Reasonable suggestions for Rule Changes / Amendments / Improvements [Archive]

Big Bird

02-16-2014, 12:53 PM

The concept of a rules suggestion thread has been raised elsewhere, so I might give it a go. I would hope that we are mature enough to have this discussion such that the outcome is an improved competition for everyone, not an improved outcome for our individual teams.

I suggest the following format:
1. Existing rule (if any): Describe the existing rule, quoting the rule number
2. Existing shortcoming: Describe the existing shortcoming in the current rule/s, in terms of how the existing rules do not meet the intent of the competition (i.e. missed or inadequate learning outcomes for competitors, or unnecessary difficulty for the officials to provide fair and consistent implementation of the rules)
3. Your suggested improvement: Describe your suggested new ruling, as concisely and succinctly as possible. Provide a balanced argument for its adoption – a good engineer will state potential shortcomings that may occur as well as potential benefits.
4. Summary of your case: Describe how your suggested change will improve the competition as a whole – e.g. improved learning outcomes for competitors, improved ability for the officials to provide fair and consistent implementation of the rules, improved efficiency of running the event)

Some comments:
• Before putting electron to screen, ask yourself:
o How are ALL teams affected by this? Think of your “opposite team” –if you have wings, think of a team without –if you have a carbon tub, think of a spaceframe team. Will your “improvement” be an improvement to them too?
o Would I want to be the competition official implementing this? For example, if your idea is to make the cost report more “real-world” by allowing teams to cost as per receipts rather than standardized costings – then are you willing to volunteer to check every receipt of every report submitted for your competition?
o Why is the rule, or task, or report there in the first place?
o Was my first adverse reaction to this issue because of inconvenience to me? What came first – a desire for a better competition, or annoyance at how the existing rules affect me. I often suspect that the words I read here are the fairest words that fit our own agenda, and not so much the result of an agenda to provide the fairest event.

So, with that out of the way – who would like to suggest changes to the rules that will make this event fairer or easier to manage, or that will improve learning outcomes for all?

I’ve got a suggestion about scoring –but it is past the time I should have hit the hay…

Big Bird

02-16-2014, 12:57 PM

BTW, this is long term outlook stuff - not a last minute attempt to get stuff into next years rules

404namenotfound

02-16-2014, 05:55 PM

Here is my contribution

1. Rule IC1.1.1 Specifically "The engine(s) used to power the car must be a piston engine(s) using a four-stroke primary heat cycle
with a displacement not exceeding 610 cc per cycle"

2. Limits us to engines under 610cc, realistically 600cc unless you're going to do some serious machining or put a big bore kit on a single. That then limits us to only a few competitive engine options.

3. Increase displacement to 655cc to allow a lot more engines in competition. Peak power is going to stay the same with the restrictor.

4. The rules essentially limit most teams to four competitive engine options. You either run the N/A 4 cylinder 600cc sport bike engine, the 550 twin (competitiveness is questionable), a snowmobile engine, or a single from a dirt bike or quad (turbo or not its the same engine). There are maybe 10-11 different engine options if you want to get brand specific. Opening up the displacement to 655 allows another 4 cylinder, a lot of v twins, and a few big bore singles. It gives the teams that can't machine an engine or seriously rework it a lot more options.

Big Bird

02-16-2014, 10:22 PM

Cool, nicely written 404. In the interests of positive and constructive discussion, as opposed to argument or just cataloguing reasons why it can't be done, I'll offer the following:

I've certainly thought that an increase in the number of engine options would add some further complexity and some necessity to rethink a few assumptions to the FSAE project. I don't think we need to make the project any more difficult, but the knowledge of existing engine options and arguments for each is pretty well established now.

I don't like the diesel option, simply because a engine management failure can easily result in wide open throttle - something we do not want in a student comp. I know you did not raise this, but I'm just justifying my overall position.

We don't need more power. But I think that with advancing technology, we can expand the range of engine choices. This is a non-engine guy thinking from first principles here.

An engine converts the chemical energy of oxygen and fuel into mechanical power. Historically we have focussed on the oxygen side of things to limit power - think intake restrictor and a limitation on the displacement of the "air pump". Is there a way we can put a similar flow limiter into the fuel system?? I'm looking for input from the engines /control systems experts here - does a cheap reliable fuel flow meter / limiter exist?

If we can set a limit for fuelflow, and for air flow, and there are no secondary buffers /plenums / storage downstream, then we are limiting the instantaneous rate of intake of the raw combustion reactants and therefore setting a ceiling on power. We would also be rewarding efforts to increase the thermodynamic efficiency of the engine. And we would not need "a limit on the size of the air pump".

Being controversial here, I'd like to see the engine rules opened up to include any engine cycle that is throttled with some sort of closeable throttling device. Two strokes, four strokes, rotaries, other cycles??. I think the days of this competition being about preparing engineers for the car industry are behind us - it is about preparing engineers to be work ready when they graduate, and able to reason their way through a complex engineering project. The key graduate skills we spruik as a reason for the competitions existence are the transferable ones anyway - the higher level decision making skills, communication skills, presentation skills, etc.

If the exclusion argument is about preparing engineers for specific engine development tasks, why cater only to the engineers who work with cars, four stroke motorcycles etc? What about engineers who go to work for KTM/Husqvarna and end up working on two stroke motorcycles, for example? Is there any reason we should exclude them? Two-strokes are not completely obsolete - for example, KTM's best-selling motorcycle in Australia for a number of recent years has been a two-stroke.

If the exclusion argument is about environmental impact, then wouldn't it be better to penalize the teams for the impact, rather than just take that choice away from them? For example, we already effectively address the environmental impact of fuel usage by rewarding teams that minimize the fuel they consume in the Endurance Event. If the argument against two strokes is that they burn oil and pollute, then why not use a similar "user pays" principle with two stroke oil? Teams nominate how much oil is mixed in with the fuel, officials mix the fuel and oil themselves, final oil usage calculated after Endurance when the tank is re-filled. Teams pay a set number of points per litre of oil used. Any implementation issues like how teams might cheat the system by hiding oil somewhere are no more challenging than the teams covering up petrol usage.

I think the competition's learning outcomes can be improved by expanding the range of choices available to the competing teams, therefore getting the teams to do more first principle decision making. We cannot compromise on safety, so the core safety rules need to be in place, comprehensive, and able to be tested and monitored for rules compliance in a way that is reasonable for the volunteer crew we have administering this event. Once the safety rules are in place, then the ideal rule set to me would be one where the whole "points economics" system was function-based:
You get points for achieving positive outcomes on the functions we want: setting fast times in the on track events, demonstrating knowledge in the report events - and I'd even add points into the mix for lower noise readings, demonstrated professionalism in race-day pit management, getting through each of the scrutineering tests first time. The idea being, if performing a function demonstrates that you are a better engineer, or it delivers an outcome that is to society's benefit, then we should award points for it- and the number of points needs to be accurately defined at the beginning of the project.
Conversely, you lose points for the attributes we don't want - fuel usage, oil usage, tyre usage, vehicle cost, noise. If it demonstrates you have not achieved your job as an engineer, or if it delivers an outcome that society does not favour, you lose points.

The rulebook effectively becomes a guide to the "graduate attributes point-scoring marketplace"- you get points when you do good, you lose points when you don't do good. The rules ideally should give all the information required for the competitors to complete a full and reasoned analysis of the "pointscoring economics" of this year's rule set. (And I did not mean "spoon-fed" the information required - but that the trade-offs should be able to be quantified by those who rigorously analyse the design problem itself).

I'm not saying that the FSAE rulebook does not do this. In fact, I've been in awe over the years at what a great set of rules we have started with, to allow such a diverse competition and to give us such a rich pasture of learning opportunities. I am aware that many sports rulebooks become incredibly unwieldy as "creative interpretations" or undesired outcomes of existing rules attract "you are not allowed to do...." style of rules. But as anyone who has read my malarkey on these boards here will know, my brain keeps running back to the top end of the design process whenever a complex problem appears - and often much simpler and more elegant results can be found by re-thinking assumptions and objectives at a high level. I'm sure Michael Royce and the people at the top end of this competition know this without me telling them!

Cheers all,

404namenotfound

02-17-2014, 02:05 PM

Mbirt

02-17-2014, 05:49 PM

As much as I would love to see some two strokes blasting around MIS I think it comes down to the idea that an FSAE car should at least in theory be a weekend auto-x machine. I feel a lot of the rules are SCCA kosher and to some extent the original rules wanted us to build and A-mod with a restrictor. You'd be hard pressed to find a sanctioning body that would allow a two stroke. Then the question arises is that still the goal today?

Going back to my point about allowing a larger engine. You're not going to make more power with more displacement since almost every car on the track reaches choked flow already. A larger engine will reach that point sooner. 8,300 rpm versus 9k based on my math. Running a larger motor will have the same effect on peak power as running a smaller engine at a higher rpm and past the choke point. If you limit air you do limit the max power you can achieve. There are diminishing returns and eventually a drop in power by running rich on a gasoline engine. The only way to get more power with a set airflow is to increase efficiency, one way to do that is running higher compression pistons.

That then leads into fuel flow limitations. You could limit fuel flow with an orifice (aka restrictor) and a pressure regulator prior to that orifice. There wouldn't be a point though. We're already limited by airflow to 85-90 horsepower.

My thinking is we already have a restrictor and we can't really make any more power than the ~90 horsepower we do now. With choked flow and atmospheric pressure being what they are a larger engine doesn't really net you and noticeable gains in power until we start looking at the more complicated system with friction. The only variable that displacement has any significant impact on is where we reach choked flow and how long we're there.
What? At every well-attended SCCA autocross I've been to the majority of the open-wheelers have been 2-strokes. The FJ/F125/KM karts, FM/F500 (small bore 2s snowmobile-powered), and wicked AM cars sometimes powered by big-bore snowmobile 2s's easily outnumber the smattering of Formula Fords, Formula Vees, and FSAE cars that might show up.

I agree with your proposal to increase the displacement limit, but only for the reason of allowing engine choices such as the Ninja/ER650 and SV-650 twins. Then you have a Triumph 675 cc 3-cyl at 125 hp that should be considered. At 686 cc the Yamaha Raptor 700R thumper might have the greatest potential among the big-bore singles. You're correct that the intake restrictor will limit power and displacement increases won't yield unfair powertrain configurations. You're incorrect, however, in assuming that almost every car on track is reaching choked flow. 600/4's, as long as the restrictor is limiting the power and not atrocious intake/exhaust deisgn, are obviously hitting choked flow. Singles and twins with poor intake design can choke the restrictor on a pulse-by-pulse basis, but are definitely not reaching time-averaged choked flow. Erlangen's well-tuned Ape, Wisconsin's turbo KTM thumper, and well-tuned or supercharged Genesis 80 fi's are likely the only singles and twins getting anywhere close to choked flow. I'll go out on a limb and say the ER650 and SV650 will behave as unrestricted with good intake and exhaust design to put out 70-75 hp and not choke the restrictor. UM-Dearborn did this with a Genesis 80fi a few years ago, making 80 hp naturally aspirated with restrictor.

Fuel flow restrictors are needlessly complex for this series. We're already airflow restricted and locked into a finite air-fuel ratio range for each fuel choice and engine design, LBT to the lean limit for instance.

Geoff, I am heavily involved in the SAE Clean Snowmobile Challenge where 2-strokes, 4-strokes, Wankels, and Diesels are allowed. Emissions and noise are heavily weighted. The catch is that the competition is one full week long to get the scant 15-20 internal combustion competitors through all events. Instead of keeping the insurance company happy by mandating an intake restrictor, a snowmobile will be disqualified if it exceeds 130 hp in the pre-emissions power sweep test. Laboratory emissions and passby noise testing are especially time-consuming and I imagine the expensive testing would not be possible without government grants and major sponsorship of testing equipment from companies like AVL. One nice thing about the powertrain testing nature of the competition is that it largely removes rider from the team's performance. The points structure is as follows:

Engineering Design Paper 100
Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price 50
Laboratory Emissions 300
Brake Specific Fuel Consumption 50
In-Service Emissions 50
In-Service Fuel Economy 50
Oral Presentation 100
Fuel Economy and Endurance 200
Acceleration 50
Objective Handling 50
Subjective Handling 50
Cold start 50
Static Display 50
Objective Noise 150
Subjective Noise 150
No-Maintenance Bonus 100

The BRP DI 2-stroke can be competitive, an especially well-done example from U of Idaho placed 3rd last year. Potential issues are that the smallest version of the ETEC engine is 600 cc and that the injectors are difficult to control with a standalone ECU. In FSAE, it could offer a real efficiency advantage running stratified charge in endurance. Diesels are limited by the emissions soot limit and won't be competitive until teams implement common rail injection to increase power without increasing soot. 2014 is the last year diesels are allowed, unfortunately. By the way, with respect to diesels in FSAE, if electronic throttle control is allowed in 2015, shouldn't diesels get the green light if the only concern is diesels dieseling after shutdown? Electric FSAE cars already use electronic torque control instead of the foot->cable->butterfly connection. It could just be required that diesels feature an electronic throttle body for fault management (modern diesels are being throttled to increase EGR flow anyway).

