It started out kind of rough. We over-fueled the car for the first test (fastest start - whose car could make three revolutions of the turbine the fastest), which literally put our project up in flames. This wasn't a huge problem, but the rubber band drive shaft melted, and we lost that contest. We simply replaced the rubber band and we were good to go for the speed test. There were two brackets for this, and we were first in all but one race during the first bracket. For the second bracket, we were up against a team that had done equally well in their respective bracket, but we ended up being faster (which was a pretty big surprise to us). Here's a video of us winning the last race.
In addition to winning the actual race, we also came in first for the "Meanest" car (thanks to the intimidating wings we added at our last meeting), and we also placed in the competition for best design.
I think a lot of this competition was luck, because we simply didn't have enough time to properly test how we could modify our car to make it consistently faster or start up quicker. The fastest start competition was almost entirely luck, as it primarily depended on how much water you had in the boiler, and the subsequent ratio of how quickly that water could come to a boil and the vapor pressure the steam could create. All in all though, I think the fact that everyone's cars worked as well as they did proved we were successful with our projects. I'm really looking forward to the next project, as we'll have enough time to test our Arduino and make sure it works as smoothly as possible.
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