehicle Team.

Our troubles were not over yet though. We discovered that our centrifugal clutch was always engaged, instead of allowing the engine to spin while idling. As a result, our engine simply would not start, since the load on it was too great. To make matters worse, it turned out that our carbuerator was faulty, and we had to manually choke the engine in order to start it. Finally, the rachet in the rear wheel was not very free-rolling, which would drastically reduce our efficiency. Since we did not bring adequate spare parts along with us, we had to resort dismantling and cleaning each part individually, which took hours. Although we fixed the clutch, and reduced some of the friction, the engine would still not start reliably, which eliminated any hopes of using our "burn and kill" technique to cut back on fuel usage.

Anyway, we succeded in passing the safety inspection, and eventually passed the technical inspection too. However, by then, we only had half an hour to practice on the track before it closed. Afterwards, we ran the car in the parking lot, but the engine was still plagued with reliability problems. After a long day, we ate dinner, and enjoyed an evening of fun events sponsored by Shell.

Below are pictures showing the CalSMV Team repairing various subsystems of the vehicle
Note: These scaled-down JPG images are 800x600, ~100KB each. Click on an image to load the full-size
2306x1728 version, ~1.7MB each.





















Short film clips of practicing in the parking lot:
(MPG movie opens in new window, ~9 MB Each)