404namenotfound

02-17-2014, 07:25 PM

I totally forgot about the karts and things. My bad. They're not that big in my area.

I said almost all, not all of them always. I'd also say that if you're choking from pulsing with the singles that counts the same as having 4 separate pulses. No one but the turbo teams are really continuously choking the restrictor. The point I was making is that we already reach choked flow so we're already in the ball park any IC engine with similar efficiency is going to make.

mdavis

02-17-2014, 09:22 PM

My comment has more to do with a potential future rule change, an agreement that something needs to be done about the current ruleset, and a few ideas that I've already sent the rules committee.

1. Existing rule (if any): IC 3.2, specifically
IC3.3
Maximum Sound Level
The maximum permitted sound level is 110 dBA, fast weighting.
IC3.4
Noise Level Re-testing
At the option of the officials, noise can be measured at any time during the
competition. If a car fails the noise test, it will be withheld from the competition until it has been modified and re-passes the noise test

Potential change: T15.8
Noise Test
–
To improve the sound quality of single cylinder engines for track workers the sound
measuring units may be changed to dBC. This is more consistent with human hearing at the higher volumes
called out in the rules. Cheap, commercially available sound meters are generally able to display dBC. The
committee is also considering a reduction in the noise level

2. Existing shortcoming: To me, the current shortcoming is the (seeming) lack of re-testing that is happening for some of the single cylinder cars. I can think of 3 cars in particular that everyone I talked to were amazed these 3 cars got through noise. After talking with one of the teams, it was no longer a surprise, but more a source of frustration than anything. I will leave their methods for passing noise out, but they were nothing that any other team couldn't do. The biggest shortcoming is that cars are passing noise, then are extremely loud on track. To me, the noise test does not replicate the on track conditions (full throttle/high load) nor is there any real consequence for changing the exhaust/noise output of the vehicle between Tech and on-track competition.

Currently, an off-the-shelf muffler and some slight tuning tweaks can get you through noise with a single cylinder. I do not have enough experience with 4 cylinders or other engine combinations to comment on the ease of getting through the current noise test with those engine combinations. If the goal of the noise test really is to make sure that the track workers are not going deaf, then to me, this solution should be kept as a viable one.

3. Your suggested improvement: I've come up with a couple of possible changes to the rules, but neither will ultimately fix the issue. The first thing I thought of would be very labor intensive on the part of the organizers, which is less than ideal, since the organizers are already spread thin. My suggestion would be any team or official could "challenge" the noise of any vehicle, which would send them back to the noise trial to be tested, accompanied by a competition official/volunteer/organizer/whomever. On the way, they are not allowed to touch the vehicle, except for the allowed modifications in the rules. If the car is found to be over the noise limit, all points that were just earned would be removed from the team totals, and the team gets a DNA or DNF for that portion of the competition. This would definitely need some ironing out, as there is currently nothing that would prevent a team from challenging a vehicles noise output during the morning of Skidpad/Accel, and causing the team to lose an hour or so from that 4 hour block, which could be used for strategic purposes with no checks/balances. Beyond that is still the needs on the part of the organizers to provide volunteers to walk back and forth with cars all day, taking away (likely) from track workers, which would make for unsafe cone-shagging and overall worsen the quality of competition.

The second possible option I came up with would be something like the SCCA uses, which is to find a place on course where the vehicles are most likely to be at full throttle under full load, and test some distance from the track. This could be done on the accel run (would have to be around the 60-ish meter mark, to prevent any secondary rev limiting devise from interfering with the noise reading), autocross and endurance courses (although endurance would be very difficult with multiple vehicles running around at the same time) without a significant increase in the number of volunteers required, and would keep unreasonable protests from happening. If a team is found to be over the noise limit, on run 1, they have run 2 to quiet down, or they could be penalized the number of points gained in the event. So if driver 1 for his accel run is over the noise threshold, he would be able to lift off throttle during the run to quiet the noise and get a valid run in or continue to compete over the noise limit and effectively waste his/her runs.
The potential issues with this solution include the directionality of the exhaust coming out of the vehicle having a significant impact on noise reading, the fact that there may or may not be a pre-competition noise test to sort out vehicles that are obviously loud, and the potential impact of multiple vehicles running full throttle under high load in close proximity to each other. Another issue with this is the lack of time between runs 1 and 2 for a given driver in each of the events. At the SCCA there are several minutes between runs, allowing word to be communicated to the driver of each vehicle, whereas in FSAE (at least the events I've been to) there are but a handful of seconds between runs.

4. Summary of your case: If the proposal to change the rules really is about the noise on track, then to me it makes the most sense to measure the noise of the vehicles on track, rather than in a very controlled environment that is isolated almost completely from the track events. If the proposal to change the current rule is to stop teams from buying off-the-shelf mufflers and is to force the teams to design their own as an engineering exercise, then it would seem that the way the rule change is worded could work. If the goal is to quiet down a few cars which seem to be exceptions to the rule, rather than the rule itself, then this would seem to punish all teams for the actions of a few.

As a reference, at FSAE-Lincoln, they measured our single cylinder car both cBA and once we passed, dBC to get an idea of the differences in measurement. dBA reading was 110db even. dBC reading was 119db. Our car at local SCCA events was significantly quieter than others which were deemed to be under the 97dB at 50 feet rule that the SCCA enforces.

-Matt

mech5496

02-18-2014, 02:25 AM

Great suggestion Geoff, I hope this thread gets up to something. I like your proposal of allowing more engine types in FSAE and I will also say that we do not need more power. However, I am gonna take it a step further. Currently there are "combustion" classes (4 stroke petrol/diesel), electric classes (various max voltages allowed depending on competition), the formula hybrid competition as well as the alternative fuel class in FSUK. My proposal is to merge those classes, like FSUK tried to do a few years ago. The most apparent problem in this is judging efficiency, and I have not yet thought about how you can equalize that factor. By the FSUK rules, EV's were given an unfair advantage over combustions, so the proportions (scoring formula) should definitely change.

Another thing that bugs me is the maximum voltage level for EV cars (EV 1.1.2), that basically prohibits European cars to compete in non-european competitions. It would make it easier to have a global set of rules.

EV 4.10 - Energy meter: I find it useful for every competition to use the same standardized energy meter, as teams can design for it and not wait almost until the comp. FSE energy meter is an excellent example, and we will avoid problems like the Formula ATA (almost) fiasco with the organizers being unsure of energy meter data because of the rain (!)

One last thing (that is already proposed for 2015) is lowering the power limit for 4WD EV's; under current rules, they have a significant advantage, at least at the acceleration event.

Bemo

02-18-2014, 03:36 AM

Electric and combustion cars were running together in one class in other competitions than FSUK too - and in general, nobody was happy with it. FS Austria decided to have two seperate classes this year after having them running in one class for a couple of times. The problem is that you always have to adjust the rules if you want both concepts to be able to win. Efficiency is only one problem. Electric cars under the current rules have a significant advatage in acceleration too.
In the end you can't tell if the winning team won because they showed the best performance or because they were favoured by tthe rules as you end up with some kind of balance of performance rules which is definitely not the intend of a design competition for students. As said, it was already tried and nobody was happy with it (there was quite a lot of feedback from EV and from IC teams after FS Austria last year that in the future there should be seperate classes - no feedback in the other direction).

mech5496

02-18-2014, 05:52 AM

Bemo,

I agree with you about adjustments; however, in real-life environments, all designs are competing against each other. IMO, combustion (4 and 2 strokes, wankels etc) as well as EVs and hybrids should be egligible, given that the rules can be equal to all. If IC cars can output 80kW, then 80kW should be the limit for EV's and hybrids as well. Matt's suggestion derived from CSC could work on that as well. The most "challenging" factor to get right is probably efficiency again...

Bemo

02-18-2014, 06:40 AM

You're missing one important point. Even if power limitations are equal it depends on tge rules which concept is superior. What about increasing the endurance distance to 50km? All of a sudden the EV cars don't have a chance although it is the same for both. You always end up comparing apples with oranges. In real life it depends on what you want to do with a car what the best concept is. A rules set for a competition gives one artificial use case. If the rules would give you the possibility to build a boat instead of a car, but forces you to compete in the same disciplines you would choose to build a car as boats aren't very useful on tarmac. Same for the decision between electric and combustion cars. It only depends on the use case you define which the better concept is. Ofcourse you can always try to define it somewhere where it is hard to tell which concept is more suitable but did an electric car win because they did a better job than the best combustion team or because electric cars are favoured by the rules? It will be a never ending discussion.

raitinger

02-18-2014, 09:44 AM

These are the issues, I've noticed after a few years doing tech inspections. There are always a few teams that are tripped up during tech with these issues, and end up having to plead their case to the inspectors, and so forth. I's also say these are the main sources of complaints regarding, "Well, we've run it this way for years.", "We ran like this at the other competition."

T3.24 Front Bodywork
T3.24.2 All forward facing edges on the bodywork that could impact people, e.g. the nose, must have forward facing radii of at least 38 mm (1.5 inches). This minimum radius must extend to at least forty-five degrees (45°) relative to the forward direction, along the top, sides and bottom of all affected edges.

• This is a rule I see teams continually get confused on, primarily when it comes to radii viewed from the top of the nose cone. The confusion comes from the, 45° relative to forward direction, reference. I think this language is ambiguous for students because it does not provide a point of reference to rotate a 45 from. In turn it is difficult to visualize and when they sit down to lay out the geometry in CAD they aren’t clear on what to do. Many seem to interpret the 45° reference as minimum width (top view) of the easily understandable 1.5in min radius from the side view. Under the current language a rectangle, long side forward, meets the 45° reference. The radius is infinite until some point past 45° at which the radius could be 0. I recommend providing a graphic to explain the intent or change the language to require a minimum radius from top and side view.

T11.2 Securing Fasteners
T11.2.1 All critical bolt, nuts, and other fasteners on the steering, braking, driver’s harness, and suspension must be secured from unintentional loosening by the use of positive locking mechanisms.

• It has been best practice to have some drivetrain components require positive locking, the rear sprocket and tripod housing bolts, while others are not included; lug nuts, front sprocket, and wheel center-to-rim bolts. This has been a point of contention for teams on multiple occasions, causing inspector discussions regarding the language of the rules that boil down to; rule of thumb, lumping desired bolts under “All critical bolts” (Grammatically incorrect interpretation of the rule) , or an assessment of failure scenarios. The rules need to be clarified regarding the drivetrain in this area, because the correct interpretation of the language mentions nothing regarding drivetrain components. The most common issue is that teams do not always safety wire the rear sprocket bolts, FYI it is a good idea go ahead and wire them regardless of the rules.

T4.5 Firewall
T4.5.1 A firewall must separate the driver compartment from all components of the fuel supply, the engine
oil, the liquid cooling systems and any high voltage system (PART EV-EV1.1). It must protect the neck of the tallest driver. It must extend sufficiently far upwards and/or rearwards such that any point less than 100 mm (4ins.) above the bottom of the helmet of the tallest driver shall not be in direct line of sight with any part of the fuel system, the cooling system or the engine oil system.

• The issue that I have noticed in recent years is that as some teams do not run sidepods, many teams have made it through tech inspection while not meeting the line of sight to the 4in. helmet point. Specifically with lines of sight to radiators, fuel system, or the occasional oil cooler. The teams have made it through with rational from inspectors, that if there aren’t any connections in the line of sight, then it is acceptable. I don’t really recommend any rules language change unless it is necessary, but more of a consensus on what is acceptable and communication of this to the tech inspectors.

Kevin Hayward

02-19-2014, 12:07 PM

I believe that a shorter set of rules would be fantastic. At the moment the rules take up 168 pages. This is a very large growth from earlier years. For comparison the current LMP1 regulations are only 80 pages and have two languages included in them (only 40 pages of English). Each additional rule requires time and effort from students and the organisers. In many cases these rules offer little benefit. I believe the following rules could be removed, with particular reasons for each one. Note that I have not made any attempt to read through the EV rules, and what I propose is no where near a complete list of what can be removed (or shortened). Unfortunately there is no longer any way to do a quick read through of the rules, and I largely skimmed looking for what I believed were obvious candidates. I should also note that much of what I suggest be removed has been added, with much thought and time put into the creation of the rules. I don't think that removing rules is necessarily taking a step backwards, nor do I think it invalidates the value of the time the rule makers have invested. There have been many great clarifications and good safety related clauses that have been added over time.

T6.5.5
The steering wheel must have a continuous perimeter that is near circular or near oval, i.e. the outer
perimeter profile can have some straight sections, but no concave sections. “H”, “Figure 8”, or cutout
wheels are not allowed.

Reasoning: Many forms of motorsport use concave sections.

T6.7.1
The track and center of gravity of the car must combine to provide adequate rollover stability.

