The second day marked the official start of the competition, with several speeches, presentation of all of the participating teams, and a big photo-op. Soon after the starting celebrations, Shell's chemists filled up our vehicle with the official 89 octane gasoline, and we were off on our first run. However, about a quarter way through the first lap, that pesky carburetor started acting up again, which caused the engine to unexpectedly quit and forced us to abort this initial attempt.

We cleaned the carburetor and adjusted the air and fuel intakes, and soon discovered the source of the problem. It turned out that the engine ran fine while hot, but if it was shut off, then we had to manually choke the carburetor's air intake(effectively increasing the ratio of fuel to air, and thereby making the mixture richer) in order for the engine to restart. We could sometimes start the engine by pumping the gas while running the starter motor, but this was unreliable and difficult to master. A better fix would be wiring a cable to control the carburetor's choke mechanism, but this solution would take some time to plan and implement. In the meanwhile, we decided to attempt a run without turning off the engine, to give Myra, our driver, more experience on the track.

A side effect of constantly running the engine was that we were unintentionally going almost twice as fast as all the other teams, who kept close to the minimum speed of 15 miles per hour. As a result, we regularly passed, and in many cases lapsed most of the other teams, proving although we may not have had the most fuel-efficient vehicle, we could leave everyone else behind in the dust. Myra was well on her way to setting a track record, when unfortunately, the engine quit (again), this time on the final lap, a few hundred feet from the finish line. After this disappointing failure, we went back to the pit, and continued to tinker with the engine, without any success. As a result, we tried yet again to make an all-out run, this time hoping that we would actually make it all the way to the finish line. And to our surprise, we did manage to finish the 8.7 mile run, with an average mileage of 283.1 Miles per Gallon, in an unprecedented time of 22 minutes (~24 miles per hour)!

Unfortunately, we did not have a chance to attempt another run. Shortly before the next attempt, we were trying to tune the engine, when it suddenly ripped out of its mount. Thankfully, no one got hurt, although Alex was about 2 inches away from the engine when the incident occurred. After closer inspection, we discovered that the Pysol holding the four bolts that were holding the engine in place had failed, causing the four bolts and their washers to come out of the chassis. In hindsight, using only Pysol to secure the engine mount bolts to the frame was an awful design decision, but since we had not built this car, but rather just refurbished it, we did not find out about the flaw until it was too late to fix it.

Although our entry into the contest did not perform as well as we had wished, we gained much experience from the competition, and learned valuable lessons that we will not forget in the future.

Below are pictures showing the CalSMV Team readying and running the vehicle in the competition
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 our official attempt:
(MPG movie opens in new window, ~9 MB Each)