The Shell Eco-marathon Europe was held at Eurospeedway Lausitz 6-7 May, 2010. Nearly to 200 teams from dozens of countries headed at the Shell Eco-marathon to compete in fuel-efficiency. Remmi-Team took part in the Eco-marathon's proto class having the vehicle Remmi 7 and Team's novel 1st driver Piia.

A lot of effort was expended in having the vehicle in sound condition after Team arrived to the Lausitz's pit area. We had two case to work on: front hubs and disk brakes, and a rear hub and a drive train. Only minutes before the end of the inspection on first test day, which turned out to be also the first race day at the very late hour, the team had barely finished major cases in Remmi 7. Inspection went fine as no worries arose. Team headed straight after the inspection to race. The vehicle was not made for top records at that time and weather did play a huge role affecting result gained as the day was very windy.

A total of 12 persons of our Team gathered to observe Piia who raced in windy conditions on first day. As described by driver, our vehicle's top part of the outer shell came loose in strong headwind every time the vehicle entered in the back corner of the track. It must have a huge affect on the vehicle's aerodynamics. People observing by the track also noticed some unfamiliar noices coming from the vehicle every time it went by. The engine sounded quite nice and worked like a dream during the first day though. Late that day and the next rainy day when racing was not possible we tuned everything but not the engine.

We thought that Friday, second race day, would give us a chance to beat our last year's record at Lausitz as it turned out to be a very sunny and calm day. Day begun early for us but queue to the track was already long consisting numerous teams. Not many did have a good result on first race day and eagerly we headed to race. The overall second race attempt started badly at the very beginning. A drive train's chain popped out and we thought the reason was the chain being too loose. Quickly we adjusted tension to the chain a little tighter and headed again to queue for an hour. Third attempt to race was not any improvement to previous one. This time the chain bounced off but also snapped at the start of race attempt. Later we discovered that a drive train's rear sprocket had been crooked in havoc.

After a moment of despair, we realized that no action to repair the vehicle would give us a chance to race since queue to get to the track was too long. Nevertheless we had motivation to find real cause behind our dramatically starts that day. We knew that it was the engine causing all the problems and as it turned out to be that the sensors monitoring the engine's camshaft position failed to work properly. Result gained on first day is 1627km/l that got us 8. position in internal combustion engines class.

Read more about the Shell Eco-marathon Europe 2010 here(Shell).