Hello all,

Just to clarify what happened to UTA, it was the "speedo" sensor on the top side of the engine which the bolts backed out of. A part that we don't even tough, except to cut the wires off of. Not only that, it was broken into two pieces. Racer's luck, maybe. Missed on the nut and bolt check, yes.

Another year, another lesson. Then there is Nationals.

p.s. Denny, I will remember the good time we had at Big Buck's Sat. Night and I am sure you were right! When we're fifty, we're gonna be talking about Itty Bitty!

Night all-

Geez, the bullets have really been flying! As I am now an FSAE alum, I think I've earned the right to say a few things here.

Texas A&M had a fast combination of car and driver (as they have had in previous years). They were obviously a very strong team this year and if they finished enduro they would have had a good shot at winning. But, as everyone here should know, that's a pretty big 'if.' Their car didn't get struck by lightning - it had a part break, and parts break for a reason. Cornell has been there before, as B. K. knows for sure. In 2000, the Cornell team was doing very well and had a brakes failure during enduro. Texas A&M won and deserved it 100%. Now, it appears, the situation is reversed. The A&M team should let it motivate them to test the hell out of their 2006 car. The world will be closely watching the competition(s) next year and I'm sure A&M will be a powerful force on the track.

I would also like to echo what Mike Jones said about our team. For various reasons, we lost a LOT of team members this year - on the order of 20! Many people, myself included, were forced to over-burden themselves by taking over the responsibilities of those who left. This came at the expense of sleep, health, and grades. Despite a seemingly endless amount of work and one demoralizing failure after another, many members of our team worked diligently to try to keep the car driving. Things hit rock bottom around mid-April when the car had not driven for weeks and most members were burned out, broken, and on the verge of failing their classes. More than a few were considering quitting. I was questioning whether we'd be able to take a running and legal car to competition. But, a few people took on a "let's go down swinging" attitude, and it spread. The two weeks before competition saw a remarkable transformation of our car. The offending parts of our car got the attention they needed from the right people in time (albeit barely) to race. Our success this year was no accident, nor was A&M's in 2000 or Wollongong's in 2003. I'm very proud of our team this year, particularly the way they were able to stay focused and keep their spirits up even in the darkest hour. I'm sharing this because I hope it will be inspiring to many teams in the future. I'll leave you with this:



PS - Thanks to all the alumni for their support.

Congratulations to all the teams that competed. Thanks for the constant updates. I know a lot of alumni from around the world like to keep track of what is going on at the competition.

Another slick performance by Cornell, those guys are always hard to beat.
Fantastic result by the UWA guys, first in design and second overall is very very impressive.
It's a shame RMIT didn't finish the enduro and get to destroy the fuel economy event but i'm sure a lot of people now realise how fast a single can go, i'm confident there will be 10 to 15 extra singles on the track next year.
Also a shame that Oakland University didn't finish the enduro, their car was around 60 lbs lighter this year, which is a great effort for such a small team.

Hopefully 5 to 10 North American teams head down under for the Australian competition in December.

To follow the thread a bit there is no such thing as luck in Motorsport. Unless a bolt of lightening hits the car or some other freak occurrence happens the failure is human in origin. I know a lot of people may be disappointed that their car didn't finish the enduro or that they had problems but there is always next year or if you are graduating i'm sure you will look back on your time in fsae with a lot of fondness. After the sobering events leading up to the competition things could be a lot worse.

UOW Racing `01-`04

quote:

Originally posted by Eddie Martin:

...... but there is always next year or if you are graduating i'm sure you will look back on your time in fsae with a lot of fondness. After the sobering events leading up to the competition things could be a lot worse.

UOW Racing `01-`04

Very well put Eddie.

Cheers mate

Man, I forgot about the effect fsae has on one's sleep shedule. You guys are up all night on this thing. Good luck to all getting back to life as usual...at least for a few more months.

