Just over a week ago on Saturday May 17, our team participated in a pre-scrutineering event at the University of Waterloo. This event gave us a chance to meet with officials and have them review our car in much the same way they will when we arrive at the qualifying event before the race. During this qualifying event, race officials will run a series of tests on our car to ensure that our vehicle is safe. This process, called scrutineering, will analyze all aspects of the solar car and the caravan.

For the 2008 North American Solar Challenge, race officials offered the opportunity to run pre-scrutineering events at locations across the country to give teams a chance to practice scrutineering and get early feedback. This is helpful because the qualifying event is only 6 days before the race start and would not leave much time to make major changes if required.

On Saturday May 17, our team arrived at 5am at our workspace and by 5:30 we were on the road. After a four hour drive, we arrived at the University of Waterloo around 9:30.
Work then started at 10am with electrical scrutineering and every test we asked to run, Continuum passed.
Thanks to our operations crew, we had a very nice lunch before continuing with sizing and mechanical scrutineering. Again the tests went well and all of the items that the officials requested we fix, have been fixed!

Following these tests we moved to an adjacent parking lot and began to run a few of the dynamic tests.

Continuum again passed all of these tests and by 5pm the car was back in the trailer and we were on our way back to Ann Arbor. The team returned home around 11pm after a long 20 hour day.


The University of Waterloo was kind enough to host the event, and I would like to thank them for allowing our team to attend.

Labels: NASC 2008 Season