quote:

What's that old saying, a decent design delivered in time is a lot better than a perfect design delivered late.

I ABSOLUTELY agree!! That is how I would do it.

Yes, but the result is you have a less than optimum DESIGN and that is going to cost you some points in the 'Design Competition'.

A team that have done this (Monash for one, based on Scott's comments and private conversations) have made a deliberate decision to 'Rob Peter to pay Paul' with points in the overall competition, and so shouldn't be critical of the judges, who can see the compromise. In my case, I am judging Design, not Strategy (even though I admire the strategy)

A good team will look at the overall competition, however, the judges, be they Cost, Design or Presentation, are looking only at their sector of the comp.

In the end, the best teams win anyway and the old rule of F=MA is still valid.

I am not going to get into a debate about this

Cheers

Pat

quote:

Originally posted by PatClarke:
optimum DESIGN

Don't misquote me Mbirt

I said LESS than optimum.

Pat

Sorry Pat, an "optimum design" clean snowmobile which refuses to run has me frustrated right now. Should've gone with a piggyback fuel controller like the team that won by a landslide last year...

Wait, wait... are you saying the "optimum design" is usually less than optimal? I think you're on to something! Pat, care to comment? Haha.

One comment only.

Nothing is optimum!
Just get as close to that mythical aim (whatever it is) as you can =]

Pat

Hi Pat,

This is the heart of the dichotomy...

What are we designing for, if not to maximise the number of points scored at comp? Why should this approach be considered "dirty" or dismissed as a cheap "strategy". It is actually the very definition of good design. To understand and balance your resources, time available, performance sensitivities, and risk to achieve your stated goal is actually a lot more difficult and requires much more restraint than focusing on simplistic "headline" metrics such as weight or power.

It seems strange and counter intuitive to view this as robbing Peter to pay Paul. Hypothetically speaking, why should the design event be used to penalize teams who are making these high level compromises and being honest about it, while rewarding those who present beautifully integrated and researched cars which are often fragile or untested?

Consider also the continuing low percentage of teams who attempt and complete all events at each competition. Is the attitude of design judges helping to maintain this status quo, where teams are encouraged and applauded for overshooting their resources and timelines provided the final product looks impressive on paper, and in the judging tent?

What do you think would happen to completion rates if your design event score was only awarded once the car had finished all events? As my signature shows(boasts?), I place a big emphasis on this metric.

This competition is about learning and preparing engineers for industry and the real world. I know that the change suggested above will never happen, and maybe it shouldnt, but Judges need to be aware of the kind of messages they are sending and the type of behaviors they are rewarding and discouraging... and not be surprised at the results.

Pat these comments are not directed at you personally, just my general feelings for the design judging process which i am still trying to get my head around after 12 years and 15 competitions!

The way we are taught design at my school is to start from a need statement and work from our needs to our final product. Is the purpose of the design event to find the most complex vehicle, the best car for a weekend autocrosser, or the car that is best designed to win the FSAE/FS event it is at? This is my fundamental question for the people that run these events.

I feel Scott's comments are asking the same questions I have, much more eloquently put.

Scott,
that probably depends on the competition and how design is handled there.

I personally have been on the team of Braunschweig in 2008 where we managed to win design at FSG with a 232kg steelframe car. That time I really felt that the design event was driven by the, at least at FSG, famous quote of Pat: "We judge your knowledge, not your car!"
We had some extra kilos on the car, no doubt. But we knew exactly where and why.
Not to mention that the car saw a lot of testing before comp and put some weight on during that period.

In this case I can absolutely agree with Tobias. The same year I was a member of the Stuttgart team and we where second in design with a car which weighed 212kg.
So the top2 in design had cars heavier than 200kg.

It is and I guess will always be difficult for the teams to know what the design judges will focus on as it veries from event to event and to some extend also from judging group to judging group. To win a design event you will always need a little bit luck, but if you're well prepared you can usually be sure to get a reasonable amount of points.

