21st May 2019
As we are off on half term holiday next week, tonight is our last team meeting before Anglesey....which only means one thing - 'Complete and Utter (organised) Chaos' making sure everything is ready!
Our final preparations actually began last Saturday (18th May) with our first off-site garage session of the season. Unfortunately due to a change in regulations, Dylan's roll bar, brace and Basil's brace no longer conform to the rules. Therefore, a small team of us descended upon Richard's garage to have a lot of fun bending electric resistance welded tubes!!!!
During the day, Immy was in charge of greasing up the clamps for the bending machine and de-burring the edges of the roll bar.
Lucy had the task of bending the metal, whilst Cate marked the metal up for size, and sanded down Dylan's bodywork ready for his brand new roll bar to slot into.
Ta-dah - we present to you Dylan's new roll bar!!!
Moving on to tonight's antics...
The first order of the evening was a quick team briefing. This involved quick housekeeping for our next couple of races, outlining the plan for Anglesey, discussion on what needed to be achieved in the next couple of hours before finally dishing out the jobs. With the team chat over, it was time to get to work!
Our team captains have been busy finishing the necessary paperwork for the race. Cate finalised the organisation for Anglesey whilst Ella tackled the Goodwood spreadsheet!
At every race, we have a race day timeline located in the garage and with our telemetry team. This is a break down of our timings for the day and helps to keep us on track, should anything happen to go wrong (which invariably they do!!). Therefore tonight, Cerys was given the task of piecing the timeline together and sticking onto the boards.
Meanwhile, Imogen took the opportunity to talk through and explain the timeline with our newbie Lara.... ready for Lara's first experience of a race day!!!
Katy, with the help of Rachel, spent the evening working on the raspberry pi. We are hoping to develop a new system where we will be able to have a camera in the car and use the footage to train new drivers. Unfortunately, this won't be ready for Anglesey... however watch this space as I'm sure it won't be long!!!
Over the winter, we stripped all of our race day equipment from the trailer. Therefore tonight, Alice and Jess, under the guidance of Luke, re-packed the trailer - returning everything into its rightful place.
After working extremely hard over the last few months improving our battery boxes - tonight, Bethan added the final touches. Each lid has been sanded down and painted before being placed into the laser cutter to have each of the cars logo etched on.
After finishing sticking the timelines together, Cerys headed onto OpenFoam to have another little play around.
With last years puncture gait still etched in our minds - another job of the night was to replace one of Basil's tyres before ensuring all of our spares were pumped up and in full working order. Any guesses on who was the first to volunteer?! yep, that would be Erin (the lover of anything to do with repairing tyres!!!!) ...with the help of Immy and Lara!!!.
Spare tyres packed... check!
It was over to Charlotte and Phebs to carry out our pre-race MOT on both Dylan and Basil. Using Greenpower's regulations, we have composed an MOT checklist that we work our way through before every race. This is to ensure that there are no surprises when it comes to scruitineering on race day.
Before long, it was time to load the cars into the trailer.... and hope that we hadn't forgotten anything!!!
We can't wait to get back out on track and kick start the 2019 season.
Anglesey - here we come!!!!!!