A routine drive in the Nevada desert turned into an unwanted crash test for Sandstorm, the robotic vehicle that is Carnegie Mellon University's entry in this week's $1 million Grand Challenge race.

	Red Team, CMU Sandstorm in "wheels-up" configuration Thursday. Click photo for larger image. Related story The Red Team heads into its Grand Challenge with Sandstorm A diary of CMU's team effort to win a million dollar, winner-takes-all robot race. The nuts and bolts of the Grand Challenge

Heading into an "S" turn at about 35 mph late Thursday, the heavily modified Humvee overshot the first turn. The robotic driving program overcorrected, the outside wheels caught in soft soil and Sandstorm veered sideways, flipping upside down.

In that instant, what should have been a relatively restful weekend for the Red Team turned into a marathon, transcontinental effort to reconstruct the machine and have it ready for its first qualification run this afternoon at the California Speedway outside of Los Angeles.

Sandstorm's primary eye -- a laser radar mounted on a gimbal that points it and steadies its gaze ---- was wiped out, along with its protective aluminum dome and a large fin holding several antennas. But Pittsburgh team members built a new fin and shipped it along with a spare gimbal to the Nevada Automotive Test Center near Carson City early Friday.

Sandstorm was back on the road by Saturday and continued to be tested until late Sunday. Then the team transported it to the speedway in Fontana, Calif., where the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency -- called DARPA -- is conducting a qualification event this week, prior to Saturday's 200-mile race from Barstow, Calif., to Primm, Nev.

"We're not positioned in the way we would have been three days ago," the team leader, William "Red" Whittaker, said yesterday. Instead of focusing on fine-tuning and making final mechanical checks, the team has scurried to replace broken parts and rebuild the machine.

"The reliability becomes uncertain," he added, noting Sandstorm has thousands of electronic and mechanical parts and components.

The Red Team nevertheless was able to show up yesterday for the qualification event, unlike five of the 25 teams DARPA had invited. DARPA will select the final field from the 20 remaining teams based on their performance in this week's qualification runs.

Sandstorm is scheduled for the first of its two qualification runs this afternoon. The course includes a series of obstacles and road conditions similar to what the vehicles must either avoid or traverse on race day.

The route of the race will not be announced until two hours before the start Saturday morning. It will include both on-road and off-road segments.

The robots must navigate the course without any human guidance or intervention, and to win the race and the million dollars, a robot must complete the course within 10 hours.

Despite the weekend's setbacks, "everyone [on the Red Team] is focused and committed to win. Everybody's up," Whittaker said.

"But moods and emotions and feelings don't count for much on this team," he added, as team members continued to work on Sandstorm in the pit area. "We've always been driven by our objectives and what it is we've got to do. And we've got a lot to do."