Chris,

I'll have to agree with you. We've always had at least 6 weeks of hard testing performed on our cars, but we've had a lot of luck also (at least in the early years). It's easy to have confidence in the speed of a car, but Endurance keeps everyone on their toes. It's too easy to overlook something, but when everything clicks it's a sweet feeling. Congrats to Cornell. Five years ago there were only a hand-full of schools that had a shot at winning. It's great to see so many schools in the chase these days. This competition is finally becoming what it was meant to be. I have a feeling next year will be even better.

quote:

It's a shame RMIT didn't finish the enduro and get to destroy the fuel economy event but i'm sure a lot of people now realise how fast a single can go, i'm confident there will be 10 to 15 extra singles on the track next year.

Agreed - the RMIT car was the closest thing I've seen to pulling off a successful single, not only in design but in performance - by our timing, RMIT's first driver was kicking both our and A&M's ass by 2s a lap and UTA's by 1s. I look forward to seeing that again.

As for heading to Oz to do so, I'd be impressed if we could arrange the time and money to do FSAE-West. Both FSAE-A and Formula Student fall at weird times in the academic year (Oz during fall exams, Student during summer when the team is on hiatus...)

And as for money...well, the Cornell budget rumour escalated to 250-300K this year, which I found amusing.

We're hardly poor - I'd guess our budget's above the median - but probably not by much and certainly not scratching six figures. Think $40-45K. That's it. Seriously. If you have reason to disagree, please let me know where our hundreds of thousands of dollars are. I could use a vacation.

And I'm less than convinced about "loopholes" or "biases" design and cost. Evaluation in both can be somewhat subjective, yes, but there are successful (and less than successful) strategies in both.

I've said my bit on cost above, so I'll hit design.

UWA didn't win design for the second year in a row based on some sketchy exploitation of loopholes or swaying of the judges via a better brand of bullshit.

They won design two years in a row because they have a proper and cleanly presented car, push the envelope in innovative design, and - probably most important - know their shit backwards and forwards.

Same recipe for us making final the last four years, winning it in 2002. The 2002 car was so together and well presented it left Carroll Smith speechless...The 2003 Wollongong car at FSAE-A did the same, and it showed when they won design in 2003 in Detroit.

UWA's last two wins have been equally deserved. Making baseless insinuations about loopholes and subjective bias does them a gross disservice.

--

Michael Jones
Cornell Racing (2001-2005)

Don't think that anybody from UWA has posted yet so I'll chuck something onto this one.

It was absolutely amazing for us to come up to Detroit and be a part of this competition. I'd like to make a lits of all the teams we have learnt a whole heap from but I'm too afraid I'll miss someone out. The level of knowledge behind these cars is phenomenal. I think this is reflected in the judges wanting nothing less than teams full of professional race engineers.

The sheer pace of some of the teams has shown excellent engineering and driving. I think we all need to find ways to get up to Texas A&M's speed or they may become unbeatable.

Anyway I'm starting to get a tear in my eye

Big congrats to Cornell ... you guys once again showed why you are the team to beat. You do yourselves and your University proud.

Kev
(ex - FSAE Team Member)

p.s. To Geoff and Eddie ... would have been great to have you guys over for the comp. Look forward to sharing a beer next time we get the chance.

Nice to see so many alums posting.... alums from successful teams too!

This year was my first year away from FSAE and just like Eddie said and Geoff echoed, FSAE will always be remembered.

To wave the Canadian flag a little, big ups to Will Chan and the entire Waterloo team (typically our rivals) for finishing 4th overall.

To my team mates who built the 05 Toronto car, its unfortunate about that pull rod....get em in the UK.....we typically do!

reading all the posts really got me hyped about competition and brought back a lot of fond memories.

I got feedback from some alums who went down to Pontiac that the level of mid-field teams has again upped the bar.

Congrats to Cornell once again. There's gotta be a way to make this series more known. A lotta bright engineers who are gonna change the face of the industry come outta FSAE.

I hope to make it Pontiac next year.