Reasoning: Redundant as this is both vague. Following rule detailing rollover test is sufficient, although could have slight word changes to include this rule easily)

T8.1
Coolant Fluid Limitations
Water-cooled engines must only use plain water. Electric motors, accumulators or HV electronics can
use plain water or oil as the coolant. Glycol-based antifreeze, “water wetter”, water pump lubricants
of any kind, or any other additives are strictly prohibited.

Reasoning: These additives are in common automotive use. They are less dangerous than many of the chemicals teams deal with.

1 Set of frame rules only.

Reasoning: If the existing frame regulations are too strict remove the added restrictions. Where the alternative frame rules are superior bring them into the main document.

Remove template restrictions.

Reasoning: By adding the template rules students have much less incentive to consider ergonomics. Building to the minimum template requirements makes it easy enough to fit any potential driver comfortably. This removes the possibility of students learning from bad ergonomics misjudgments. This also puts an emphasis back on judging a car on its ergonomic merits. If the template rules were maintained I believe that the templates should be smaller, to allow ergonomic studies to have more relevance.

IC1.7.1
Turbochargers or superchargers are allowed if the competition team designs the application. Engines
that have been designed for and originally come equipped with a turbocharger are not allowed to
compete with the turbo installed.

Reasoning: The restrictor is the primary limit on engine performance. Why not allow factory turbos?

IC2.4.4
Any size fuel tank may be used.

Reasoning - Not necessary (There are a few more rules that are written that provide no restriction at all. The rules already co-exist with other documentation such as frequently asked questions and examples. I don't believe these should be in the rules, so as to keep the document short and easily readable)

Remove the business logic case.

Reasoning: The intent of the business logic case is similar to the requirement of the marketing event. To my mind this just adds another level of documentation, with little effect to the design decisions made within the team. Philosophically I believe the bulk of the teaching and learning of the event occurs when designing, building and developing the car at the university. This sort of documentation should be recommended to teams, but not mandated. Universities almost universally teach project management for engineering courses already. An alternative might be to mandate that teams submit their marketing presentation slides (or similar material) prior to the event. This can then be used for cross checking with design and cost reports. In short look to amend the marketing event before creating a new task.

Remove the requirement for open wheeled cars.

Reasoning - Apart from shortening the rules this has the added effect of bring another area of design (and inherent trade-offs) to the competition, one that has distinct links to passenger vehicles. Course workers deal with sportscars outside of FSAE, so arguments about the ability to move cars are doubtful.

Kev

p.s. I also put the challenge to others to find places where the rules could be removed or shortened.

02-19-2014, 10:43 PM

I agree 100% with Kevin that the Rules are too long, and the best way to improve them is by a thorough pruning (it works for roses!).

IMO the Rules have got the way they are by the same processes that kill off many societies. Namely, some people want to "contribute to the betterment of our society" and they feel that the best way to do this is by "adding" something. In this case they add more Rules. They don't want to sit there in their retirement homes and say to their grandchildren "See that great big empty space with nothing much at all in it. Well..., I did that!"

Unfortunately, like bureaucracies, red-tape, and the Easter Islander's desire to erect ever more stone heads, this "more is always better" attitude can eventually be the death of the society.

Also, while the justification for many (most?) of the Rule additions is that "we must improve safety..", the stone-cold fact is that in any competition, whether it be tiddly-winks, ping-pong, FSAE, or any other, there is always be an element of risk. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO MAKE ANYTHING ABSOLUTELY SAFE. And a written document such as a "Rule Book" is probably the least useful area to instill more safety into FSAE.

As I have noted before, the biggest influences on real safety come from;
1. The track layout. More bumps and bends to slow the cars down, and less hard things to hit at speed, is generally safer.
2. A sensible approach to scrutineering and marshalling. Just because it is "legal" does NOT mean it is safe. And, conversely, something "illegal" might well be far safer than the accepted practice (see below).
3. Education of the competitors. In my experience, allowing the competitors to hurt themselves "a little bit" is very educational (although difficult to do in FSAE conditions, though I can think of a few ways...).

Bottom line here is that despite the ever growing Rulebook, I personally do not think FSAE cars are very safe (see below). More importantly, more Rules will NOT help. (Well, the only advantage of a lengthy Rulebook is that in the post-disaster courtroom the organisers can point to the NNN+ pages and say "We did everything in our power...".)
~~~~~o0o~~~~~

Here are some specific examples of what I am getting at (these are just a tiny fraction from the "General Technical Requirements", and covered very briefly here).

"T2.1..."

Long section devoted to banning "wheelpods". As Kevin suggested earlier, what educational or safety gains are there from banning full bodywork?
~o~

"T2.2 Bodywork
There must be no openings through the bodywork into the driver compartment from the front of the vehicle back to the roll bar main hoop or firewall other than that required for the cockpit opening. Minimal openings around the front suspension components are allowed."

The danger of "openings" is that something (perhaps a "front suspension component"!) can enter the cockpit and stab the driver in the leg, or somewhere more sensitive. This Rule ALLOWS the most dangerous type of opening, so does nothing, even from an educational point of view, to improve safety. More generally, most FSAE "bodywork" is extremely flimsy (and legally so), so provides little protection from intrusion.
~o~

"ARTICLE 3: DRIVER’S CELL
...
T3.5.5 If a bent tube is used anywhere in the primary structure, other than the front and main roll hoops, an additional tube must be attached to support it. The attachment point must be the position along the tube where it deviates farthest from a straight line connecting both ends...."

Ambiguous to the point of uselessness. If you use an "additional tube" to support a curved section at its mid-point, then you now have TWO unsupported curved sections! When do you stop? And, from an educational perspective, why are the "front and main roll hoops" ALLOWED to be curved, given that they are the main safety members?
~o~

"T3.10 Main and Front Roll Hoops – General Requirements
T3.10.1 The driver’s head and hands must not contact the ground in any rollover attitude..."

IMO this makes all current FSAE cars illegal (think about "ANY rollover attitude").
~o~

"T3.11 Main Hoop
...
T3.11.4 In the side view of the vehicle, the portion of the Main Roll Hoop that lies above its attachment point to the Major Structure of the Frame must be within ten degrees (10°) of the vertical.
...
T3.12 Front Hoop
...
T3.12.6 In side view, no part of the Front Hoop can be inclined at more than twenty degrees (20°) from the vertical."

So, below the level of the top of the Major Structure, the MRH is ALLOWED to be at any angle, say 45 degrees to vertical, to perhaps follow the line of the seat back. But the FRH must always be everywhere close to vertical, so it can NOT be used as a diagonal bracing member, by perhaps joining to the MRH at floor level, thus giving extra-thick-wall-tubing protection from side-impacts.
~o~

Bottom line here, the above overly-restrictive Rules, and those on Side-Impact-Structure, etc., make it very difficult to design a frame that is both efficient and safe. In fact, I have never seen an FSAE spaceframe that I consider efficient (ie. high strength and stiffness per mass), and most of them are not particularly safe.
~~~~~o0o~~~~~

As a real world comparison, here is a HyperProRacer (www.hyperracer.com) (these have their own one-make comp here in Oz). These cars were designed by the father and son team of Jon and Dean Crooke, who have a long history in Australian motorsports (going back to grand-dad Crooke's days, IIRC).

