hello homies

it is now the weekend after solar car wrapped up, and i forgot to blog about it.

most of my dear readers here will have been on the trip, so they already know, but oh well!

texas was very hot, there was quite a bit of sun, and i suffered a good bit. i got off without any kind of sunburn (unlike our sysop and datbirbdude) thankfully though.

the first few days were scrutineering, where i shadowed tar in order to kind of learn more about the car/stuff i could help with.
i did a good bit of actual borrowing from other teams, mainly electrical tape and silicone for insulation purposes, and we payed them back with a new roll of electrical tape.

we started with station 3, the turning one, which we passed first try. we then did 3/5th of the drivers for the slalom, which worked out.
i had wanted to be a driver, but as i heard from other people, driving was kind of boring and our car has no overhead cover, so it's whatever.
station 1 (mechanical) we passed most of with a few minor issues, station 2 (electrical) we had a lot of issues with though.
we passed station 1 on day 2, and station 2 on day 3.

i don't remember when, but when we sent the car out to do station 5, braking, the most important test that we failed was getting up to speed.
to qualify, we needed the car to go 20mph, which it did not.
it was nearing the end of day 3, our car was not going fast enough, and it looked like we weren't going to pass scrutineering because of our speed.

sysop was trying to get ahold of a software for the motor controller, but the company that he was going through was from australia. the time that we emailed them for a new key was approximately 1 am the following day, so needless to say we were not going to get the license before the end of scrutineering at 8 pm.

having passed 4/6 stations, the car had been charging for a while and some of the team went to go try station 5 again. i thought we wouldn't pass, then we got news that they had actually passed station 5 (getting up to speed), and were on the way to do station 6.

as it turns out, they just barely passed station 5, getting to 19.something mph, which the judges accepted as 20 mph.
the last part of station 6 involved doing 2 laps around the track and making it back under a certain time.
it was 7:48 pm when the car got off the track with a 12 and a half minute time. we had 12 minutes left out of 36 hours of scrutineering when we passed, but we passed and moved onto racing!

throughout this trip, despite food being (mostly) covered by fundraising and the credit cards of chaperones and our advisor (thusly RW), many trips to sonic and many quik trips to quik trip happened.
a milkshake at sonic is so affordable, and it was a short walk, so <3.

2 for 7?

starting with the race days, our first driver was tar, and we decided to have a spotter (me) go into the stands. spotting was an L though, since it was a 3 and a half hour commitment in the heat with nothing to do.

watching the cars was cool for a little bit, but then it was repetitive and i didn't have a radio to communicate with the driver, so i had to play a really shitty game of telephone.

i was on a call with non, who was radioing messages over to tar while others were also using the radio.
i would give non a message to tell tar, and then he would either not hear me, or ignore me, so my message wouldn't conveyed. i would then hear him repeat the caution i gave over the radio, not from me however, but from the pit announcers.
it was kind of annoying and the car got pulled after about 40 minutes, so i sat for about an hour doing nothing.

then later, i looked up and saw them moving the car from charging in order to send it back out, and at no point did i get a notification of that, which bothered me.
if i had a radio, i would've known they were moving the car since i'd have heard it, but i didn't, and nobody sent me a message about it :(.
the shift for spotting was supposed to be roughly 9 am to 12 pm, and i didn't get back to the garage until about 12:30 pm.

lunch wasn't important, but we had discussions about if we should have another spotter, and our remaining freshman volunteered to go up and spot, so we sent him.

i figured it would be fine, but genuinely, i didn't notice any value in him going up, since he didn't radio in any cautions or location notices at all. overall, we discussed and decided we weren't going to have any more spotters since if they weren't trying, it was just a waste of time, and the car doesn't go out long enough to constitute having one.

by the way, even though we passed scrutineering, the deputy race guy remarked that he was worried about how fast our car went, saying we were "a hazard", which is true.
our car went an average of 9-10 mph when running on batteries, and 2-3 mph when running fully on solar. our car does run on solar, it's just very slow.

additionally, that morning i had gotten the license for the software from sysop, so we had the software for the motor controller. unfortunately, it was locked based on hardware, so it could only go on my computer. this was an issue since i had been intended to fully reset my computer, and i'd been helping tar with theirs the whole trip.

tar's fedora committed suicide, twice, so i was using my laptop to get the new os's that they could try on their laptop. nixos didn't work at all, and the second one they tried, project bluefin (fedora 39), worked pretty well. also it has dinosaurs.

i don't appreciate windows very much, teams keeps harassing me, and i needed to do a reset of my computer, so for shits and giggles, i just decided to try out the dinosaur linux. the fedinosaur. the dinosaurux.

eventually, sysop was able to reprogram the motor controller for speed mode rather than torque mode, and we tried the car out with that on day 2.

