Monday we finally raced our steam powered car after much work and promising tests last week. We finally got the boiler to stay more or less in place by adding a bit of metal on the back to hold it up. This week Neal even put an awesome little pirate flag, finally making our steam car a boat.
However, the final race was sadly filled with problems. The rubber band kept falling off just as the races started, and the car never really showed the vigorous acceleration it had last week. We suspect both of these problems were caused by the rubber band getting pretty wet from just running while we waited.
Despite having a huge, awesome flame, and getting rid of some of the water in the boiler, we did not have the fastest startup time. For the speed competition we then decided to put more water in the boiler, which may have been a mistake. We pretty much lucked out that no one else in our race started before us, because we had to restart the car after blowing out the fire and adding cold water. Luckily we were the only team to complete the first race, putting us in the lead.
However, the rubber band problem started presenting itself in the next two races, causing us to have delayed starts. After three races we were tied with another team and had to have a face off race to see who would make it to the final race. For once we did not have rubber band problems when the race started, but half way through our car ran out of vigor and died, losing the race. I feel like if we had just been able to replicate that awesome acceleration and speed from last week, we would have won easily.
