Race Day Two Update

Race Day Number #2

Our day started in the middle of the Appalachian Mountain range in Sunbury, Pennsylvania with light clouds. We used the morning sun to recharge our batteries until about 10:30 and hit the road. Immediately we were met with the hilliest conditions we have experienced to date and fought hills for the remainder of the day. We thought we had a strategy to avoid the overheating we experienced the day before but we continued to struggle with the heat and had to pause on several steep, long grades to let the car cool down. 

The whole team felt frustrated with our predicament, however, while struggling with the problem we identified the root cause -- our motor controller was overheating not our motor itself. The motor controller is basically a switchboard that turns on and off electromagnets inside of the motor to spin the wheel. We finished the day driving 147.3 miles into Brookville, Pennsylvania, and got to work fixing our problem. The team stayed up until about 1:30 in the morning tearing the car apart and placing the motor controller in a position where the airflow will be better as well as installing an additional fan to cool down the motor controller. 

We feel much better about the placement of the motor controller and our additional fan to keep the motor controller cool. We expect to get back on the road in the late morning and are hoping to get out of Pennsylvania by the end of the day.