http://www.hyperracer.com/download-files/wall3.jpg

The important point is, even though the primary requirement in the design of these cars was SAFETY (ie. to build a much safer Superkart), the cars would be considered ILLEGAL in FSAE. Bent tubes, aaarrghhh! Non-vertical FRH! SIS at the wrong height! Blah, blah, blah... (And note that these cars race at twice the speeds of FSAE, at around 200 kph!)
~~~~~o0o~~~~~

Anyway, I think it would be better to have a much shorter Rule book that spells out the "spirit of the competition", and gives a few hard constraints on what is, and is not, allowed. This could then be usefully accompanied by a much longer, and more educational, "Informal Guide to the FSAE Rules", which would act a bit like the "Rules FAQs", or this Forum. That is, it would suggest how to do a "best-practice" car, but it would not actually mandate anything.

That way it would not limit a clever team from coming up with an "even-better-than-best-practice" car, as I believe the Crooke's have done above.

Z

(PS. Geoff, I will have to talk with you about two-stroke diesels later... :) )

exFSAE

02-20-2014, 06:57 AM

Going to break the format and tradition of lengthy posts here. Not a specific car rule but more toward the event itself... I've thought it would be great if the cone course were (a) drawn up well in advance and distributed, (b) the same for autocross, endurance, and "practice area.". Make it like going into a race weekend.

Now I know, the competition is supposed to be an engineering and car performance evaluation and not necessarily a 100% recreation of a race series. But I like the above concept from an engineering perspective in that you're not just making a generic car, how are you then tuning your setup to that specific track? What simulation and driver training work have you done? Are you doing anything differently for "qualifying" vs. "race" setup? When you get out to practice and log some data - how well does it match what you've geared yourself toward (literally!) in advance?

Big Bird

02-20-2014, 07:25 AM

Agreed.
Eliminate unnecessary words.

:)

mech5496

02-20-2014, 08:27 AM

I think we all agree on keeping the Rules as short and understandable as possible is a great thing; on that note I could not help but noticing that section A takes 16 full pages! Nevertheless, I have some more comments.

T1.2.3: "The vehicle must maintain all required specifications, e.g. ride height, suspension travel, braking capacity (pad material/composition), sound level and wing location throughout the competition." Not sure if all these parameters are checked and how easy is to check them. Never checked on us.

T3.1: "Vehicle structure - 2 options". Unify AF rules with driver cell or mandate AF calculations for SES. Mandate minimum WT and OD and ask for calculations regarding strength and EI as part of SES would make rules much shorter and understandable while maintaining safety.

T3.23.2: "The front wing and wing supports may be forward of the Front Bulkhead, but may NOT be located in or pass through the Impact Attenuator. If the wing supports are in front of the Front Bulkhead, the supports must be included in the test of the Impact Attenuator for T3.22." How about the wing itself? If a very stiff/strong wing is mounted in mounts BEHIND the bulkhead, it still violates the intention of the rule, which IMO is ensure proper function of the IA. Either enforce testing with a wing in place, or at least SES-like calculations.

T3.24.2: "All forward facing edges on the bodywork that could impact people, e.g. the nose, must have forward facing radii of at least 38 mm (1.5 inches). This minimum radius must extend to at least forty-five degrees (45°) relative to the forward direction, along the top, sides and bottom of all affected edges." In conflict with 1.5mm radius for Aero devices (T9.3.1), would be better if unified and clear.

T4.7: "Driver visibility". Not sure of the necessity of this particular rule; however, if kept, a method of testing compliance can be included, something like this: "With the shortest driver seated normally, a two cones placed on an angle of 100deg relative to the longitudinal axis of the vehicle and at a distance of x meters should be visible", or even better place a camera at Percy's head height for that purpose.

T6.5.6: "In any angular position, the top of the steering wheel must be no higher than the top-most surface of the Front Hoop." Not sure of how useful this is; driver hands are already covered by the "roll-over envelope" formed from front and main hoop. As in matter of fact, I believe that the envelope should be formed by the bulkhead and the MRH, and not the front hoop.

Article 11: "Fasteners" Define properly "critical locations"

Regarding potential rule changes for 2015, I should note that I agree with all said.

Alumni

02-20-2014, 03:26 PM

Having now been involved with FSAE as a student for many years, and now as a tech judge and been unofficially involved with a number of rule changes/rewrites over the years I thought I'd chime in and respond to as why a few things are the way they are:

T6.5.5
The steering wheel must have a continuous perimeter that is near circular or near oval, i.e. the outer
perimeter profile can have some straight sections, but no concave sections. “H”, “Figure 8”, or cutout
wheels are not allowed.

Reasoning: Many forms of motorsport use concave sections.

This is a holdout from the early days when many teams tried to run jr. dragster wheels, which should not be used in an autocross car. Obviously it is not strictly enforced any longer

T8.1
Coolant Fluid Limitations
Water-cooled engines must only use plain water. Electric motors, accumulators or HV electronics can
use plain water or oil as the coolant. Glycol-based antifreeze, “water wetter”, water pump lubricants
of any kind, or any other additives are strictly prohibited.

Reasoning: These additives are in common automotive use. They are less dangerous than many of the chemicals teams deal with.

Most of these additives leave a very slippery puddle behind when spilled/puked

1 Set of frame rules only.

Reasoning: If the existing frame regulations are too strict remove the added restrictions. Where the alternative frame rules are superior bring them into the main document.

Great idea, but would increase the complexity many times over. We'd be left with something like the LMP rules with the dozens of cryptic references to "ground planes" "reference planes" and "legality panels etc

Remove template restrictions.

Reasoning: By adding the template rules students have much less incentive to consider ergonomics. Building to the minimum template requirements makes it easy enough to fit any potential driver comfortably. This removes the possibility of students learning from bad ergonomics misjudgments. This also puts an emphasis back on judging a car on its ergonomic merits. If the template rules were maintained I believe that the templates should be smaller, to allow ergonomic studies to have more relevance.

No way in hell. I'm not even allowed to show you the video of some pre-template era crash tests, and I can attest that there are plenty of ways for ergonomic screw ups even with the templates. Downsizing them by maybe an inch or so - that's another story. After all, the current templates are used simply because that's what F1 was using (at the time anyway,) and we all know how well that excuse is supposed to go over with design judges.

Remove the business logic case.

Reasoning: The intent of the business logic case is similar to the requirement of the marketing event. To my mind this just adds another level of documentation, with little effect to the design decisions made within the team. Philosophically I believe the bulk of the teaching and learning of the event occurs when designing, building and developing the car at the university. This sort of documentation should be recommended to teams, but not mandated. Universities almost universally teach project management for engineering courses already. An alternative might be to mandate that teams submit their marketing presentation slides (or similar material) prior to the event. This can then be used for cross checking with design and cost reports. In short look to amend the marketing event before creating a new task.

If used properly - and it isn't - the business logic case is supposed to equalize the playing field between the big budget huge team techno-cars and the simplistic three guys in a shed ones. What should happen is the judges of various events decide "is this a good car for the target audience and price" not "is this a good car compared to the last one that rolled through."

Remove the requirement for open wheeled cars.

Reasoning - Apart from shortening the rules this has the added effect of bring another area of design (and inherent trade-offs) to the competition, one that has distinct links to passenger vehicles. Course workers deal with sportscars outside of FSAE, so arguments about the ability to move cars are doubtful.

With the addition of a front jacking bar (why isn't there one already?) I agree

Alumni

02-20-2014, 03:42 PM

[QUOTE=mech5496;118806]

T1.2.3: "The vehicle must maintain all required specifications, e.g. ride height, suspension travel, braking capacity (pad material/composition), sound level and wing location throughout the competition." Not sure if all these parameters are checked and how easy is to check them. Never checked on us.

After tech, this is only checked "when in doubt" or if there is a reasonable protest from another team. I also believe some items are gone over again for the top endurance finishers.

T3.23.2: "The front wing and wing supports may be forward of the Front Bulkhead, but may NOT be located in or pass through the Impact Attenuator. If the wing supports are in front of the Front Bulkhead, the supports must be included in the test of the Impact Attenuator for T3.22." How about the wing itself? If a very stiff/strong wing is mounted in mounts BEHIND the bulkhead, it still violates the intention of the rule, which IMO is ensure proper function of the IA. Either enforce testing with a wing in place, or at least SES-like calculations.

This rule is an absolute mess in that it contradicts the "no non crushable objects ahead of the bulkhead" rule, and offers no explanation as to why you can't have supports run though the IA (as long as you test them.) What if an overly creative team built a wing that worked as part of the IA and nose cone? Oh wait, you can't because...

T3.24.2: "All forward facing edges on the bodywork that could impact people, e.g. the nose, must have forward facing radii of at least 38 mm (1.5 inches). This minimum radius must extend to at least forty-five degrees (45°) relative to the forward direction, along the top, sides and bottom of all affected edges." In conflict with 1.5mm radius for Aero devices (T9.3.1), would be better if unified and clear.

...these rules are also contradictory! Not to mention you're much more likely to be hit in the ankle by a wing or end plate than just the nose of a car.

T4.7: "Driver visibility". Not sure of the necessity of this particular rule; however, if kept, a method of testing compliance can be included, something like this: "With the shortest driver seated normally, a two cones placed on an angle of 100deg relative to the longitudinal axis of the vehicle and at a distance of x meters should be visible", or even better place a camera at Percy's head height for that purpose.

Ever since the template rules came into play, the only problem here I have ever seen has been immediate forward visibility - which is never checked and has no requirement, and I have sat in many a fsae car that had an unreasonably large front blind spot, which is really what the rule is trying to avoid.

T6.5.6: "In any angular position, the top of the steering wheel must be no higher than the top-most surface of the Front Hoop." Not sure of how useful this is; driver hands are already covered by the "roll-over envelope" formed from front and main hoop. As in matter of fact, I believe that the envelope should be formed by the bulkhead and the MRH, and not the front hoop.

The thought here is that in a serious rollover crash the front bulkhead will probably not be where it was when the crash began. The roll hoops should still be pretty close though.

Article 11: "Fasteners" Define properly "critical locations"

My rule of thumb in tech for this has been "If it comes loose, does the car coast, grind or skid to a halt?" If it is either of the latter two, it is probably critical.

MCoach

02-21-2014, 04:00 PM

"This rule is an absolute mess in that it contradicts the "no non crushable objects ahead of the bulkhead" rule, and offers no explanation as to why you can't have supports run though the IA (as long as you test them.) What if an overly creative team built a wing that worked as part of the IA and nose cone? Oh wait, you can't because...

T3.24.2: "All forward facing edges on the bodywork that could impact people, e.g. the nose, must have forward facing radii of at least 38 mm (1.5 inches). This minimum radius must extend to at least forty-five degrees (45°) relative to the forward direction, along the top, sides and bottom of all affected edges." In conflict with 1.5mm radius for Aero devices (T9.3.1), would be better if unified and clear."

The off hand reason (meaning at competition and probably completely unjustified or supported) that I was given at one point during a competition why this is allowed by a worker:

"Cars are big and heavy and parts like the nose cut and hit people hard. Parts like the wing are light and flimsy. It'll just break if it hits anyone anyway. Those won't do any damage to anyone anyway."

Um....yeah, some of them...but a well built wing that is doing some serious work like those from Monash, Terps (Maryland), or any other large wing set up would cause some serious injurt anyway.

"T4.7: "Driver visibility". Not sure of the necessity of this particular rule; however, if kept, a method of testing compliance can be included, something like this: "With the shortest driver seated normally, a two cones placed on an angle of 100deg relative to the longitudinal axis of the vehicle and at a distance of x meters should be visible", or even better place a camera at Percy's head height for that purpose.

Ever since the template rules came into play, the only problem here I have ever seen has been immediate forward visibility - which is never checked and has no requirement, and I have sat in many a fsae car that had an unreasonably large front blind spot, which is really what the rule is trying to avoid."

As a small driver sitting in car built to easily fit Percy into...I hate Percy. The horizontal template is actually what causes me the most grief. It's hard to sit in the car and actually be able to see reasonably over the front roll hoop. If it were shorter, I wouldn't have a problem with it. F1 may use it, but that's for a completely different series where objects immediately in front of you don't need to be as visible because you are looking at the end of the corner you are in....an 1/8 mile away. That and they don't really have the issue of worrying about tiny cones that just happen to make up the course that lie directly in front of you in that blind spot. I personally have an issue tracking cones during slaloms. This is mainly because I lose sight of them shortly before entering the slalom and then can't see them until I've just rolled over them or past them. Why couldn't percy have 33" legs or something like that? 36 inches? Really? With the contemplation of adding 5th female to the mix, this makes things a bit eccentric. Yes, it's made to fit Americans, but we already have 6-8" of pedal adjustability just to fit our drivers and Percy. Percy doesn't conform as well to open wheel vehicle seating as humans do. I wouldn't mind if it were less of a range such as 90% or 80%. It's not a passenger car where we're advertising 3rd row seating and enough room to fit you and your lap dog. It's a student racecar(-esque) design project that has as much room as the rules say we need.

"T6.5.6: "In any angular position, the top of the steering wheel must be no higher than the top-most surface of the Front Hoop." Not sure of how useful this is; driver hands are already covered by the "roll-over envelope" formed from front and main hoop. As in matter of fact, I believe that the envelope should be formed by the bulkhead and the MRH, and not the front hoop.

The thought here is that in a serious rollover crash the front bulkhead will probably not be where it was when the crash began. The roll hoops should still be pretty close though."

For roll over reasons, we've always made sure that the front bullkhead and main hoop would hit first to give a bit more room to the driver. That and the bulkhead supports are beefy enough to take such a hit. In-house crash lab helped with that and testing of our IA.

"T6.5.5
The steering wheel must have a continuous perimeter that is near circular or near oval, i.e. the outer
perimeter profile can have some straight sections, but no concave sections. “H”, “Figure 8”, or cutout
wheels are not allowed.

Reasoning: Many forms of motorsport use concave sections.

This is a holdout from the early days when many teams tried to run jr. dragster wheels, which should not be used in an autocross car. Obviously it is not strictly enforced any longer"

I can see the justification for that with minimal rule writing. If this were to be allowed there would have to be some strings attached such as minimum radius and depth of concave or style of internal supports or just an explicit NO JUNIOR DRAGSTER WHEELS, KIDS!...

