Formula Sun Grand Prix 2019 — Day 2
It’s stupid late for this, but it’s 5am and I said I’d get my posts out once a day so I’m delaying sleep for this. Maybe this was a poor idea because I think ops is waking up within the next five minutes, but whatever I’ll deal with the consequences of this later as I tell you about this crazy day where I’ve been up almost 24 hours.
Wake-up was pretty early; 5:30am to be exact. I ended up sleeping a little past this since I woke up and went back to bed but was still on the first shuttle out of the apartment to the track. You’d think that after the mishap last night that we’d figure out this whole “shuttle people between two locations” thing. HA. no. Six people were stuck at the airbnb for an extra hour and a half (someone got bored enough to start watching solidworks tutorials on their phone) so who knows. Maybe by the end of the week we’ll have this down.
The morning was a mad rush of having the outer shell of the car fixed in time for scrutineering at any time today. So before 9am we needed to remove the side panels and windshield, replace clickbonds and put it all back together. While we did succeed in repairing all the clickbonds in time (except for one which we decided to use VHB tape to lock it together), we discovered a new issue. So far everything seems to be going wrong for us, as this time it was our rear suspension that decided it wanted to be a problem. The swivel joint on the rear passenger shock popped out of its housing, causing the suspension to become near useless. This significantly delayed our mechanical scrutineering, causing us to show up 40 minutes late because we sent out team members to try and get a fix at a bike shop nearby, then couldn’t properly reattach the bolts holding the shocks to our chassis through the correct bushings.
Mechanical scrutineering wasn’t real nice to us, even though we told them before we had no brakes or suspension. We had a lot of sticky notes added to our wall as a result of this scrutineering process, some easy some not. It’s usually how it goes though and I was honestly surprised we didn’t get torn a new one. Maybe that’s tomorrow when we actually show up with our completed car and he decides to rip into us. We went back to our bay with a lot of new sticky notes and surprisingly, a yellow sticker.
The next scrutineering was body and sizing. This actually took a surprising amount of time, as the checklist is pretty long so we spent a long time getting passenger compartment volume checked out and making sure that we meet all the sticker requirements for competition. While this was all going on, Kentucky was setting up their telemetry antenna on the roof and ran the cable down through a hole in the ceiling to their garage on the first floor. Unfortunately for them, it wasn’t their garage. Instead they passed it into the mechanical scrutineering bay where several scrutineers had a field day messing with them. They did fix it eventually and the 70 feet of cable eventually went back up the hole. We did pass body and sizing, somewhat conditionally since the crash foam on the roof actually meant we wouldn’t pass but he allowed it, and then immediately moved to driver operations. Tyler is great, I’ve seen him a lot at competition the past two times and he’s known for putting stickers on team cars in places the team doesn’t know about (we haven’t found his sticker on ours yet). We had cleared most parts of driver ops before showing up, such as radios and water so all we had to do was egress.
All we had to do was egress. It’s simple, get out of the car in the direction pointed within 15 seconds. Well we didn’t actually make it to the egress part before our driver accidentally pulled back on the steering wheel and our steering column came apart in three places: the u-joint, the shear pin and the collar. I was livid. We couldn’t fit it back in immediately, so for the purpose of egress the steering wheel sat out of place while our drivers dove out of the car. We passed egress in under half the time required, so that was impressive considering that we’ve added a metal ballast box between the drivers that someone will have to get over. Good job drivers. Afterwards, we realized that we can’t actually go anywhere because our steering can’t be controlled so we hung out in the scrutineering pits for a while to fix it. It took about half an hour to piece the steering back together and while this was going on, one of our team members got called into work and ditched another member somewhere in Austin. Someone else got sent out to pick up the stranded team member, our brake rotors and a handful of items requested from mechanical scrutineering, but I don’t know how the hell situations like these happen. I got lunch finally around 4pm, which at that point can’t really be called lunch but the charcoal barbeque that we were using was so slow that they would’ve had to have started at 8am this morning to be ready for proper lunchtime.
One of our team members had pretty poor luck so far today. First she got a wrench dropped on her earlier in the day during panel removal. Then she received some pretty significant burns courtesy of a hot glue gun that left four fingers wrapped in gauze. In her defence, she wasn’t operating said glue gun and someone else didn’t see her, but still sucked. Sucked for me too since she’s been doing a ton of stuff for me and has been great but I have to send her back on an early shuttle since she needs to not go crazy with new burns. Ironically, she is also one of our two safety officers and also a driver so hopefully the burns will be ok really quickly. Pretty sure that’s not how burns work, but we can only hope.
So far, we every scrutineering we’ve been to has been unofficially scheduled, as our team isn’t scheduled until Wednesday. We’ve been taking over slots from other teams that weren’t ready and were supposed to go to electrical scrutineering at 5. Guess what: didn’t happen as we were having multiple problems with one of our boards preventing us from going. We didn’t make it over there until 6:10 or so. We were able to drive over, earning some cheers from several teams as we made our way down the paddock. Somehow we got a green, pretty surprised but hey I’m not going to complain about it. Something went our way for once.
During the electrical scrutineering, our new brake rotors finally arrived. I’m honestly so excited about these, as it finally means we can progress through mechanical scrutineering and get to dynamics. However there is a considerable amount of work that has to go into it but more on that later. With the arrival of the brake rotors, the team made the decision to move the car and a lot of gear to the nearby RV park, which would allow us to continue working on the car past the 11pm curfew enforced in the pits. We made the call, but also ran into the scrutineer for lights and vision and asked him if we could run his station to get a yellow. If we are yellow or higher in all tests, we can go to dynamics so we figured it wouldn’t hurt to get this out of the way now. He agreed and we scrambled to put the windshield back in for the test before wheeling the car down to the test area. Two highlights came out of this test, one was when the scrutineer was standing on the passenger side behind the seats holding up a number three in a blind spot for the driver. Our driver guessed three since he couldn’t see the scrutineer at all, and the scrutineer then spent about two minutes crouching and peering through the window trying to figure out how the hell our driver saw it. The driver blew it though by saying he guessed over radio to the team member standing next to the scrutineer. The second moment was after the horn test we were doing rear lights and the three point turn to turn the vehicle around accidentally triggered our horn through a conductive spring so the horn wouldn’t stop until we powered off the car, to which the scrutineer responded “you already proved the horn works we don’t need more of it.” Our entire team was dying of laughter though which was pretty nice given the day of Ls. The Ls weren’t over for me though, since upon arriving back from the lights and visions test after 9pm I was informed that the food that was saved for me had been eaten, so thanks to ops for figuring out some other food for me for dinner.
Afterwards the team split. Most went to the airbnb and some to the RV park. Nighttime at the RV park consisted of a dozen members working on a few tasks related to steering and brakes. The brake rotors had to go in, so those were the critical tasks of the night but I also had to add a latch to the ballast box and put our steering back together. We worked from about 10:30 to 3:30am and I honestly don’t remember a lot of what happened. I do know that most of it was finished so hey we did it guys. Now I just have to wake up in an hour to go back to the track to get the car ready again for 9am battery protection scrutineering. Wish us luck! (and me for I will be an embodiment of death soon enough)
Windshields and dashboards removed this competition: 5
