SAAT Recap and This Week's Plans

Hi everyone,
This is Joseph again with my regular Monday (sort of) update from the Solar Car team. Brandon has been doing a great job with updates during the Schulich Axiom Alberta Tour while we were extremely busy on the engineering side, but now, Tim, Scott, and myself should be able to make our regular weekly posts.
So, our race team returned from the SAAT on Sunday afternoon, which was by all accounts a huge success for everyone involved! We were able to visit 5 schools in 5 different cities during our trip, fix a whole bunch of bugs, get our drivers lots of practice, and of course, learn to work better as an entire race unit.
Some of the highlights of the tour included signing autographs for kids at one school visit, having a herd of cows run with us for a bit as Axiom drove by (they were behind their fence of course), camping in spectacular Elk Island National Park (and setting up a spectacular base camp as well), being helped through a very busy highway intersection, impromptu by a local policewoman, seeing almost every bystander and passing motorist gawk at Axiom and our convoy, and many more memorable experiences and stories that helped us grow as individuals and as a team.
From a race engineering point of view, as the days went on, things ran more and more smoothly. We were able to practice emergency stops, perform merges and passing manoeuvers on highways, and everyone became more comfortable in their specific roles on the team. GPS logging was used effectively to make sure we kept to the correct route, radio communications between vehicles were streamlined and efficient, and wind speed data was collected at regular intervals by our scout vehicle to inform us of headwinds or crosswinds. And of course, Axiom performed admirably (as usual) despite some un-co-operative weather.
Next up, we have a busy week after taking a day off today (a Civic holiday in Canada). Tuesday will be our third and final day of track testing in Hanna, mostly for driver experience, the big difference being we will be making the 3-hour drive up there in convoy formation with Axiom, rather than pulling her in the trailer as before.
Later in the week, we have a media event with Breakfast Television (a local TV program) on Wednesday, and a track day for the media on Thursday afternoon at Race City in Southeast Calgary.
There's still lots of preparation before we leave for ASC on June 4th (only 11 days away -- wow!) Stay posted for updates!
Cheers,
Joseph