"Remove template restrictions.

Reasoning: By adding the template rules students have much less incentive to consider ergonomics. Building to the minimum template requirements makes it easy enough to fit any potential driver comfortably. This removes the possibility of students learning from bad ergonomics misjudgments. This also puts an emphasis back on judging a car on its ergonomic merits. If the template rules were maintained I believe that the templates should be smaller, to allow ergonomic studies to have more relevance.

No way in hell. I'm not even allowed to show you the video of some pre-template era crash tests, and I can attest that there are plenty of ways for ergonomic screw ups even with the templates. Downsizing them by maybe an inch or so - that's another story. After all, the current templates are used simply because that's what F1 was using (at the time anyway,) and we all know how well that excuse is supposed to go over with design judges."

Agreed. Having done full scale IA crash testing for several teams. The other anomalies you would get are chassis designs that show up (mainly from the Asian entries) that Smokey Yunick would be proud of. The drivers fit just fine; the judges would look at it and have trouble getting their wrist inside the driver cockpit. Very small.

"Remove the requirement for open wheeled cars.

Reasoning - Apart from shortening the rules this has the added effect of bring another area of design (and inherent trade-offs) to the competition, one that has distinct links to passenger vehicles. Course workers deal with sportscars outside of FSAE, so arguments about the ability to move cars are doubtful.

With the addition of a front jacking bar (why isn't there one already?) I agree"

This could get really interesting, but would more than likely stretch the rules out rather than shrink them. I envision early 2000 style F1 cars with little winglets popping out of everywhere and looking like strange plants that grow deep in the jungle. That or LMP cars with, as you already mentioned, references to all the legality planes and how we can orient wings everywhere or bodywork doing weird things. On the note of a front jacking bar, we've always designed our nose in such a way that a quick jack can be used on it easily without needing to manually move anything. On the subject of the jacking bar in general, I wish it were a little less specific, yet less vague at the same time. It says 'painted' but what stops me from anodizing an aluminum tube (not that I've ever seen anyone called out on that as non-compliant and it's a meaningless argument)? What if I wanted to use a carbon tube or something other than a round tube which may be more ideal to lift by?

Back to work...

mech5496

02-22-2014, 04:35 AM

02-23-2014, 04:30 AM

Charles Kaneb

02-23-2014, 11:26 AM

The rules for FSAE are remarkably similar to the ones Dr. Bob Woods wrote before I was born for a little interscholastic competition for Texas teams building mini-Baja cars and adding minimal suspension systems to karts. They work REALLY, REALLY well! The 1986 U-Texas-Arlington car would require fewer than ten grandfather exemptions to get through tech and finish about 15th at most competitions. They obviously allow for lots of interesting and innovative cars that wouldn't be allowed anywhere else. Complicated and long-development-time parts are celebrated rather than banned so long as they work, while a car that had 90% of its components built and assembled in three weeks was still highly competitive at Lincoln last year.

168 pages isn't really that long. It's no longer than an average PhD thesis, shorter than the New Testament. Over half of the one-year team members at Texas A&M know every rule that applies to their system by heart by the end of the build. It's not too long. I think there are some that are just there to eliminate particular parts or technologies that don't necessarily improve the car if used. I also think we're not guarding all that well against the one low-likelihood series-ending event that we've gotten hints about.

One sufficiently bad fire ($5,000,000 settlement for a driver's or corner worker's death or permanent disability) split among roughly 500 teams and paid off over five years would raise the entry fee by $2000 per event if no universities dropped the program in the aftermath. The numbers get worse if universities abandon programs or can't justify the new, higher entry fees; if 60% of the entries are present the fees go up by $3000-$5000. We don't have significantly more stringent fire-safety rules because the "straight" cost-benefit doesn't add up. If virtually eliminating the major-fire risk adds $750 per car per year (estimated based off of the cost of total replumbing and carrying an extinguisher in LeMons), and the Swede Savage/Elio De Angelis fire has a 10% likelihood of happening in any given year (again estimated off the top of my head based on the number of bad car fires and bad FSAE car crashes I've seen), then that's $500 per car per year, and it doesn't quite add up to do it. However, raising the cost of cars by $750 is unlikely to do much damage to the series, while everyone putting a "University of Somewhere - Some City" sticker on their car one year and having their universities extensively review every safety risk they take throughout the year from a very risk-averse perspective.... I'm biased on this issue after watching a driver burn to death after a crash on Texas Highway 40 last year.

Suggestions:

New Rule IC2.4.6: The fuel tank must consist of a bladder that is resistant to the fuel in use (as specified by the manufacturer of the bladder) inside an enclosure made from .065 or thicker aluminum with no internal protrusions smaller than .250" in diameter. Teams are to provide photos of the inside of all walls of the tank with a gauge or ruler identifying any protrusions into the tank. Full-length welds are required for all outside edges.

An ATL FC140 brand-new from Summit Racing is $579 and meets all of these rules for a four-gallon tank. Given the size of the FSAE market ATL would probably be willing to develop a less-expensive two-gallon or eight-liter option. Switching from an in-tank pump to an external pump may cost $100.

Amendment to Rule IC2.5.1: All parts of the fuel storage and supply system must lie within the surface defined by the top of the
roll bar and the outside edge of THE ROLL BAR AND SUPPORTING STRUCTURE.

This change is already a rule at Texas A&M and I estimate zero cost increase for a newly designed car.

Amendment to Rule IC2.8.2: All fuel vent lines must be equipped with a check valve to prevent fuel leakage when the tank is
inverted. All fuel vent lines must TERMINATE IN A STEEL CATCH CAN OR RETURN TO THE FUEL TANK ASIDE FROM THE FILLER CAP VENT.

I recommend that the fuel system be entirely closed aside from the filler cap and its vent but if there needs to be a vent line elsewhere in the system then it shouldn't be allowed to pass fuel vapor outside of the car.

New Rule IC3.1.4: All exhaust system components must be separated by at least 2" from all fuel system components.

Gasoline is volatile and heating beyond 100* C is undesirable outside of the combustion chamber. Almost all fractions of typical gasoline boil below that temperature. A 1" separation between the composite firewall and the exhaust header still requires heat shielding to prevent it from damaging the resin which is good to about 100*C.

Amendment to Rule T14.3: A balaclava which covers the driver’s head, hair and neck, made from acceptable fire resistant
material as defined in T14.12, or a full helmet skirt of acceptable fire resistant material. The balaclava
requirement applies to drivers of either gender, with any hair length. NO HOLE OTHER THAN THE NECK OPENING MAY BE LARGER THAN 1.5" DIAMETER AT REST.

Motorcycle helmets are still legal and provide no fire protection. We could adopt an SFI/FIA standard for the balaclava or just minimize the size of openings to reduce the surface area of exposed skin.

These rules bring us up to roughly the standard of the 24 Hours of LeMons, an endurance race for $500 jalopies. They have not had a major car fire in three years.

Charles Kaneb

02-23-2014, 12:50 PM

Now for the ones that just eliminate design decisions and force a direction. I think the no-vacuum-traction (T9.4) one can stay, but otherwise if it's not an obvious safety problem, why have it?

T6.5.5: "The steering wheel must have a continuous perimeter that is near circular or near oval, i.e. the outer
perimeter profile can have some straight sections, but no concave sections. “H”, “Figure 8”, or cutout
wheels are not allowed"

How about "The steering wheel must not have any protrusions sharper than a 1/4" radius that can contact the driver." If you want to use a junior-dragster wheel, go ahead! Your steering ratio and cockpit ergonomics would have to be favorable to the driver's hands never leaving the wheel...

IC 1.6.5 "The circular restricting cross section may NOT be movable or flexible in any way, e.g. the restrictor
may not be part of the movable portion of a barrel throttle body"
This is the anti-carburetor rule. If a team can justify using a 19mm diameter carburetor instead of fuel-injection, they should be allowed to do it. Don't require a second restriction to be placed elsewhere in the system. If a circular cross section of under 19mm diameter is present when the throttle is closed, and this cross section's perimeter is maintained when the throttle is opened, the area cannot exceed that of a 19mm circle. I will make up a 19mm no-go gauge that can check a butterfly carburetor if necessary. Please delete the rule. I'd have gladly taken the power hit for more time to tune the suspension and validate the vehicle simulation in 2012 and Texas-Austin's 2013 car was great as soon as they ditched the legal intake and went back-to-stock.

IC 1.1.1: The engine(s) used to power the car must be a piston engine(s) using a four-stroke primary heat cycle with a displacement not exceeding 610 cc per cycle

I'd modify that to "The engine(s) used to power the car must be a piston engine(s) using a spark-ignition primary heat cycle with a displacement not exceeding 701 cc per cycle.

I'd much rather not see a student-designed diesel injection system with gasoline as the working fluid.

Two-stroke engines power almost every competitor of FSAE cars in autocross (Karts, A-Mods, F-Mods), and the running and purchase costs of a two-stroke engine can be substantially less than a comparable four-stroke. A good 450MX engine costs between $2000 and $4000 on ThumperTalk or eBay. I can get good complete 2t250 or 2t500 motorcycles for $2000. A top-and-bottom-end rebuild for a 4T engine is between $1000 and $3000, while the same for a 2T is between $500 and $1000 - and rebuild intervals for a 2t500 are longer than a 4t450MX. It is reasonable to expect student-rebuilt, student-internally-modified, or even student-custom-cased two-strokes from even small teams. The restrictor will limit power even more than on a four-stroke engine as the pressure difference between the crankcase and intake is smaller than the cylinder to intake pressure difference in a four-stroke. The fluid mechanics of a two-stroke engine are IMMENSELY complicated and are summarized in Gordon P. Blair's book "Design and Simulation of Two-Stroke Engines"

Going up to 701cc adds the following engine options: Ducati Monster 696cc v-2, Triumph Daytona and Speed Triple 675cc i-3, Honda NC700 670cc i-2, Honda XR650 single, Suzuki SV650/Gladius 645cc v-2, Kawasaki Ninja ZX6R 636cc four. There is no 699cc four-banger that would instantly dominate the series - the Yamaha Genesis and Honda Nighthawk 699 fours are older than I am. Italian and British teams would appreciate having a local option and maybe sponsorship. The big 650 enduro singles would provide a long-lived engine option that would make an easy 45 horsepower. The SV650 is a V-twin that isn't an Aprilia (Sorry, Aprilia teams!).

mech5496

02-24-2014, 07:06 AM

Amendment to Rule T14.3: A balaclava which covers the driver’s head, hair and neck, made from acceptable fire resistant
material as defined in T14.12, or a full helmet skirt of acceptable fire resistant material. The balaclava
requirement applies to drivers of either gender, with any hair length. NO HOLE OTHER THAN THE NECK OPENING MAY BE LARGER THAN 1.5" DIAMETER AT REST.

Motorcycle helmets are still legal and provide no fire protection. We could adopt an SFI/FIA standard for the balaclava or just minimize the size of openings to reduce the surface area of exposed skin.

These rules bring us up to roughly the standard of the 24 Hours of LeMons, an endurance race for $500 jalopies. They have not had a major car fire in three years.

Charles, these already apply to most European competitions as far as I am aware of; we are also always using full underclothing per FIA standards (underwear, socks, balaclava) in every drive of the car. I agree that those should be enforced to every single competition, and I may add that an on-board extingusiher system could be useful as well, given the fires I have witnessed in FSAE cars. A bit offtopic, but I am amazed on how it could possibly be OK to drive in shorts/t-shirt in some SCCA events...

Claude Rouelle

02-26-2014, 02:26 PM

As far as rule possible suggestion you may want to see the last post I put on the "Teams from India" part of this forum

Alumni

02-27-2014, 07:47 PM

Alumni,

Is all that red ink meant as an ironic comment on the ever increasing red tape in the FSAE Rules? :)

More to the point, you seem to agree that there are a lot of redundant rules in the Rulebook. Would you care to share your opinions on why you think these rules are never deleted? (I gave my opinion earlier.)

Also, what are the implications of a Rulebook that only ever gets longer and more restrictive? I smell boring spec-series, with zero educational prospects.

Z

The few times I've asked, I always get a variation of the same old answer - "Re-writing the entire rule book would be too much work for the rules committee, since they are all volunteers and have families and lives outside fsae."

To elaborate, I also believe that the rules committee is - as with all motorsports - full of sniveling egotistical brats that never got their way during their time in FSAE, (or other endeavors for those older folks,) and now find themselves in a position where they can enact un-justified and bass-ackward rules in order to feel personal fulfillment - whether they realize they are doing it for that reason or not. Essentially, they're all mini wannabe Bernie Eccelstones to the mini wannabe F1 cars they control.

A few examples of this that come to mind are the inertia switch and height limitations on aero (both now rescinded I do believe, and I applaud those that made that wise decision.)

Sure, sometimes an "incident" or close call can justify adding in or expanding a rule for safety's sake, but as one of my favorite people (Mr. P.J. O'Rourke that is) said, "Everything that's fun in life is dangerous. Horse races, for instance, are very dangerous. But attempt to design a safe horse and the result is a cow." Attempt too hard to design a safe formula car and you'll end up with an under powered, re-enforced tube frame box puttering along the course at such a speed that it drives all the freshman straight out of the shop to drinking at frats and playing video games. Further, it lowers the limits of acceptable engineering such that "REIBs" (another rant for another day) and poorly designed load paths have little to no overall effect on team performance. In my day we called this "Baja."

Furthermore, since I'm now in rant mode, the rules and the associated committee need to make up their minds about trying to level the playing field for all competitors, while keeping in mind that this is an educational exercise, NOT motorsports (and it never will be.) If you want to level the playing field, only two rules are needed. 1.) Spec ECU with low pin counts (and no other magical boxes besides maybe ignition,) and 2.) Minimum curb weight of 225kg. (I feel #2 would also have the added benefit of a greatly improved endurance finishing rate, and be far more feasible and reasonable than video of your car running 3 months before competition (sorry Claude.)) The yearly addition of rules targeting individual car and concepts needs to stop, as it does affect the educational aspect of the event, though I feel that we are still many many years off of a "spec series."

Big Bird

02-27-2014, 08:32 PM

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

I most definitely did NOT open this thread so that we can engage in personal attacks and name-calling. As per the title of the thread, this thread is about reasonable suggestions for rule changes, and I would like to think that the conversation might be mature enough that members of the rules committees might join in.

Name-calling is not required. Lets keep it polite and reasoned, and not sink to the levels of other online forums.

Cheers,

Markus

02-28-2014, 02:21 AM

Alumni, I have to disagree with your suggestions a bit.

Spec ECU: not really needed, the restrictor already levels the playing field and "detailed" engine stuff in general has very minor effect on competition results (as in the big conceptual decisions actually matter, fine tuning not that much, and there's so many ways to go wrong in there while achieving "good results" in corresponding detail).

