Thanks Chet. Yeah, woohoo! We won it. And came home with a check for five grand. Who would have thought that racing these things would be more lucrative than building parts for them. When I do get around
to my income tax, I can list my profession as Race Car Driver.
It was a rally, of course, since the highway departments of both states forbid racing--or even speeding--in organized events on public roads, and this event was surprisingly high profile. My cell phone messages have a plethora of interview requests (one's a guy from the BBC, the rest are North America). We were told the target speed formula just before they dropped the flag: the speed limilt plus 10% for scavenging (that is, if the speed limit was 60 any the distance
to the next checpoint was 60 miles, a perfect arrival time would be 1:06; an hour for the drive and 6 minutes for finding fuel. So in practice, yeah, this was a race. There was a truck there that could (and did) go 90 mph on the steep downhill straights and a Mercedes sedan that moved out all right, but there were a bunch of twisty mountain roads and man (he said humbly), we smoked the competition in the twisties.
I'm not home yet and I'll tell you more when I get back and get a chance. For now, I think the best coverage was the New York Times, which has a couple stories and a nice slide show on their web site. Here's some links.
This is their story today:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/us/15 ... ref=slogin
This is the one that came out Sunday:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/us/13eco.html
And here are a couple of photos. The latter link is in a slide show of all the competitors (those that started, at least). It starts in the beginning since only a couple shots have locost content, but it's worth clicking through. A street legal flaming snail may be off topic, but hey, how often do you see them out here in the sticks:
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/ ... ready.html
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/1 ... ECO_8.html
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Locost builder and adventurer, and owner/operator of
http://www.kineticvehicles.com