Yesterday we had a tough day with many setbacks. But we all know the famous saying “Every storm cloud has a silver lining” and thus we had the fortunate to enjoy from prosperity. Read the complete report of the day below:

We started the morning with good news. We received a message telling us that we were in the Design Judging finals. We were very happy that we managed to convince the judges that our design belongs among the best. After that, more good news arrived at our camping: we also managed to get in the cost finals. So we had a really great morning with a lot of good news.

Yesterday we found out that our data acquisition system did not function as well as it was supposed to. The reason for this was a failure of a flash memory card. We quickly got on the phone with one of our good sponsors; NXP; who had a spare part ready for us to use. Two of our team members, Len and Sjoerd, didn’t doubt for a second and jumped in a car and went directly to Nijmegen to pick up the flash memory card.

Today, we continued with the scrutineering process. Last night Paul, Gihin, Remco and Felix worked through the night to get the car ready. Luckily enough, their hard work paid off. Our car went through electrical scrutineering quickly. We continued on to the other parts of the scrutineering which were the rain and the brake test. We completed both tests without any problems and we are glad to announce that we completely passed scrutineering.

Yesterday evening we got nominated for the Daimler Best E-Drive packaging award. Today we had to present our car to the jury of Daimler to convince them that we are the rightful team to win this award. We had to wait until the evening for the results.

Then it was time to drive the skidpad. Eindhoven set an incredible time: 5.75 seconds! For us it was important to set a first time. After that, we could adjust the settings of our car to deliver the best performance. Reinier began his first attempt and set a time of 5.98 seconds. After that, the driving-crew had some time to adjust the car accordingly. Initially, the car suffered from oversteer. After the adjustments by the driving-crew, Reinier performed his second attempt and managed to set a time of 5.87 seconds, this was the third best time.

When we rolled the car back to the pits, we saw that there were some problems with the ECU. We tried to solve this as soon as possible, however we did not managed to repair the ECU in time. Unfortunately, this led to the fact that our second driver, Bastiaan, was not able to drive the skidpad. So our final time for the skidpad is 5.87 seconds. Great job Reinier!

Then we had the Bosch best power system award judging, it was quite a rush because we were already in a fix with the Design Judging finals which were at 19:00. We tried to convince the judges from Bosch that our car should get the power system award. The result from the Bosch award will be published later.

At 19:00 the Design Judging finals took place for which we were nominated. It was an exciting evening and we will have to wait until Sunday for the results.

Then it was time for the first award ceremony and we had our best evening so far. We are second place in Daimler best E-packaging award and second at Bosch best power system award. Then the real party could break out because we won BASF best use of fiber reinforced plastics! When we thought the night could not get any better we then won Cost! Robert who didn’t do any sporting for a year ran to the stage to get his award!

As you can read, it was a busy day where we had to perform at different events. Fortunately it went a lot better today than yesterday and we look forward to the dynamic events tomorrow full of confidence.