Minimum weight: well maybe, but it should be low enough to be justified. 225kg is way too much, if you don't mean it with a driver. There is always a case of too light, as in too flexible, too weak, too unreliable, etc which justifies not having a min weight rule.

My own personal suggestions for future rule changes: engine displacement rule, either something way higher (680cc, 700cc, 750cc etc) or removed. The restrictor already dictates the amount of power, bigger engines only create more torque and add weight, but so does forced induction on <610cc's. This would open up choices to some interesting engines as mentioned here previously, like 650cc V2's and 675cc I3's.

Level the rules between monocoque and tube structure: to current rules it's possible to make a monocoque of about 12kg's in total weight but with tube frame you hit the wall at around 25kg's. This is mainly because with monocoque you can prove equivalency to "simple tube frame" while the same is not possible with advanced tube frame. It would be easy to prove equivalency with a tube frame of ~15-20kg's of weight. Alternative Frame rules were kind of a try to approach this but went to forest as it results in even heavier tube frame.

I do understand the rules point of view to some extent: the tube frame rules are somewhat "idiot-proof". But they also limit the frame design, as ~75% or more of frametubes are both positioned and chosen by the rules. And at the same time you can go full monty on the monocoque rules and there is no control over that. So why not allow proving equivalency of a tube frame?

Alumni

02-28-2014, 12:07 PM

Markus, I wasn't really suggesting them as rules, just examples of how easily rules could be done to level the playing field if that is what needs to be done, rather than imposing new rules on every change and new idea that shows up at competition (wheel pods come to mind.)

As far as my thinking behind them, the spec ecu would severely limit the number of electronic aids on a car, saving on cost, complexity and artificially increasing driver ability. The weight I feel should be about the current average, such that it is easy to hit for the typical 4-cylinder space frame on 13s etc.

But as they are both poor rules I won't go on too much.

I do certainly agree, as seems the theme here, that the restrictor is the limiting factor in most engines and the limitations should be opened to any displacement. Alternative fuels and rotarys/2-strokes are probably more work to regulate than it's worth.

You also bring up a good point I never thought about with the monocoque weights and equivalency.

SNasello

02-28-2014, 04:59 PM

Alumni,

I don't think that electronic aids are making a huge difference in artificially increasing driver ability. I think that driver ability and training is the absolute limiting factor. Monash is still driving with a mechanical shifting system, and they don't seem to be hurting too much because of it. I have witnessed a number of electronic systems cause more problems to teams then help them, so it really comes down to the teams decision. Can they result in an improvement? Aboslutely, if executed properly and IF the driver has enough time in the car to train with them.

As for the minimum weight rule, this pretty much eliminates the advantage of the 'lightweight single' concept if you set it to something like the average. It is possible to hit under 190 kg with a steel frame, 4 cylinder and 13" aluminum wheels. There is no real trick to it, just proper material selection and good design.

I think opening up the engine rules would be interesting if not to allow for some fresh ideas in packaging and overall vehicle concept. Whether this has a huge influence on performance is questionable as engine power is not really a determining factor in laptime after a certain point.

I think the frame rules could be opened up a bit too, which might make it attractive again to run a steel frame over a monocoque for some teams. Like markus said, 25-26 kg is about the limit for a steel frame to the current rules, which is mostly limited by template sizes and pre-defined tube sizes.

On that note, the fsae cockpit templates which are clearly based on the F1 cockpit templates of the time, were made approximately 25-50 mm bigger in every direction, if i remember correctly. Even a 1 inch reduction in the width of figure 9 would have a big influence on front end packaging. IMO this wouldn't really affect driver egress or safety if the height is left the same. A reduction in height would also be welcome, if it were done in such a way as to prevent teams from installing a knee breaking steering rack, which was one of the reasons for the template in the first place. Something along the lines of, "the drivers legs may not pass under the steering rack"

Alumni

03-04-2014, 08:08 AM

Just thought of this one while thinking about the Clean Snowmobile Competition and it's much more even distribution of points across events:

What are everyone's thoughts on perhaps giving out ~100 points to any team reaching the driver change in endurance? Keep the 1 point per lap as well to have record of that. Further, perhaps another 25 points for teams that return to the track after the change. This would certainly make the event more fun to watch rather than it being the current 30min death watch and give more teams a better, more represented chance to place well overall.

My thought here is that the current 1 point per lap criteria doesn't quite give enough credit to those teams making it to within a lap or two of the finish, and the points are too heavily biased towards finishing the endurance event.

Thoughts?

Charles Kaneb

03-04-2014, 05:13 PM

MCoach

03-04-2014, 08:19 PM

Alumni,

are you in attendance to the Clean Snowmobile Competition? I'm here as a competitor right now so I find it interesting that you bring it up. Every member of our CSC team is part of our FSAE team. It allows us to test some techniques and technologies before they are allowed or approved by our FSAE team for competition in a lower risk environment.

Ironically, We've been trying to push CSC to adopt rules more akin with FSAE.

404namenotfound

03-05-2014, 09:57 AM

Maybe change the scores to "a few points for starting, a bunch of points for finishing, the rest for being competitive"?

Say 10 points per dynamic event for starting, 20 points for laying down a run that was faster than a minimal standard or completing the endurance race without being flagged off, and the other 70% for performance?

Consider the autocross, with four schools.

School A wins the event, time 53 1/2 seconds.
School B finishes tenth, time 57 1/4 seconds.
School C finishes 30th, time 62 3/4 seconds.
School D turns in a time of 80 seconds.

Under the current points system,
School A gets 150 points,
School B 100 points,
School C 45 points,
School D 7.5 points.

Seems reasonably fair, right?

How much would you really want to buy a race car that's three and three quarter seconds off the pace on a one-minute course? How much of a premium in upfront cost and maintenance would our hypothetical weekend autocrosser be willing to pay to be three and three quarter seconds faster? I'd say it would be about the difference in price between yesterday's newspaper and today's!

Change the performance points allocation to a 110%/125% rule, and now:

School A 150 points
School B 10 points for starting, 20 points for finishing within 125% of time, 107% of the time of School A giving 30% of the 120 performance points available for 36, summing to 66 points.
School C 10 points for starting, 20 points for finishing within 125% of time, 30 total points.
School D 10 points for starting, 10 total points.

Tony Adamowicz said "When the green flag drops, the bullshit stops." Describing what you did, why you did it, how you did it, and why it should add up to a very fast autocross car is important. Shouldn't proving that it is a very fast car be worth more? The point spread in the top 15 teams in autocross is about equal to the point spread between the top 15 teams in design today.

I feel that wouldn't work well. At our level of competition you can't really say a car that is 1 second faster on the auto-x course is 2% better and therefore deserves a significant reward in points because 2% is a big deal in real racing. It seems much more fair to say that a team that is actually abnormally slow, say one standard deviation, gets 0 points and the fastest team gets full points. Last year that would be 8.7 seconds off about 59.7 seconds which is a time of 68.4, that's just shy of the 145% rule that already exists and put the minimum time at 69.4.

With that I'd actually like to see a rule like that implemented anywhere that a score is calculated off something quantitative.

I do like the idea of giving points out for finishing an event. With endurance you could even scale it based on how many laps a team did. If they don't even make it one lap past the driver change they get 50% of the possible points for finishing, so maybe they walk away with 50-60 points. With the amount of teams that don't finish endurance it seems a little harsh to give them nothing. It means that even more of the mid pack's place at the end of competition is based on the static events and SP/acceleration.

404namenotfound

03-05-2014, 11:18 AM

I was writing a long winded reply about how the subjectively scored events have too much weight. No one wants to read that. Here is a short summary.

- Presentation and cost should be one "business" event IMO. There are 175 points between the two and 135 of them are essentially a marketing presentation, some of that comes from being graded on how good your materials are, another part of it is about reducing cost, and then you finally have the actual sales pitch.

- Presentation and cost should be worth fewer points overall. Those two events are worth more than SP and Acceleration, more than Auto-x, and a few teams get more points via cost and presentation than they do in endurance even after finishing.

- Its too easy to cheat on cost report, either get rid of it or make it easier to do correctly and review. Right now you're actually doing yourself a disservice by making it complete down to every last nut and bolt. My suggestion would be to remove fasteners and assembly time, every team is in roughly the same position on those.

Alumni

03-05-2014, 06:48 PM

Charles - Interesting concept and I like the idea, though my main concern is still with the disproportionate number of points associated with the endurance and related economy event.

MCoach - I'm not there. I would love to be and consider a return every year, but it's simply too far away to go for a few days of volunteer work (read: drinking and riding.) I always though it was probably the best run SAE event, though it clearly doesn't have the limitations imposed by the 100+ car counts of Baja or Formula.

404 - I agree that the points for static events need to be reconsidered a bit. I believe it was mostly Pat Clarke who invested a huge amount of time around 2010 to revising the cost report format to what it is now. It made the event much more realistic then it was (similar to Bill Riley's redoing of impact attenuator testing rules,) but suffering from the same sort of unforeseen consequences that the IA testing did. The current problem I see with the cost report is the time commitment required to pull it off probably isn't worth the points for most teams. Only a huge team will be able to commit enough team members to doing it well, and those teams probably have a well sorted "legacy" report they reuse every year due to general lack of changing of the format. Removing some of the simpler things like fasteners or assembly would help bring the time/points ratio into check but wouldn't address the legacy issue.

Alumni

03-05-2014, 06:59 PM

Also, since I brought up CSC, why doesn't FSAE have a welding test like Baja? Sure there isn't nearly the amount of contact or inversions as baja but if impact attenuators and side impact protection is considered important enough to be designed for shouldn't it have to be proven to be adequately welded? Not to mention seat belt mounts...

xander18

03-05-2014, 07:08 PM

I've been kicking around a peculiar idea, mostly inspired by some of the rule changes going on in MotoGP (and USCR, to a lesser degree). I think this thread would be the place to share it.

What about introducing an 'Unlimited' class and a 'Cheap' class? I don't have very many firm suggestions for these rules, maybe outlaw structural carbon fiber in the Cheap class, limited aero, I have no idea what else could be done. I can immediately think of a handful of pros and cons, most of which are also mirrored in professional motorsport, but it's an interesting idea and I'd be curious to hear other's thoughts.

mdavis

03-05-2014, 08:29 PM

Tony Adamowicz said "When the green flag drops, the bullshit stops."

In the end, I think this is what needs to be remembered. If the points are given for speed, people need to design for speed. If points are given for finishing, people will build tanks that are slow. That's not going to help industry, which was the original idea of this competition, right?

I do like the idea of giving points out for finishing an event. With endurance you could even scale it based on how many laps a team did. If they don't even make it one lap past the driver change they get 50% of the possible points for finishing, so maybe they walk away with 50-60 points. With the amount of teams that don't finish endurance it seems a little harsh to give them nothing. It means that even more of the mid pack's place at the end of competition is based on the static events and SP/acceleration.

Points for finishing less than the full event? Why? If you want points for finishing, finish the entire endurance. It took us 3 tries this year to finish endurance. Were we upset at the competition for not giving us points we did not earn? No. We accepted it, went back to the test track, and figured out our reliability issues, and then finished the full event. It's a whole lot sweeter if you earn the points, rather than someone dropping the bar so you can get over it, IMO.

- Presentation and cost should be one "business" event IMO. There are 175 points between the two and 135 of them are essentially a marketing presentation, some of that comes from being graded on how good your materials are, another part of it is about reducing cost, and then you finally have the actual sales pitch.

- Presentation and cost should be worth fewer points overall. Those two events are worth more than SP and Acceleration, more than Auto-x, and a few teams get more points via cost and presentation than they do in endurance even after finishing.

- Its too easy to cheat on cost report, either get rid of it or make it easier to do correctly and review. Right now you're actually doing yourself a disservice by making it complete down to every last nut and bolt. My suggestion would be to remove fasteners and assembly time, every team is in roughly the same position on those.

1. If anything is going to change in the Presentation event, it needs to be more continuity between judging groups. We won Presentation in Canada, and up against similar teams that finished top 5 (Kettering, for 1), we were nowhere to be found in Lincoln, and we had a better presentation, and more legitimate numbers. The judging feedback? Things weren't lined up in our presentation. Nothing to do with the content of the presentation, and 1 of the judges walked in after lunch late, halfway through the presentation.

2. If anything is going to change in the cost report, IMO, it needs to be how composites are costed. Costing a final component based on weight is a really good way to drive up costs to the teams and provide highly unrealistic cost numbers. I know of 1 purpose built weekend autocross car that is a monocoque (and even then, it is folded aluminum, not carbon fiber), and I found a post at 1 point where the guy that designed and built the car said he wouldn't do it again if given the chance. So why are carbon monocoques not being given the cost penalty that they should have, when the 1 guy that actually runs a tub car in the SCCA says he would never do it again? I do not doubt there is going to be a performance gain (I have not personally done any points based analysis, as the idea of a tub was far beyond my team's capabilities) by going from a spaceframe to a tub, and there is likely a significant cost penalty. But (I have not seen a tub team's cost report, even though they were supposed to be publicized) I do not see that happening, based on the final cost of vehicles using lots of structural carbon. To me, that does not make sense.

-Matt

404namenotfound

03-05-2014, 09:32 PM

In the end, I think this is what needs to be remembered. If the points are given for speed, people need to design for speed. If points are given for finishing, people will build tanks that are slow. That's not going to help industry, which was the original idea of this competition, right?

Points for finishing less than the full event? Why? If you want points for finishing, finish the entire endurance. It took us 3 tries this year to finish endurance. Were we upset at the competition for not giving us points we did not earn? No. We accepted it, went back to the test track, and figured out our reliability issues, and then finished the full event. It's a whole lot sweeter if you earn the points, rather than someone dropping the bar so you can get over it, IMO.

