Well, Abu Dhabi is over and the #99 Team is happy with that. We found out at this race that our aerodynamic strategy was far from correct for the race format for this season.

In short, we tried to make a plane that was able to pull a lot of “G” without losing speed. To accomplish this, we installed a leading edge “cuff” to the wing (photos attached). This mod worked well in the cold climate under high speed but once we got onto the race track, the induced drag from the cuffs was just way to much to overcome.

Again, our flying performance all week was very good and we got everything we could out of the machine. In fact, we were usually one of the fastest through the first section of the course, however, the plane just got slower and slower as we went along and there was no way to overcome this.

For San Diego, we will hopefully have the cuffs removed and then for Windsor we will have a much lighter plane which should help us in the end.

All in all, a frustrating start to the season but we are still very hopeful for excellent results in subsequent races.