03 Jul Back on the summer grind

Hello again from the depths of our garage! The team is 3 weeks into our summer break and fully running on Stanford time – which is to say that we started off a little behind, and deadlines are approaching, but the crew has been having a great time putting in the long hours to successfully pull this car together and our pace feels strong going into the final stretch.

Our spring quarter was a tough one, with a few key components in the suspension and chassis experiencing design delays. We really started to feel the pressure of making changes to several processes and parts that had been established in earlier cycles, and as always, it was tough to make serious build progress in the midst of everyone taking classes.

The summer, however, has so far been seriously productive! Thanks to support on-campus from the School of Engineering, the Precourt Institute, and the TomKat Center, we’re able to have 14 team members working full time on the car this summer with research funding, and several more of the race crew are working locally and spending evenings at the shop. The structure of the car is in place, machined parts have arrived from their respective shops or been pulled from our CNC, and the first of three battery pack builds is finished.  The EE/CS team is getting driving early with our car-on-a-bench, and our array has arrived in-house and is ready to go as soon as our topshell returns from being vinyl wrapped.

I’ll keep it brief and end with a save-the-date: we’re unveiling our new car on July 21st at 2pm, in just a few short weeks! Hope to see you all at the shop to join us in celebrating. In the meantime – leave a comment with your favorite song to wrench to, and help us mix up our shop playlist!