Our team actually has a decent track record of finishing and we did last year.

Maybe I'm thinking of the intent of competition being different than it is but here is where I'm coming from. You can have a team that builds a "good" car barring one oversight like an end plate not being bonded correctly or a brake light going out. Now they're out halfway though endurance and are sitting low mid pack with a bunch of teams that never made it more than a lap. I'd argue that car was still a good car even if is crapped out.

1. If anything is going to change in the Presentation event, it needs to be more continuity between judging groups. We won Presentation in Canada, and up against similar teams that finished top 5 (Kettering, for 1), we were nowhere to be found in Lincoln, and we had a better presentation, and more legitimate numbers. The judging feedback? Things weren't lined up in our presentation. Nothing to do with the content of the presentation, and 1 of the judges walked in after lunch late, halfway through the presentation.

2. If anything is going to change in the cost report, IMO, it needs to be how composites are costed. Costing a final component based on weight is a really good way to drive up costs to the teams and provide highly unrealistic cost numbers. I know of 1 purpose built weekend autocross car that is a monocoque (and even then, it is folded aluminum, not carbon fiber), and I found a post at 1 point where the guy that designed and built the car said he wouldn't do it again if given the chance. So why are carbon monocoques not being given the cost penalty that they should have, when the 1 guy that actually runs a tub car in the SCCA says he would never do it again? I do not doubt there is going to be a performance gain (I have not personally done any points based analysis, as the idea of a tub was far beyond my team's capabilities) by going from a spaceframe to a tub, and there is likely a significant cost penalty. But (I have not seen a tub team's cost report, even though they were supposed to be publicized) I do not see that happening, based on the final cost of vehicles using lots of structural carbon. To me, that does not make sense.

-Matt

I have never done the cost on composite parts, I imagine it must be wonky.

What I have a lot of problems with is when I'm siting here counting nuts, bolts, and washers, and then putting them into cost. I know for a fact other teams do not do this, so every bolt that a judge will never notice is driving the cost of our car up.

mdavis

03-05-2014, 10:17 PM

Our team actually has a decent track record of finishing and we did last year.

Maybe I'm thinking of the intent of competition being different than it is but here is where I'm coming from. You can have a team that builds a "good" car barring one oversight like an end plate not being bonded correctly or a brake light going out. Now they're out halfway though endurance and are sitting low mid pack with a bunch of teams that never made it more than a lap. I'd argue that car was still a good car even if is crapped out.

I have never done the cost on composite parts, I imagine it must be wonky.

What I have a lot of problems with is when I'm siting here counting nuts, bolts, and washers, and then putting them into cost. I know for a fact other teams do not do this, so every bolt that a judge will never notice is driving the cost of our car up.

The way I see it is that if the car doesn't finish endurance, they don't deserve the points for finishing endurance, no matter what the failure was, or where they end up in the rankings. Michigan Ann Arbor and S&T in Michigan had better cars than us. We ran more of the endurance event than they did. Should we somehow get more points because we finished 17 and 6 more laps (respectively) than they did? To me, that doesn't make sense. Waterloo finished right behind us. They finished endurance, but drove really slow in autocross (39 points). We were also significantly better in Cost and Presentation (at least according to the score sheets, I have no idea what the level of preparation Waterloo had in their static events, so I cannot comment on whether or not the scores were "fair" or not), which is what gave us the edge overall. I personally like the current endurance scoring system. You get points for what you accomplish, but not "participation" points, even though the 1 point per lap thing could be seen as participation points rather than achievement points.

As for the cost report details, we had 1 guy working on the report for ~3-4 months. Our subteam leaders would help with their specific subsection (getting engine details from the engine guy, or suspension details from the suspension guy) but that was about it. Our cost report guy did very little beyond the cost report. Our car was probably one of the simplest in the paddock, and we ended up with an adjusted cost of $13,121. Manitoba had a carbon tub, electric shifting, electronic dash, etc. and somehow came up with an adjusted cost of $12,601. I ask anyone that saw our 2 cars at either of the US competitions this past year (I don't think Manitoba went to FN 2013), does this seem correct? Maybe we weren't playing the cost game correctly, and that's fully possible, and if that's the case, then props to the teams doing it better than us. But that seems to be one event that needs work, if rules changes are going to happen.

-Matt

Alumni

03-06-2014, 07:25 AM

Edward M. Kasprzak

03-06-2014, 08:33 AM

Alumni,

I'm not sure what your experiences have been, but I can add this data point: In my design queues we have always considered serviceability. In fact, it is combined with manufacturability as one of the major subtopics in our first round scoring guide. We've seen the full range, and scored it accordingly. Perhaps you'd like to see more emphasis on serviceability, but it is not forgotten in the design event. Perhaps more evidence of this in the design feedback is needed (?).

Also, I'd like to note that simplicity and serviceability do not necessarily correlate. For example, "fancy electronics" can be very serviceable with well-labeled wires (and not all white!), smart wiring paths, standardized connectors, easy access to the electronics "box", easy access to a port for laptop connection (e.g., in the dash, not under the seat--yes, I've seen this), a sensible human interface to the system (maybe a GUI?), good fault logic, system diagnostics and calibration tools.

mdavis

03-06-2014, 06:28 PM

Once upon a time, serviceability was actually taken into consideration. Everything from accessibility of the oil dipstick to ability to change rear sprockets.

Not sure why they stopped taking that part of design seriously, but I can't imagine a car with expensive carbon work and fancy electronics should ever do well in that part of the competition, even though it's a small portion of points.

Last year it wasn't something that our design judges asked about, but it was something we had to point out. When we pointed out some of our serviceability items in the design, the judges were very receptive and liked most of the ideas (from what I heard).

-Matt

Kevin Hayward

03-07-2014, 08:16 AM

Please try and avoid bashing composite parts as if the arguments on high cost and low serviceability are obvious. Composite manufacturing techniques and approaches are quite varied, and can be made very easy to work on and very cheap. Just in the same way that steel structures can be made complicated, difficult to repair, and very expensive. The argument is quite odd considering virtually all FSAE cars run composite structures of some sort. Some just choose to make their bodywork structural.

Once again I have a group of first years starting. I am sure just like the last batch they will be laying up wing elements, and helping with chassis construction, with a couple of hours of instruction; and just like the last lot only a very small fraction will be capable of welding uprights within 3 years.

Any rules that attempt to penalise composite use, just because it is obviously more difficult, more expensive, and less serviceable, will do a disservice to the competition, and to the training of future students.

Kev

mdavis

03-07-2014, 10:17 AM

Kevin,

I have no problems with composite parts, their use, or anything about them. Whether a team wants to use composites, steel, whatever materials is their choice, and they should choose whatever material is best for them in their situation. We had good welders, so we used a lot of steel. Someone like Washington who has a lot of aerospace near them probably should use carbon, since that is a way to draw sponsorship to the team, and really train the team members for jobs in industry.

The thing that I have a problem with is the way composite parts are costed in the cost report. I can see, and agree with, the way additive manufactured parts are costed, that makes sense to me. But composite parts being costed by final weight, regardless of the amount of material or pre-work it takes to make that part doesn't make sense to me. Even putting in a fixed cost for the mold prep chemicals and time to prep the mold would help. Then again, if you do that, you would have to add jig setup time for tubeframe cars, which honestly isn't the worst idea, imo. My thought is not that you need to get to actual cost to make composite parts (tubeframe costs are not 100% correct, so I do not expect composite tub costs to be either) or the cost for the logistical support needed to make them, but my intention would be to get the costs closer to actual cost.

I guess I should add the disclaimer that I have never done a cost report on a composite tub (we had 1 piece of body work that had any carbon in it last year, and the seat, but that was it) and since the cost reports have not been made public (to my knowledge) then I do not know all of the specifics to costing a composite chassis (or other part, honestly). I'm simply basing my information off of what I have experienced in reading the cost report rules.

-Matt

bob.paasch

03-07-2014, 12:59 PM

Any rules that attempt to penalise composite use, just because it is obviously more difficult, more expensive, and less serviceable, will do a disservice to the competition, and to the training of future students.

Emphasis mine.

We currently manufacture every carbon part on both cars here at OSU, although the DHBW-R has a carbon lab on their architectural plan that should come online in 2016.

At their most basic level, universities are in the human resources business. In the last 3 years OSU has sent 7 people to work at SpaceX and another 6 or so to Boeing. Those placements would not have happened if GFR built vehicles with steel tube chassis.

mdavis

03-07-2014, 01:25 PM

Dr. Paasch,

I completely understand that designing and building a composite chassis can lead to very good jobs for students. I mentioned that in my above post. And for the teams that have students with that desire, I think there is nothing at all wrong with a composite chassis. I went back and looked at the carbon tub teams from Michigan 2013, and most of them have a cost of $16k+. This number makes sense to me. There are a few teams, however, that have a composite chassis, tons of data aq, lots of fancy electrical things (which are not cheap), and they have a cost of $11-14k (the same as cars without all of the electrical extras and fancy do-dads that cost a lot of money).

So, I guess I spoke too soon, and I should have really made my argument against a very small minority of teams, that also happen to run composite chassis. It should be noted that the few teams with very low costing composite chassis cars also have rather low scores for the report portion of the cost event.

-Matt

Racer-X

03-08-2014, 02:02 AM

I propose we change how registration is done for FSAE Michigan and FSAE West.

I'm just going to say this now so my position makes sense. I think Michigan should be the "A" competition and Lincoln should be the "B" competition for new teams and those that do poorly in multiple events.

Right now Waterloo, UTA, Columbia, and Texas A&M are all on the wait list for Michigan while other teams that have rather poor track records are registered. I don't know why exactly this is but I have to imagine it wasn't intentional.

My solution to this would be break registration up into a few different groups that each have a day to register.

Group 1: Top 10 teams from both US FSAE events and top 5 from all the other FSAE and FS events may register for Michigan.
Group 2: Top 40 Teams from Michigan and top 30 from Lincoln and all other competitions can register for Michigan.
Group 3: Open registration for Michigan.
Group 4: Teams that are not registered for Michigan can register for Lincoln
Group 5: Open registration at Lincoln.

This is similar to what we have now but favors teams that have done well the previous year and ensures they'll have a spot.

_J_

03-12-2014, 04:57 AM

Pat Clarke's recent blog: https://www.formulastudent.de/fsg/pr/news/details/article/pats-corner-engine-choices/

This was brought to a head recently when the FSG management committee instigated some changes to the Formula for cars running at FSG. These related to suspension mounted aero (something that should never have been allowed in the first place) as well as some other needed amendments.

We should never forget that FS is an educational exercise with a motorsport theme rather than a pure motorsport event and the rules should reflect this.
But before contributing, remember what the intent of the FSG event is, an educational exercise, so bright ideas that will make the cars go faster will probably not get much attention.

One suggestion I like is to increase the maximum engine capacity from 610cc to 650cc or something similar. This suggestion has been rejected by the rules committee in the past on two grounds.

Of course, all this only affects the entrants in the combustion class of FS competitions, a class which is becoming less relevant as Universities see more educational opportunities if they concentrate on electric vehicles.

The EV’s, of course, have a need for rules revisions. It has been shown that attempting to permit EVs and Combustion cars to compete directly against each other has not led to fair competition. Rules changes are mooted to level the performance advantage of the electric cars in order to present a more level playing field.

Finally, another issue concerning event organisers and the Rules committee is the number of cars seen up on two wheels at recent events. Cars with aero packages that include large wing endplates are particularly susceptible to being blown over in this situation if they encounter a side wind gust.

Charles Kaneb

03-12-2014, 06:37 PM

Pat,

That should read "Those related to suspension-mounted aero (which should never have been banned in any other form of motorsport to begin with)" ! Yes, I know what happened at the Spanish G.P. in 1969. I also know that Chaparral and McLaren had no unsprung-wing failures between 1967 and 1969 on even faster cars. Bad mechanical design and underestimating your loads from lift, aero moment, and drag can cause a part of any type to break!

Fixed, body-mounted wings are irrelevant to road cars. 5 hp worth of drag at a 75 mph cruise is over 1 MPG lost on a passenger car.

Movable, unsprung aero would allow us to build cars with narrower tires, smaller brakes, less drag even going dead straight with everything tucked in, and not have to worry as much about pitch angle changes due to different loads and speeds. It is expensive and difficult to get anything tested in a production-car environment. It is comparatively easy and cheap to try it in a racing environment - if it's legal. It is even better when it's student-designed as these people are the ones the automakers will hire!

If you want to change the aero rules, how about these:

1) Cut the front overhang from 30" to 24". This will reduce the size of a front wing, and also control the rear wing size due to the difficulty of balancing the reduced moment available.
2) Increase the tilt test angle from 60 degrees to 66 degrees, getting the critical acceleration past the 2g that many aero teams can reach. Don't try to argue cold-tire, 25 mph skidpad figures as realistic measures of maximum lateral acceleration. Get Missouri S&T, Washington, or Kansas data from Lincoln 2013 in the showcase turn.
3) Add a rule saying that no wing elements or endplates can exceed the height of the main roll hoop. This will lower c.g. heights and in many cases will reduce the energy of the incident air to the rear wing.
4) Change the ground-clearance rule: "No part of the car not made of pine, plastic with a Shore durometer below 80, or rubber may touch the ground at any point during any dynamic event..." Who knows, we might get a sliding-skirt design that actually works worth a darn out of it!

-CPK

Pat Clarke

03-12-2014, 07:33 PM

Charles.

I don't make or change the rules ;-) I just comment and am entitled to have an opinion, as are you :-)

Pat

Alumni

03-12-2014, 07:59 PM

Once again Pat hits the nail on the head with his column, and really gets me going regarding the attitude that most europeans have toward the US competitions. Yes - FSUK and FSG are better events than FSAE. We get it already! SAE was all but dissolved a few years ago so we're still recovering and changing in new guard that "gets it."

Oh, and Charles, your proposed rule #3 will simply result in taller roll hoops. ;)

Charles Kaneb

03-12-2014, 08:04 PM

Yes, and when these opinions disagree, I think it's a good idea to have a discussion!

