Edison2 cars and crew arrived Sunday at the Michigan International Speedway without incident and reasonably rested. Four cars, three trailers, 630 miles. While we were moving into the garages Sunday afternoon Popular Mechanics spent over two hours with two of our cars on a photo shoot; they are doing a story for the fall on the X Prize. Moving in went smoothly and two cars – the mainstream number 97 car and the alternative (tandem) number 95 – passed technical inspections yesterday without any significant problems. The other two cars go through inspections today and are in good shape.
On-track testing began yesterday for some of the alternative cars and starts for us tomorrow, with all 4 cars doing efficiency testing (city and urban cycles). At some points tomorrow we will have 2 cars on the track at the same time, both driven by professional endurance auto racing drivers – Brad Jaeger, who is also one of our engineers, and Emanuele Pirro, a five-time Le Mans winner.
It is interesting to see the variety of cars at the X Prize; many of them are new to us, since the April shakedown stage was conducted in two waves. A lot lies ahead for Edison2 and all the teams here. There is a spirit of camaraderie in the garages: a sense of how steep the challenge of the X Prize really is and acknowledgement of the hard work and ingenuity that has brought us together.
Media days begin tomorrow. This will be a very interesting week at MIS and should result in a lot of exposure for the competition and the teams. Edison2 has had some great stories lately, especially in the Charlottesville weekly paper The Hook and a radio story yesterday by WVTF in Roanoke; we look forward to more!