Hey everyone - thanks to all teams for a great show. This was my first year at competition (im a 1st year from QUT) and was great to meet so many people from each of the teams who was willing to chat about their cars and give me some really great advice and information.

Cant wait till next year!

I took a stack of photos over the weekend of most of the cars - tried to get a few closer shots of the drivers etc. too so we'll see how they all turn out. Would have liked them to be a bit sharper but you get that.

Here are a few shots - will get around to processing some and uploading somewhere.

Tim Cz

Unfortunately, because of the problems we had leading up to, and during the event, I hardly even got to have a look at any of the other cars. I didn't even see a single acceleration or skidpad run! Luckily it seems there's enough pics around to get me up to speed.

A month out from the competition, things were looking pretty good for us, but then the supercharger, monocoque, then crank angle sensor problems did a pretty good job of turning things around for us, halting a lot of work on finishing the car, and hampering our preparations for the design event. In the end I was happy just to get through an endurance (with some very promising lap times too).

Frank - thanks for your kind words about our car - we'll be looking at whether or not to go overseas next year with it, but I think it's going to be a struggle to both finish that car to a standard that will ensure a worthy performance while also building a new car for Aus 08. That was my first time under the scrutineering tent (I was the beared guy w/ pierced face) and I think we both learned quite a bit. I'm going to be making some suggestions to the rules committee to try and get some things clarified for future years.

James W - We certainly did have a cone-fest in the second enduro. We didn't get a chance to check out what the issue was, before having to pack the car up, but something we did between the two runs turned the car into a much different beast, and made it reportedly very difficult to drive. Unfortunately our undertray/sidepod design seems to do a great job of holding cones in, and once they get lodged in there they can be hard to lose, and make driving difficult! As you can see from the picture, our driver did a few hundred metres with the front right wheel off the ground because the cones were wedging the lower wishbone up!

Finally, it was great to get to meet so many new folks while over there, look forward to seeing you all next year.

That was the first comp for me. Big props to UNSW for their Never-Say-Die attitude at comp. It was impressive. It was, of course, a pleasure to see all the other teams' cars.

Big thanks to the other teams and the organizer's patience with us and our loud, profane language, unwashed appearance, trigger happy cameramen, exploding wings, juggling people, immature innuendo and our bogging our truck... Twice.


Look forward to seeing you all next year.

quote:

Originally posted by Davo:
Some things Davo said..

I am forced to ask Davo....Is the pianist from Thirsy Merc part of the UTS FSAE Team? If not, can you at least confirm the uncanny resemblance (the bad hair and facial hair mainly)? Did you at least come away from competition this year thinking "someday, someday..."?

hahaha, Jared I believe you are referring to Jon our Technical Director. He definately has the whole Thirsty Merc thing going on...... its too bad he absolutely hates them

But definately next year, especially after hearing what Claude had to say about car design.....

Hope everyone has a happy new year !

PS: As Davo said......wheelie tunes will be back....

Did anyone else notice something fishy on the back of the shirts you got from the comp?

On the left column it reads 'University of Technology, Queensland' and on the right it reads 'Queensland University of Technology' ...

Hmmm

That's not the only issue with them.
After all we are the UAS of Munich, not the TU.

I was wondering if any of the AUS teams light be able to help me verify Erik Zapletals fax number in NSW. I looked on the AUS White Pages and it lists three numbers of which each wouldnt take a fax I was trying to send him. I have his home number. Any chance one of you can give him a shout for me to verify his fax number?

I am pretty sure I am not screwing up the 02 or 04 prefix when calling using 2 or 4 instead. Internet says if outside of AUS then drop the zero.

quote:

Originally posted by Marwan:
Did anyone else notice something fishy on the back of the shirts you got from the comp?

On the left column it reads 'University of Technology, Queensland' and on the right it reads 'Queensland University of Technology' ...

Hmmm

Should read
University of Technology, Sydney
and
Queensland University of Technology

We noticed that at comp, because we thought they got our name wrong. Instead they put us on it twice.

quote:

Originally posted by Rob Woods:
I am pretty sure I am not screwing up the 02 or 04 prefix when calling using 2 or 4 instead. Internet says if outside of AUS then drop the zero.

