Fail...

Saturday evening after everything was done I was on my way back to the camp with 6 others when one of the german students told us he heard we could get on the roof of the mercedes building right by the pits. We decided to give it a shot figuring the doors to the roof would be locked, we were wrong. The view from up there was amazing, I would have loved to watch some of the cars practicing on the track from up there. Well as it turns out we were not supposed to be up there and not 15 minutes later security shows up. They take down our names, fortunately they didn't care about what teams we were from, I was only concerned about having this not affect our team in any way. Instead the head guy decided to think up a penalty which ended up being for us to clean up a few oil spills in front of the pits.

I ended up partying that night with a few guys from a california school. We ended up at TU Wien's camping spot where they had cold pils on tap and a live band, it was really sweet.

Sunday was the final event, endurance, worth 325 of the 1000 points. The day was supposed to be overcast with rain, rain was what we were hoping for as our car being much lighter and with lower power is a lot faster than the heavy high HP cars. If it had rained we would have won no problem, however it didn't. That was the first unfortunate event. Our first driver out was doing well until he got passed by Stuttgart(the dominating team for the last few years), next lap he got a little carried away and hit two cones, finally he hit two more in the last few laps. A while later our second, and more experienced, driver came out. He was doing very well until he got passed by Helsinki, only to have them break down not 400 feet later. Their driver is a total asshole, after getting flagged to leave the course he coasted around until he was barely moving and finally left, causing us to add almost 25 seconds to our lap, and by that time Stuttgart had caught up and was allowed to pass us. Fuck that team, I hope their car fails catastrophically before FSG next year. Getting passed is terrible also, it adds a minimum of 10 seconds to your 55-60 second lap. Luck just happened to not be on our side that day as the next lap our muffler fell off and the officials pulled our car out of the event meaning we had just lost up to 325 points from our total score. We were one of two teams to not finish endurance who were pulled for things which didn't affect the car, everyone else, about 45 teams had a failure which imobilized their car. The other team was RIT, who beat us in california by 9 points. Two american teams, us and RIT didn't finish for somewhat BS reasons, the other two did finish but not on the podium. If us and RIT had not been pulled we would have been 2 and 3 on the podium, behind Stuttgart.

That was a major downer, to come all the way over here and do really well in autocross, second fastest lap by a significant margin, and have a small part fall off because we cant find any steel rivits.

After endurance, a bunch of the german students stole about 20 flags, each team had a national flag set up by the organizers above their pit. I ended up being given the swedish one which was awesome. The party that night was a lot of fun, although they ran out of beer by 12:45am and the party was supposed to go until 2am. We were each given a token for one glass which was filled and then exchanged when empty, so my goal was to get as many glasses as possible since we could keep them and they were nice 0.5L mugs. I ended up snagging 19, 7 of which were for other team members, it's funny I ended up with 12 as that was the unreasonable goal I set for myself. Now I have 14 total, one from the first night here and another pils glass from the night before. I am going to have a hard time bringing all those home.

Monday we packed up the truck in the rain and headed home. The car I was in went into Hockenheim only to learn their monday's are like our sunday's, nothing is open. Everyone in the car was tired so after food they went back to the car and napped while I walked around the town. I don't think it's worth driving to other than for the race track, but if you are near by I would definitely suggest just walking around it for an hour or two.

On the drive home we ended up getting a bit lost and then finding out the road we needed to take was closed. After buying a full size map we eventually found our way back home. Again I saw some sweet cars like a porsche turbo which blew by us doing probably 230 km/h.

Today we slept in and spent most of the day doing laundry as we had to walk 45 minutes to the laundry mat. Laundry is very expensive, I only had 5 things so I tossed them in with other people but most paid 10+ euros to wash and dry just one load! After spending about 5 hours there we walked down to the lake, ate and drank a bit, then walked home. Tomorrow at 8am we drive to Austria, about the 5 hours, maybe 6 if the traffic is bad, it's 600km. Unfortunately no time for photo's, maybe next week.