Scrutineering

Today is an interesting day. Well, most days here are because we are constantly discovering regulations we overlooked and little things that just didn't go as we originally planned. We had a drivers meeting early this morning- pretty much first thing- and there they went over how we're expected to qualify... once we finish scrutineering, which we have yet to do.

Work to get the car meeting regulations seems never ending. None of the bolts on the car are right-- we need a specific type of locking bolt and they're proving to be insanely difficult to find. We also still have to reverse the brake lights so they actually light up when we're stopping, and not accelerating.

But most daunting now is the curfew we face. We need to have yellow stickers in all of the inspection categories by 5 p.m. tonight before we can move onto the next step in scrutineering: dynamics. That's just the figure eight and stuff. But, while we managed a yellow in both the drivers and body categories, we still have glaring reds in mechanical and electrical. And we still haven't done the support vehicle inspections yet-- we still need to buy more orange traffic cones before we can do that.

To get by in mechanical with a yellow sticker, we still need to replace all the bolts and nuts, which we're still in the process of finding. But it seems like we have a lead with a mobile hardware store that may just have them. We'll see. Our second round of inspections for that is at 6 p.m., an hour after the cut off.

Electrical shouldn't take as long- we did a lot more work on that last night after the storm cleared. Inspection for that is at 3 p.m.

The downside though, is that by tomorrow we'll have the same mad dash again to update Tigergen to blue sticker status, the lowest status we need to compete on Sunday.

A lot of things have caught us off guard on this race though. It's definitely been a lot more difficult to fit Tigergen into NASC's regulations than we had originally anticipated, and there are all the small things that keep holding us back.

But we did manage to get some work done: we mounted the strobe light to the top of the car (and it doesn't look as ridiculous as we all anticipated-- and feared); the master car shut off is installed; all five drivers we plan to qualify completed the emergency escape in under ten seconds; and we attached the foam guards to the roll cage.

And now it's back to work!