Race Update - 20-Oct-1999

End of day update

We are back in the lead!. We had dropped to third position this morning, and we had a small stop to fix an array problem. This put us 10 minutes behind Queen's University's Radiance and eight minutes behind U of Q's Sunshark at the media stop at Cadney just after mid-day. But even so, we had caught up 10 minutes or so on Queen's.

We had good running this afternoon, and late in the day we overtook both other teams, passing Sunshark at around 4:30 pm and Radiance at around 4:45 pm. We stopped to camp at 5:02 pm after completing 651 km today, putting us at 2357 km from Darwin.

Radiance stopped a bit before 5 (evidently with low batteries) some 11 km behind us. Sunshark stopped at 11 minutes to 5 (apparently with a similar problem) 30 km behind us. NTU's Desert Rose is now 56 km back. They were only 33 km back last night, so this shows what a good run we have had today. In 5th place, we believe is Tamagawa (Japan), and behind them is Lake Tuggeranong College's Spirit of Canberra, but we don't know exactly where they are.

This has been a good clear day, and we have had good solar power. The car has been running really well, and under these conditions, we think we have a car with a 5% margin over the competitors.

Tomorrow we would like to make Adelaide. It is another 650 km from here, and there are two media stops along the way, unlike today which had only one. This means there is half an hour less time available to make the distance tomorrow, so we need good weather, not only during the day, but tonight and in the early morning too, so we can get a decent charge into the batteries.

We have had phone calls from Ford, R.J. Pound and Whirlpool today to keep up to date with us. The interest in the race seems to be spreading well, both within the sponsoring companies and around Australia. Wish us luck for tomorrow!

The Uni of NSW crew took some nice pictures of us today - you can find them here.

Earlier report - 12:50 pm Central Standard Time

We are just about to leave the Cadney media stop. We are in third position about 10 minutes behind Queen's and 8 minutes behind Queensland's Sunshark. NTU's Desert Rose is about 23 minutes behind us.

We appear to have resolved our array problems today, and we have caught up 10 minutes on Queens this morning. Sunshark (who were camped last night just behind us) passed us right at the very start of the day. For the first half-hour, we had no telemetry data from the car, but this problem has fixed itself. The Weather so far is bright and clear.