It’s now about 11pm and the rest of the team has gone to bed. We pulled in around 5:15 to our camp on the side of the road. We’ve traveled 631 kilometers today, which is better than we faired two years ago. Hopefully with our array fully connected, we’ll cover a lot more ground tomorrow. Strategically, we’re doing alright. We should hit the Dunmarra checkpoint early in the morning and put the array up for some good charging.
We had an interesting dilemma today – to stop and try to diagnose and fix the array, or to wait until a scheduled stop. The issue was not knowing how long it would take to diagnose, and we weren’t really losing that much power. If we were to stop and try and diagnose it, we could actually lose more kilometers overall depending on the time taken. So we decided to wait. Turns out It was an easy fix. We probably could have gone an extra 30 km today if we’d fixed it right after the start line when we noticed the problem. However we are still happy with our decision as it was the safe way to go.
Stanford pulled up beside us tonight wth their car on trailer. The place they stopped to fix their car wasn’t very safe and they needed to make camp for the night. This means they need to go back to their location for 8am tomorrow to start. However, this is only if they have fixed their array. They are currently working feverishly beside me to fix it. They are drawing about half the power they should, but cannot diagnose a problem.
As it stands tonight, we are 7th in our class, and 11th overall. This does not include any handicapping for the class differences – so it’s tough to judge. Our goal tomorrow is to gain a position or two.