Definitely agree with Scott. It's pretty insulting and off-putting to be beaten in the design event by cars that don't complete the competition or, in some cases, don't run at all. Something learnt in my last year was that you shouldn't spend the entire year asking "what will the judges think of this?" because in reality (in Australia anyway) the judging has been very strange indeed. I used up all the alotted time talking to a judge and answering his questions (with plots, facts, figures, practical demonstrations, etc.) and the only real feedback i got was that i made a typo on the design board... Spending the year wondering what some judge is going to think only to have him have absolutely no idea is not cool.

As for the topic of this thread, we certainly didn't seem to raise any eyebrows with a 188kg turbo intercooled 4 space frame, but the previous year we made finals with a 220kg version. Go figure.

Feedback is definitely a problem with the Design event. Carroll Smith used to give a great review of the finalists and why they ended up where they were. I don't think there were anywhere near as many complaints. Most of us are fairly reasonable, and when it is explained to us clearly why certain teams did well it is easier to accept.

I am very wary of design judge bashing that appears popular on a lot of threads. As soon as you question the teams that do well in design you are making two assumptions:

1. The judges made the wrong call

and

2. The winning students involved did not deserve it, and are less knowledgable


I have no problem with the car winning design not being the best or most desirable car at comp. Every team starts from a different point, with different resources, and different goals. Which team did better in design:

a) A large legacy team that built a $300k car that wins the comp easily, hence meeting their goals

or

b) A small second year team that built a $10k car that placed 4th, hence meeting their goals

The only real way to have the design event separate from the overall competition is to make sure there is a large student knowledge/decision making part of the event.

In general I do have a problem with non-reliable cars winning design. It was an unwritten rule in the US that the car winning design had to finish endurance. There may be extreme cases where this may not happen, but I would look pretty hard on a team who deliberately sacrificed reliability for minimal performance gains.

A winning team should have a good handle on the compromises and short-comings of their car. Monash do this very well and I can understand their dissappointment from the last Aus comp. I was surprised at the points difference between the design finalists at Australia. The steps each finalist had made from the previous year were significant, the knowledge level appeared high. In this case I would have expected the points to be closer.

I wish I had easy access to the past results because I think the best way to judge the judges is to see if they are predicting performance. Any time you ahve a great lot of students come through their impact may not be fully felt for a while. The groundwork laid in a great year often pays off in following years. If the design judging is going well a team that wins design should increase (or maintain) competitiveness in the next couple of years.


Geoff, if you're reading this put clearer design feedback on your list of things to make the Aus comp better. A good spoken (and recorded) design review at comp would add a lot for the students.

Kev

Wow, us Aussies have well and truly hijacked this thread. It would seem the design event is a sore topic around here?

For those that have traveled the event varies a lot from place to place, and also year to year. I would be interested to hear what the Euro teams that do 4 or 5 events a year have to say about design event consistency with the same team and car?

I have done a few design events, and after being seriously cut by some results, I somewhat cynically resolved to treat it just like all the other events. Do your best, and accept the outcome is out of your control, and a bit random.

I don't think you can/should try to design a car to please all of the judges all of the time, but at UWA we do spend a lot of time considering how ideas will presented and if the detail matches the broad concept. They don't have to like our car, but it would be nice if we can show them why we do.

I would like to see more feedback, and also more interaction with judges outside of the event. I think most of us would very much like some feedback and appreciation (or otherwise) on the years blood, sweat and tears regardless of the competition and the points. I for one was a little sad not to show off our 2011 car, of which I'm very proud of the design, to people like Ron Tauranac and Pat Clarke, simply because the car never made finals anywhere.

On the topic of Light Weight, I remain cut over the FSG award for "light weight CONCEPT". Forget the design event, even with the terms narrowed down to simply Vehicle weight you still can't figure it out! We had driver cell safety and mechanical durability by a massive amount over any of the other finalists near us, and were not that much heavier (than the other 4 cylinders). All the other finalists were either slow (toe stiffness???), broke, or both. You guessed it, the prize went to the lightest car, that had never done 22Km without failure, including at that event! I don't want to be rude to what is a was very good and fast car from Delft, but I really believe your machine has to meet the basic function requirements before it can be assessed fairly in other areas, and here that means going quickly for 22Km. (the failure was "lightweight design" related, not just unlucky).
Now if it was just called "lightest car award" it would of saved a lot of effort and confusion.

Pete

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Pete Marsh,

No prob Kev, point taken and has been put to the consortium already. And of course I am reading this thread...

