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Taking Atlanta by Storm!
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by Jed Christiansen, Project Manager
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 ighteen members of the MaizeBlaze team went to Atlanta, Georgia on the weekend of March 27-29 to attend the Sunrayce 99 Workshop. The workshop is held approximately one year before the actual race and is meant to help teams prepare for the upcoming challenges that await them.
Teams also get a chance to see what the Sunrayce atmosphere is like and also size up the competition.
The first group of team members arrived on Thursday night. They spent most of Friday touring Lockheed Martin’s Low Speed Wind Tunnel in Marietta, Georgia, the same wind tunnel used by Maize&Blue in 1993. They also visited a member of Maize&Blue, Alan Ristow, who is doing graduate work in photovoltaics at Georgia Institute of Technology
(see page 3). The rest of the team arrived in Atlanta on Friday by way of University station wagons and plane tickets, courtesy of Northwest Airlines.
Friday evening was spent choosing our team name, (MaizeBlaze) and number (see article below). Saturday was spent discussing rules and finding out the preliminary race route (see page 3).
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In the afternoon, two parallel sessions were held. One room had aerodynamic and mechanical presentations, while the other one contained the battery, motor, and solar array presentations. We split up so that team members could get experience in the areas they were currently working on.
While thirteen team members drove back on Saturday evening, five stayed for Sunday’s presentations. These dealt with team management, fundraising and logistics. Our own Ryan Smith and José Alvarez (Materials and Manufacturing Team Leader and Special Projects Director, respectively) made a great presentation on race logistics. Both Ryan and
José shared their experience from the Operations Team for Sunrayce 97 with the rest of the workshop. Several teams approached us afterward and told us how much they appreciated the presentation. They mentioned that they had never realized the work that has to be put into the logistics for a race.
The Sunrayce Workshop proved to be a valuable experience for all involved, from the rookie team members getting their first taste of Sunrayce, to veterans who were able to see how new technologies could be implemented into the design of MaizeBlaze.
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Selecting Number 2
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by Jed Christiansen, Project Manager
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 ur first official act for Sunrayce 99 was to select our car’s name and number. Although we were pretty sure MaizeBlaze would not be taken by any other teams, we were not as sure about our car’s number. Originally the team had chosen the numbers 5, 7, and 50 as their
choices. Unfortunately, we drew the 40th slot for choosing a team number, and were not sure if any of our previous choices would still be around.
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In the end we selected the number 2. It was chosen primarily because it is a small single digit number. However, the number 2 can be traced to our past, since Sunrunner’s car number in GM Sunrayce 90 was 2. Michigan is the only team to have won two Sunrayce championships. Finally, Michigan also won two National Championships this year (hockey and
football), and the number 2 was worn by Heisman Trophy winner Charles Woodson. Coincidence?
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