day 2- no spotters, pretty hot out, went alright. we found out that full credit was given for the video, so 20 laps added to our score. people drove, stuff happened, so on.
day 3 took a slightly worse turn, in the face of RW. throughout the entire trip, RW had been irritiating, but not awful, so it was bearable when he did decide to be annoying. on the first day of scrutineering, we had to go to some stupid semi-formal banquet.

while we were there, since we had fbla the week before and had not much energy, we had been sitting a little bit (my legs hurt and tar has foot problems so they shouldn't be forced to stand long), and RW started bitching at the fact we were sitting.

to paraphrase what he said, he was incredibly upset by the fact we were sitting when nobody else was, and told us to "just be normal" for the duration of the trip, which i really took offense to.
it bothers me that he said that considering how not-normal most of the people in our club are, but especially me and tar, which are the people he aimed that comment at. he was very unsympathetic.

but back to day 3, the previous days of racing, we had a teams meeting in the morning, where we'd go and sit down in the shaded area while they talked. he got upset that non was repeating back a simplified explanation of what the announcers were saying, which was really helpful for me since them talking over the speakers sounded like a bunch of indecipherable gibberish.

on day 3, he forced us all to stand together in the direct sun for the 20 minutes of team meeting, and then had us go back to the bay and sit in a circle, where he claimed he wasn't talking down to us, but he was very obviously talking down to us.

he complained that we were being lazy and not working hard enough, ignoring how he had been making us work full 12 hour work days with no real breaks (lunch doesn't count as a real break, there's no relaxing in the 100 degree heat).
me and tar had been repeatedly going inside the media building with air conditioning to sit down and do work, partially for c3 and partially for college stuff.

like i said though, we complained we were being lazy and went on and on about how "south river is the best ranked school in maryland, we should be at the front showing off", which is stupid since our school's ranking doesn't matter at all in a national competition. it doesn't matter in the face of a bunch of other teams with better cars that function better.
he was bothered that we would sit down when "nobody else was sitting", despite people always sitting when we would. one time he told us not to sit, citing, "do you see anyone else sitting down!?", which, yes, there were at least 10 people in clear sight of us sitting down.

he also complained about us not being consistently downstairs and ready at 7:15 am, partially since people kept oversleeping, probably because we were all extremely fatigued and exhausted from all the work and hours we'd been putting in.

at no point did he express gratitude at the efforts we put in, at no point did he thank us for trying so hard, at no point did he empathize or sympathize with our pain and exhaustion.

i can't be in the heat very long because i get exponentially more exhausted and fatigued as i'm in it, and direct sunlight makes it a million times worse, so standing in the sun for like 20 minutes for that team meeting made me extremely nauseous.

and that's just me. there's no reason for all of us to be sitting out in the pit, watching the car, when we don't need to.
there are 5 people who need to be dealing with the car, that being:

the driver
the safety officer
a second person to flag/do safety
an adult to drive the safety vehicle in case of a breakdown
a judge liaison (to speak with the judge so less confusion)

we had 10 people for the racing days, so we didn't need every single person to be out with the car in the heat.
me and tar had been routinely inside, and after it was brought up to me, we both did express that if we were asked, we would flag for the car and they would drive again.

i did flag a few times after that, but really, i feel like RW was really stupid for preferring all of us be out in the heat, suffering together, and by suffering i do mean suffering, rather than acknowledging that we could switch off (at the event).

but yeah, RW really pissed me off on this trip, so he was kind of an L, but it doesn't matter because he's going to a different school next year.

on day 4, the last day, it was really overcast for half the day, and we were at 66 laps. our goal was to get 3 laps, specifically so we could have 69 laps.
RW had wanted us to get a full 70 laps via driving, averaging 20 laps a day, which was not possible. he also heavily implied that we weren't allowed to be proud of our achievements unless we got 100 miles driven with the car. we also said we could do with "a little less air conditioning" and a little more of something else, which i take as him saying he'd rather us get heatstroke instead of being comfortable at all while he forces us to stay at the motorway for 12 hours.

we'd often be one of the last teams to leave the garage at like 7:30 pm also, next to the iron lions down the hall (they had 2 cars).
i thought that was really silly since objectively, we had won since we'd done a lot more than the seniors before us. we had passed scrutineering and gotten our car to drive on the track, which was a win.

but yeah, day 4, we ended up getting to 70 total laps (50 driven, 20 from the video), 2 laps done in the morning and 2 in the afternoon.

for our chaperones, we had two main ones, Shamom and Kdad, both of whom were really great. Kdad was very helpful with working on the car, and at the end of the trip, said he'd keep helping us with the club, and offered us his garage to work out of if we ever needed a spot. Shamom will also be helping with a bit of the contact stuff for fundraising probably, so W.

but yeah, overall, i did learn a little bit, and we had a good bit of discussion about how we're going to do next year. ben said he'd actually try to teach/involve me in mechanical which i'm excited for. i also hope i'll get more of the electrical knowledge, but more involvement will be really nice.

i give texas a 7/10, it was okay.
would go again though, dry weather is much more desirable than maryland's humid.

cheers
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