That's right.

If you're outside Australia, then you should be dialling something like this:

+61 8 9472....

I'm just using my phone number as an example. My area code is 08, so it becomes +6189472....

Chris,

Check your PM's

hey guys,

i know this is a bit of a late response, ive just been lazy. it was a great comp, id like to thank everyone involved, organizers and officials. Auckland, deakin and unsw thanks for helping us out and making it a great comp. 3rd place was just amazing and cheers to the guys on the team who forgot to sleep and sacrificed a lot to get us into 3rd.

its been a hard slog, we are stoked, we weren't expecting much this year, we were struggling the whole weekend with engine problems. We didn't do so well in design, but this is the first year we got some proper feedback on our design. im still unsure why we got 4th last but it just give us incentive to do better.

Also id like to say thank you to Scott Wordley for all his hard work and dedication for the last 8 years. Scott has been a very big help and mentor to a lot of the people past and present on our team and has been the driving force and the old wise man to set us straight when we do stupid stuff. 2007 was his final year on our team and im sure it will be a different comp without him. Cheers scotty.

We have also gotten some footage of comp and we also have a movie of the wing falling off. Enjoy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMBZW9ODnwE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1Y0FZAakgE


If any of the Victorian teams here are interested the 2nd round of the Victorian hill climb championships are being held on the 23-24th of feb at the Rob Roy track, supp regs can be found here http://www.hillclimbracing.com/supregs/Rob_Roy/SUPP_REGS_VHC_rnd2.pdf


We were at the first round this weekend at Morewell and we were giving strict instructions to get as many FSAE teams down as possible. Everyone at hill climbs loves fsae and it is a good weekend of racing. for more vic hill climb info check out http://www.hillclimbracing.com/

to the interstate and international teams see you in December
to the Victorian teams hopefully we will see you at a hill climb or we need to organize a social night of hard drinking

cheers guys,
fil juric
monash motorsport

Nice video mate, good choice of choice of music as well, didn't notice any footage there with the wing missing :P

We still got to get around to making a video, bit difficult though as we didn't get as much footage as I'd hoped.

Was that direct actuation I saw in one of your pictures near the end? How'd that go for you?

hey hey there is an entire movie devoted to the wing falling off, lol, also the end bit where is says not aero team members were hurt, thats a lie one guy got hit with a clipboard following that incident. yer we try and keep our public f*ck ups on the down low, cars burning and wings falling off arent the most helpful thing to recruit 2nd years and sponsors with. The footage from our test track is awesome. pity the car looks slow, we finally fixed the thing and its so much quicker around the test track.

yer, i kept telling our guys to worry about the car and not mounting cameras and stuff on the car. its hard to get good footage from comp. ill try and get some footage from the weekends racing on youtube, there are some pretty wild cars we race against.

direct actuation of what? wings, dampers?

Yeah, it does look pretty nice on the test track, what kind of cameras do you mount on the car when you're testing?

We got these ones meant for skiing but they kept vibrating too much and turning themselves off. :/

Direct actuation of the damper looks pretty cool though.

im think its an oregon scientific ATC-1000 camera. Its pretty crap, doesnt like vibration and the sound goes to shit as soon as you rev the engine.

direct acting dampers in my opinion (i was my decision to run them and i did the design) are pretty good (no bias here...) Easy to mount them, achievable motion ratios, good load paths and simple. Drag is a non issue because of the front wing and non linear rates aren't a concern because of the small travel we run.

its amazing how many cars run really flimsy bellcrank/shock mounts, so much compliance and in alot of the cases they dont run them into nodes so who knows whats going on. we run the front dampers into our front roll hoop in plane and the rear dampers into the rear engine plate in plane. simple, neat and stiff which is what we were aiming for. the only issues are you need a damper which is long enough and getting an adjustable front anti-roll bar does cause some headaches. on the up side there are less parts and there is less shit to go wrong.

I stumbled across this vodcast of some tv footage from the 07 event. Its from a show called in pit lane on channel 31. Check it out its videocast 032

http://feeds.feedburner.com/inpitlane

cool! nice find.

what's with the flies?!