At the end of the second race day, Infinium is currently in second place, positioned 30 km north of Alice Springs. Tokai University, currently in first place, arrived in Alice Springs at 4:06 PM today, so we are essentially 90 minutes behind the race leader. We are 20 km ahead of four-time champions Nuon, although they have gained on us over the course of the day. Once again today, Infinium ran with great reliability, and we spent no time on the side of the road.

Today was marked by dust from a dust storm blanketing the sky for nearly all of our race route. Roughly 80 km into our day we reached the system, which continued all the way to Alice Springs. The dust in the sky limited the amount of power we were able to get from the solar array, forcing us to reduce our speed from the previous day's pace. We anticipate that the dust should clear up tomorrow as we head towards the South Australian border. Once in South Australia, the speed limit will decrease from 130 to 110 kph, making it harder to catch any team ahead of us. However, if we keep a lead over Nuon, we will be in for some great racing for the next half of the race!

Infinium has completed its hot-lap with a time of 2:09.95. We were delayed in our running due to a number of on-track incidents before us, including a broken wishbone suffered by Umicore. Umicore has already completed their repairs, and it sounds like there should be no lasting damage. They will be able to complete another hot-lap, but we're not sure whether it will count for starting position. With Umicore and Nuna both repaired, it should be exciting to face these and other top teams at full-strength.

In the challenge class, we believe we will be starting sixth. The teams ahead of us are, as we know it:
Aurora
Nuon
Bochum - BoCruiser
Tokai
Stanford

If Umicore starts based on their next lap time, we expect them to be in the top 3. We are excited that Infinium qualified so well, since our high-efficiency motor and large battery pack are ill-suited for track driving. With a 3000 km race ahead, we should have plenty of time to pass the teams in front of us.

Official starting position will be announced at 3:00 PM Darwin time today (1:30 PM Eastern Time--Darwin is 13.5 hours ahead of US Eastern time).

With our first pass through scrutineering yesterday, and with our second pass and qualifying scheduled for tomorrow, today was quite a busy today. During the morning we worked on preparing our car for the track, so that we could make our last practice laps before the single-lap time trial. We were inconvenienced by one of our telemetry radios failing; however, our back-up radios are a different technology that we have used for many miles of testing, so we don't expect this failure to show up again in the future.

After we got Infinium rolling, we were met by Ford Australia's Global Green Challenge Team. Their eco-cars are starting in their respective class of the Global Green Challenge tomorrow, so they came and visited us at the Hidden Valley Speedway so we could meet each other and see each other's vehicles. Their eco-cars side-by-side with Infinium and our support vehicles was quite a sight!

After our quick meeting, it was back to the track to get in more practice laps! Our driver, Sudeep Rohatgi, has been able to achieve consistently faster laps each day, putting us in a good position relative to our competition. We did lose some time on the track after Infinium suffered a flat tire after going over a patch of grass. However, after getting back into the car, Sudeep was able to achieve a time that would have challenged for pole position in 2007--quite a feat for a car carrying 25 extra kg of batteries compared to the competition.

At the end of the day, we rolled Infinium through the garages and out into the track's parking lot. Once in the parking lot, we set up Infinium's concentrators for an evening charge to further test the system. We received quite a crowd of onlookers--many competing teams were curious about the system, of course. We will be testing the system once again tomorrow for sunrise, then making final bolt-checks before our qualifying run. While Infinium was certainly not designed to be the fastest car around the track, we are very pleased with its track performance so far, and hope that our qualifying result will set us up well for the race.

The team arrived in Darwin this afternoon, after spending our morning at Litchfield National Park outside of the city. The morning was very enjoyable, as we got to swim in two different waterfalls at the park--quite a relief given the hot temperatures in the Northern Territory!

Only part of our team visited the Hidden Valley Raceway this afternoon, as Infinium and its trailer aren't arriving in Darwin until late tomorrow. In order to familiarize themselves with the race track where qualifying will take place, our track drivers got to walk and drive around the course in the afternoon. Tomorrow we will further acclimate ourselves in Darwin while we await Infinium's arrival. We will also learn the exact time on Thursday or Friday that we must pass through pre-race scrutineering, where our car is inspected to make sure it meets all race regulations. After two years of anticipation, it is quite a feeling to be in Darwin, and we are looking forward to the start of the race on Sunday.

On Tuesday evening, facing a new round of storms headed towards Adelaide, the team left its base in Adelaide for our final test day before heading up to Darwin. We trailered the car up to Port Augusta, which put us just north of the storms and wind in Adelaide, and readied ourselves to test on Wednesday morning. The goal for Wednesday was to run one more day at high speeds, since our mock race was plagued by such bad weather. Wednesday's route had us driving north to Glendambo and then south back to Port Augusta. We were lucky to finally receive some sunny weather, so our pace for the day was brisk--we spent most of the time at or near the South Australian speed limit of 110 km/hr.

We completed the Port Augusta-Glendambo-Port Augusta route in the early afternoon, before the typical end time of 5:00 PM. After packing up Infinium, the team and the trailer went their separate ways: while the team headed north for Darwin, Infinium was trailered back to Adelaide. Infinium will leave Adelaide on Saturday, and we will all meet on Monday in Darwin, where scrutineering and qualifying take place.

Today, Thursday, we arrived at Uluru (Ayer's Rock) in time for a gorgeous view of the setting sun. After taking many pictures, we enjoyed dinner and such unique meals as kangaroo and Aussie burgers (with beets and fried eggs). The next few days will take us to other scenic sites in the Northern Territory as we head towards Darwin. We'll be sure to post more pictures once we arrive!