Mittwoch, 12. September 2012

Day of Truth

Day 2: Problem solved

At the beginning of day two we seemed to be one of the lucky teams. The self made transformer stopped working in the middle of the night and three of the cars only charged to about 25%, not enough to cover the more than 97 km long stage to Novara.

Piazza Martiri

On the way to Novara we had slight navigational problems and ended up trying to charge our vehicles on the wrong “Piazza Martiri”. After blowing a couple of fuses and being frustrated with the bad charging infrastructure, we were approached by an angry old Italian lady. Wildly moving her hands and yelling she tried to explain to us, that this is not the Piazza we are looking for, and that she never heard of the WAVE rallye. The problem was, that neither us, nor any of the four other teams trying to load their cars, was able to speak Italian. With hands and feet we managed to find out that we were in a suburb of Novara and the correct piazza was in the city center.

Seeing the cars leave calmed the old lady down and she even seemed to have a small smile on her face. What she didn’t know was, we never reinstalled the three blown fuses…

Finally making it to the correct piazza (also after breaking a few minor traffic laws such as: ignoring one way street signs or entering a pedestrian only zone) with our four-car convoy we were able to recharge our cars.

Monza

With nearly full batteries we set of to Monza. There, we were welcomed by the major and a couple of other, as we assume, highly ranked politicians.

We were given an interesting sightseeing tour trough the old city center, which ended in a small courtyard. There we were served something that looked like risotto, but all of us weren’t really sure if it was. But our good mood could not be troubled by the lack of food in our stomachs and a couple of short nights. Happy we went back to our car, buckled up and were good to go.

After 200 m - big disappointment: At some point our car decided to stop charging and so our batteries were only 20% full. This meant that we had another two hours of charging ahead of us. That meant that we would miss the planned event in Mendrisio. If this wasn’t bad enough, the car would not start by key after it had charged. We couldn’t identify the problem so we decided to reprogram the car’s software, so that we could drive it by using a laptop. And this is then how we left, with a pretty bad feeling in our stomach..
(After a few meters we noticed we still needed the key because of the steering wheel lock, haha..)

At the borderline of Switzerland
Feeling like winners we arrived in Mendrisio with two hours delay.
We just arrived in time for dinner, and guess what was on the menu: risotto!

But against all fears, it was really good this time. Everyone enjoyed this wonderful dinner in the city hall of Mendrisio, especially after such a long day.

Directly after finishing our dinner, we went searching for the cars error.

Amazingly, after only 15 minutes Roger found a half-broken fuse. It was easily replaceable and our car was fix within minutes. Very happy the team enjoyed a couple of beers while waiting for the car to charge completely. We were hoping that the batteries would automatically start balancing, after it was charged. We waited untill 0.30 o’clock , but unfortunately nothing happened. We decided that we had to go to bed, since our alarms were set to 6:30 in the morning.

Let’s just hope the batteries will balance tomorrow

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