Saturday, July 21, 2012

We made it to St Paul, Minnesota, and the 2012 North American Solar Challenge has come to an end. Despite today's weather forecast of clear and sunny skies though, we were unfortunate to spend a large part of this morning pushing through heavy cloud cover and rain. Worried about making it to the finish under our own power, we stayed considerably below marked speed limits until after noon when we finally hit the sun we were promised. As we picked up speed and headed into the twin cities, it became apparent that there was considerably more power in our battery pack than we had expected to finish with. The caravan's speed was more than doubled by the time we were within the last hour of the race, and under the suns rays, were able to maintain the battery pack voltage that we thought would have been nearly depleted by this portion of the race. The team pulled up to the finish line in front of the Minnesota capital with almost half of our pack's energy left which was unfortunate, but after the unpredictable weather we've seen over the past few days, we feel it was worth playing it safe during this last leg of the race to be sure we made it under our own power.

It was good to see those of you who stopped by the display outside the capital following the race. We also own another large thank you to the folks at 3M for a wonderful picnic dinner. Great job this year to all the teams and facilitators of the 2012 North American Solar Challenge!