Pete,
don't mix up an extra award with the design event. They were/are orthogonal at FSG and do usually not share judges.

Although I agree that design winners should be reliable in general, I would not say that a design winner has to finish endurance. There is still such a thing as hard luck. All of us have probably experienced parts failing which were bought and/or designed to live forever and still failed.

Pat and the other two chief design judges hold a design review after the FSG endurance.
At least two of them are available on YouTube, if you are interested.
FSG2008 Design Review

FSG2011 Design Review
The latter is more like a general lecture in car design, but the 2008 version is quite specific.

I know this may not really help, if you have not attended that event with your car, but I think it shows how it could be done.

Regarding Kev's comment:

quote:

I wish I had easy access to the past results because I think the best way to judge the judges is to see if they are predicting performance. Any time you ahve a great lot of students come through their impact may not be fully felt for a while. The groundwork laid in a great year often pays off in following years. If the design judging is going well a team that wins design should increase (or maintain) competitiveness in the next couple of years.

I do not think that this is possible. It should match to a certain level, let's say predicting in which third they will end up, if they complete the respective dynamic event. But that's it.
Having been a design judge, I can tell you that this job is harder than you expect telling from the other side.

Anyway, I have the whole world ranking database at my fingertips. So tell me, what kind of evaluation you think would be good and I will see what I can do.
Perhaps, percentage of maximum points in design vs. overall dynamic points percentage or similar?

I'm wondering what portion of design judges have significant experience with the competition? I imagine this having a big influence on how they decide on their judging criteria.

We learnt the hard way this year at FSG that the design event is about knowledge, not the car when we scored 0 for a suspension system that the judge admitted was one of the best there, but it just so happened that our entire suspension department had gone straight into work before the event.

While other team members could easily answer questions about the construction of the system, the lack of knowledge of finer details of the geometry and kinematics resulted in no points for the entire section. Extremely harsh, but their decision is final.

The one thing that I do find issue with is the number of design judges with little knowledge of motorsports, often from general automotive companies. They're often looking for automotive solutions instead of motorsport. The main example for us is in the cockpit, where judges will often complain that we use seat inserts moulded to the driver instead of adjustable pedals & steering column. One of these solutions takes 10 seconds to change, the other takes much longer and can add compliance into the system.

quote:

While other team members could easily answer questions about the construction of the system, the lack of knowledge of finer details of the geometry and kinematics resulted in no points for the entire section. Extremely harsh, but their decision is final.

The problem is that they are in that case not able to decide if you just copied a previous year design or if a professional engineer did all the design work or if it was just bad knowledge preservation management.
I think also that this is harsh, but I see no other way of reacting to it from a design judge's point of view.

Fantomas

quote:

Originally posted by Pete Marsh:

For those that have traveled the event varies a lot from place to place, and also year to year. I would be interested to hear what the Euro teams that do 4 or 5 events a year have to say about design event consistency with the same team and car?

Sometimes it's very disturbing to compare Silverstone and Hockenheim.

There is a saying: "UK judges focus on manufacturing, German judges on awesome design features".

I don't know if it's true but look at GFR 2011:

- Michigan (ok without wings): 1st
- Cali: 2nd
- Germany: 1st
- UK: I don't know.. 15th or something like that

In Germany the Top 3 in Design matched exaclty the Top 3 overall. Maybe not that bad (if you judge only the car, not the knowledge).

I guess in UK they are more looking at simple cars (in the feedback 2011 the put Bath as a good, TU Graz more or less as a bad example for a "too sophisticated" car).

Bath on the other way round placed only 15th in Germany...

Zurich did pretty bad in UK too, won Germany, won Spain and placed second in Austria.

I don't know but I guess GFR and Zurich went with the same team members at least the "important" ones.


It's hard to tell if it's "fair"..

quote:

There is a saying: "UK judges focus on manufacturing, German judges on awesome design features".

Since we share quite some design judges, this cannot be true. It depends more on how the head of design runs the event and briefs the judges.

Additionally TU Graz for example won design in the UK in 2006 and 2007.

Just use the "Achievements" view at the FS World Ranking List to find out such things.
For GFR it shows this for example:
GFR Achievements