Cheers,

quote:

I think we all need to find ways to get up to Texas A&M's speed or they may become unbeatable.

Kev

It's the simple combination of a big school (43K+ students) and a strong local SCCA chapter where we have a good pool of experienced autox racers to pull from.

Every year we wonder what we will do when the current speed racers graduate and leave, until we hear about a few more new guys with mad skillz that can lead us to victory.

Call it luck, or just call it a great driver training program. We probably spend as much time getting practice time in for the drivers while tuning the cars as we do building the car. After all, a fast, well-designed car can't win anything without a good driver to use the car's full potential.

I know some of yall mention how much it hurts when you lose 15+ team members to graduation. That happens to us every year! Our project is a senior design class, and although we get 5 hrs of design credit for it, we lose all that knowledge and experience each year, save for 5-10 volunteers, design reports and CD's.

Good luck to everyone next year! I'm sure all the members of the 2006 teams worldwide spent the majority of time on the way home talking about what their car will look like, and what will be differnt, and how they will get that #1 spot. I know we did in 2003

I think some of the "loopholes" in cost come from things you can afford that a team with a normal budget (which i believe is almost half of what you have, I know its less than that for us) can't, like development of a custom ECU and custom shocks. perhaps teams should be asked to cost depreciation/amortization of the machines used, then equalize everything to the $35 labor rate. in this way, CNC will still be more expensive than manual machining, and the teams that can afford shock dynos, big electronics test rigs, engine dynos, etc. will take their hit. just my two cents though.

One of our teammembers has an awesome camera...check out the pics.

http://stoopidsavant.com/v-web/gallery/0505fsae

We were running with no swaybars because we were having some issues with them in the rear...IE we kept breaking em.

quote:

Originally posted by adrial:
One of our teammembers has an awesome camera...check out the pics.

http://stoopidsavant.com/v-web/gallery/0505fsae

Wow, those are really good shots! I need to break down and get an actual camera, instead of the point and shoot junk I have now. 2x optical zoom just doesn't cut it for anything more than 25 feet away.

quote:

Originally posted by adrial:
One of our teammembers has an awesome camera...check out the pics.

http://stoopidsavant.com/v-web/gallery/0505fsae

We were running with no swaybars because we were having some issues with them in the rear...IE we kept breaking em.

Congradulations guys. That car is SWEEEET!

Thanks to all, who posted all the news.
I´m so sorry that i can´t be there, but the world is to big.

After leaving FSAE one part of my live is missing. But what is left are a lot of new friends all over the world.

But we will come back! See you in UK in summer!

Vinh, can you contact me of list: madruska#at#hotmail#dot#de

Frank Roeske

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Mad Ruska,

I was looking at the results that were handed out at the banquet and counted only 43 teams who recieved points for the Endurance run, although 48 teams finished. We (University of Alberta) being one of them, since were were some of the last to finish is there a possibility that these are not the final results?

What may have happened is that they finished but used too much gas. OU finished in 02 (I think) with zero points because we didn't meet the fuel economy req.

quote:

Think $40-45K. That's it.

Holy Crap! No wonder we can't compete. Our budget was barely a third of that, and that was a good year.

quote:

Originally posted by Marshall Grice:

quote:

Think $40-45K. That's it.

Holy Crap! No wonder we can't compete. Our budget was barely a third of that, and that was a good year.

You've got company down there moneywise...

Definitely we're above the median, no question. But we're certainly not the top of the heap budget-wise. I wouldn't even put us top ten. I know at least a few schools are in the $50K+ range.

Last year, the folks at Hartford were laughing at our sorry asses as our Wal-Mart canopy disappeared like a fart in a gale-force wind. It'd be very cool to have a proper trailer. We're not getting one for years, unless some gracious Cornell alumni donates the cash for one.

Kolp, I'd look in your general direction, but you're returning to grad school (and in the arts at that...) Welcome to the hell of perpetual poverty, my friend. Enjoy it. You might as well.