I think you've made a few very inaccurate statements about Texas's finest racing cars (the Chaparral/Chevrolets) and a lot of people trust your opinions on the development of racing rules. Please re-read the chapters on the development of the Chaparrals in Milliken's RCVD, or the race reports contained in Pete Lyons's "Can-Am" book. The Chaparral 2J "Vacuum Traction Vehicle" did not immediately the road when the JLO/Rockwell two-stroke stopped running - neither Jackie Stewart or Vic Elford crashed the car during its only season in 1970 and either the fan engine or the big Chevy suffered problems in every race. The undercar volume (roughly 10' long, 5' wide, 3" tall so 12 ft^3) and forward leakage area (5'-10' of forward-facing leakage length, 1/4" clearance so 1/4 ft^2) gave it a time-constant of almost a second at 100 ft/s. If the fan engine quit in a corner the car's cornering power gradually dropped to the point where it was 3-5 seconds per lap slower than the other Can-Am cars. Chaparral suffered unsprung-rear-wing failures in 1966 - and then they redesigned the rear wing mounts with the data they'd recorded that season.

My opinion on this topic is that if you want the racing to draw engineers towards a difficult problem and project, keep the problem and solution set open to as many solutions as you can.

Charles Kaneb

03-12-2014, 08:15 PM

The taller roll hoops will do a better job at preventing the wing from coming forward and clonking the driver on the head!

dr. ill

03-12-2014, 09:15 PM

The taller roll hoops will do a better job at preventing the wing from coming forward and clonking the driver on the head!

Physics and this video seem to debunk the myth of forward rotating wings :0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTIDUyOp51c

Pat Clarke

03-12-2014, 09:19 PM

Charles, please be fair and do not attribute words to me that I never wrote, intended or alluded to.

I never mentioned Chaparral and your discourse on the 2J means nothing here as 'powered ground effects' have long been banned.

The column I wrote pointed people to this thread where discussion could be made about potential rules changes.

I stated some opinion, my opinion, but that is all it is.

My last word on the topic.

Pat

sjfehr

03-23-2014, 02:12 PM

Dunk Mckay

03-27-2014, 03:22 PM

It's not so much an amendment to the rules, I promise I am going to go through them and highlight a few things I think could be improved.

I'm wondering if it might be possible to consider an Alumni class. I know of at least a dozen of my old team's Alumni that would be up for building a budget formula student car. It wouldn't be to compete against the student teams, but just to go along and have a bit of fun. Without the support of a university's bank account or the likelihood of much sponsorship these would probably be self funded, so would really demonstrate how a group of perhaps slightly more experienced engineers would go about designing and building a car with very little time and very little budget; demonstrating some very efficient engineering. Also there wouldn't be so much concern about being the best car there, so there would probably be a lot of experimentation with the concepts. I'd be willing to bet that if FSUK (for example) announced, with say 2 years notice, that they were going to have maybe 4 or 5 slots for alumni teams, they wouldn't struggle to fill them and they would see 4 or 5 very interesting and probably all very different cars.

Greenpower have had some success with both their Formula 24+ and Corporate Challenge categories. I probably wouldn't be too keen to go the corporate route with an FSAE based event, as then cars will be turning up that would potentially put all student teams to shame, which probably would take some fun out of it for said student teams. Perhaps if the corporate fee was significantly higher, so they would in essence be supporting the event, and they had additional restrictions on performance, such as a minimum weight (200kg?) and perhaps smaller restrictor size (18mm instead of 20?).

Basically I just want to come back and do it all again, me and some my old team mates have some really fun ideas we'd love to try. But I also don't necessarily want to be relying on an employer to start a team (if it were purely a corporate thing). Any chance of that happening?

sjfehr

03-27-2014, 05:07 PM

Dunk, not sure if it's what you're looking for, but SCCA explicitly allows non-students to build and compete in cars built to any year's FSAE rules:

18.5 FORMULA SAE (FSAE)
A. Vehicles constructed to any single year’s Formula SAE rules (1985-
on) to include all FSAE safety items for that single year are eligible
to run in SCCA® Solo® events. The FSAE rulebook year shall be
specified on the entry form and those rules shall be provided by the
entrant for viewing.
B. Non-students may build, own, and compete in FSAE vehicles.
C. In addition to FSAE safety rules, SCCA® safety rules per the ap
plicable portions of Sections 3.3 and 18.4.A shall be met. Passing
vehicle inspection at a prior FSAE event is not required.
D. Transponder and FSAE lettering shall not be required.
E. These vehicles are assigned to Supplemental Class FSAE, which
may run as a subgroup of AM but shall be scored separately. An
FSAE car may only compete directly in AM if it meets all AM requirements
and specfications. FSAE cars must also meet the following
minimum criteria:
1. Current year FSAE restrictor plate and engine displacement
rules. Restrictor requirements are as follows:
a. Gasoline fuel: 20.0 mm (0.7874”) intake restrictor
b. E85 fuel: 19.0 mm (0.7480”) intake restrictor
c. M85 fuel: 18.0 mm (0.7087”) intake restrictor
2. Current year FSAE aerodynamic rules
F. FSAE vehicles may not mix and match specifications from multiple
years except as specified above.

Dunk Mckay

03-27-2014, 06:34 PM

It's something, although not much use to us in the UK. But it's really the interaction with existing uni teams, the nostalgia of an FS/FSAE competition, running on the same tracks, on the same stage, so to speak. That's kind of the key thing. Being able to show all the current teams what a bit more thought and experience can do with less money and less time (hopefully opening them up to more outside the box ground up thinking, rather than copying the standard formula), also interacting with the judges as well, getting their thoughts and opinions.

Also, if it helps to justify it to the mucky-mucks, not being under the pressure of it being the last time you're ever going to have the chance to compete could make a difference for some teams. Teams that have the support from their universities to do well, but rarely do, because team members try to leave their mark, which means people try to go all out on one car and generally failing because they've overstepped themselves and asked for too much. This can also cost the following year's team, and it becomes a vicious cycle of descent. It's been talked about on here before and I've seen it first hand; leading a team that on paper should have been the best team the uni had in years to build one of the worst cars it had had in just as long. Knowing there are alumni teams out there that one could join or start up after finishing uni could help alleviate this problem.

Dunk Mckay

03-28-2014, 09:53 AM

Ok, I have a had a serious read through and would like ot put forward the following suggestions:

1. Existing rule: Part AF – Alternative Frame Rules (in the case of space frames)
2. Existing shortcoming: Overcomplicates the rule book for teams who have opted to go with a space frame. It is also not eligible at some events unless previously scrutineered at other events where it is eligible. One of the key points I think has been highlighted is that it would be nice to have one single rule book agreed upon by all competition organizers (no addendums other than those required due to venue differences).
I would add also, that if there were some advantage to be had from these rules then it penalizes those teams that cannot attend said pre-qualifying events where it legal, or worse still who intend to but miss out during the application phase and then their chassis designed car become ineligible for the event they do make it to.
I understand that it is supposed to provide “expanded design freedom for space frames” but, to be honest I don’t believe it makes enough of a difference to be worthwhile. It’s just more confusing rules for people to have to read through and figure out when they are first starting out (either new teams or just new team members).
3. Suggested improvement: Get rid of it. Have a separate section purely for monocoques that makes thing clear-cut and simple.
4. Summary: This will simplify things for new teams or new designers trying to build a simple car, who are worried that they will lose out if they don’t fully investigate all their options. And in the case that it somehow provides a performance advantage would not penalize those teams that cannot enter in pre-qualifying events. The rules need to be shorter and more welcoming, not longer and difficult to get one’s head around.

1. Existing rule: Part EV – Electric vehicles
2. Existing shortcoming: This should be a clear cut different class to combustion, and all event organizers should be discouraged from merging the two classes as they cannot fairly be scored in parallel. This also means that it is a waste of space and more pages to flick through for non EV teams. Reciprocally, they EV teams have to scroll through Combustion rules they don’t care about.
3. Suggested improvement: Have separate rulebooks for combustion and electric. They can be identical in almost every other way, but in a separate document. Making it simpler for those that already know which type of car they are going for, and no more complicated for those that are still deciding, who can simply look through both rule books.
4. Summary: Again, simplifying things for all involved. Also will hopefully ensure teams are competing or a more level playing field, where fudge factors in the scoring system don’t arbitrarily decide who wins and who is a runner up. Being separate would also open up opportunities for the class to diverge further, maximizing the potential they provide to both teams. For starters, safety regulations with regards to electrical insulation in carbon chassis can be integrated into chassis rules properly, rather than being tacked on afterwards. But that is probably just the tip of the iceberg, differing aero rules to promote the best options for efficiency and performance in both classes, different lengths for acceleration runs to challenge the two classes in different ways, the list goes on.

It’s been said before but:
1. Existing rule: T3.24 – Front Bodywork vs. T9.3 Minimum Radii of Edges of Aerodynamic Devices
2. Existing shortcoming: These contradict each other.
3. Suggested improvement: The whole bodywork and aero rules need a rethink. I understand that having thing end-plates is unavoidable, but we don’t want to allow teams to turn up with ice-cream cone noses either, so make it clear that either it’s just noses that have the large radius rule, or that specific items such as end-plates are excluded and that it is a known exception, not just an oversight that no one can be bothered to address.
4. Summary: We all know the whole bodywork shebang hasn't been ideal for a while. So this would be a good opportunity to start from scratch and clearly define what counts as which and what rules apply. Having them under the same rules section would probably actually help clear this up and there will be no need to refer to page XX to call out an exception, it would just state “this, not this” and move on without confusion. While you’re at it why not add in a nice easy puncture test to ensure people aren't wrapping their cars in wafer thin materials that are rigid, but wouldn't stop a fast moving flea from getting into the cockpit, let alone track debris that has been thrown into the driver at semi ballistic speeds.

1. Existing rule: Article 12: Transponders
2. Existing shortcoming: Every event I've been to uses a different type of transponder and mounting method. Having one overall rule that doesn't apply at a number of non-US events is very US centric, for what has no become an international competition.
3. Suggested improvement: Either get every single event to subscribe to using the exact same transponder so teams can plan things out easily. Or perhaps more likely, just put in a one liner saying something along the lines of: “each event will have its own transponder system; see their additional rulebook for details.
4. Pretty straightforward, cut another page out of the “all-encompassing rulebook” that isn't actually all encompassing.

1. Existing rule: Article 13: Transponders
2. Existing shortcoming: Different events have their own variation on this, making this page redundant.
3. Suggested improvement: Unlike with the transponders this doesn't cost anyone anything to just you the same rule for every event. So get everyone together and come up with an all-encompassing system that everyone agrees to and forbid addendums that mean teams have to waste time reworking their livery and sponsorship logos between competitions. With the exception of the SAE logo, as different events are run by different organizations (IMechE for example). But at least agree upon and define a specific size and location for the organizers logo. I’d add here that the IMechE’s insistence on massive logos on the front and both sides of the car is ridiculous; they can put up big banners around the track, why do they have to take up so much valuable sponsorship space on our cars as well. Especially when it can really disrupt a team’s livery; taking yet more fun out of the competition.

As you can see there has been a bit of a theme here. With most teams have a very high turnover every year; I feel that having a long rule book to learn is counter-productive for the competition. Some are turned off, others do not do a very good job of reading the rules and it costs time in scrutineering. I would very much like to see a rulebook that is at least under 100 pages, 80 or below would be ideal.

I'd now quickly like to list the suggested rule improvements for 2015 that I strongly agree with:

T15.8 Noise Test – To improve the sound quality of single cylinder engines for track workers the sound
measuring units may be changed to dBC. This is more consistent with human hearing at the higher volumes
called out in the rules. Cheap, commercially available sound meters are generally able to display dBC. The
committee is also considering a reduction in the noise level.

T15.10 Design Event – The committee is considering including the objective of value in the design event
objectives. This is to make it clear to all participants that a cost effective car which is well executed should be
able to score well in the design event. This will result in the design event being judged on the three main
objectives of Design for Performance, Design for Value and the knowledge of the team members. The
committee hopes that this will change the perception of the design event so that it is clear that a large budget is
not a prerequisite to winning the design event.

T15.11 Cost Event – The committee is considering a major revamp of the cost event such that it addresses
product / component engineering issues including design for cost, design for manufacturing, design for
sustainability and the life cycle of the product. Students will be expected to have an appreciation of all areas of
relating to product / component engineering which will be important in their engineering careers. The
committee would appreciate feedback and proposals on how the cost event might be changed to improve its
value to the students as part of this revamp.
(Any revamp of the cost event that actually works towards levelling the playing field for poorer teams is fine by me)

T15.13 Efficiency – The efficiency event is being reviewed to determine whether the influence of lap time on
the efficiency score is in line with the intent of the rule.
(I haven't quite figure out what the proposed equation would do, but seeing as teams are already awarded a huge amounts of point based on time, I think if we're going to try to promote good fuel economy at all then all that really needs considering at all is the amount of fuel used. Teams are going to want to go fast anyway, so using lap-times as a factor when looking at fuel consumed is just going to promote more time thinking about speed and less time thinking about fuel economy. That being said, you don't want a team to trundle round slowly purely to win fuel economy, so put a reasonable 1xx% rule in there, but based on the average lap time, not the fastest.)

Think that about does it for me for now.

sjfehr

03-28-2014, 11:36 AM

"This car sure is fast, but I wish I could trade some of that speed for fuel efficiency!" - said no autocrosser, ever. Why does this part of the competition even exist? Seriously, fuel efficiency plays no part, whatsoever, in autocross. I'd pour 2 gallons per run in my car it made me faster.

There's plenty of time after graduation for practical things; FSAE should be fun.

mdavis

03-28-2014, 12:17 PM

I'd now quickly like to list the suggested rule improvements for 2015 that I strongly agree with:

T15.8 Noise Test – To improve the sound quality of single cylinder engines for track workers the sound
measuring units may be changed to dBC. This is more consistent with human hearing at the higher volumes
called out in the rules. Cheap, commercially available sound meters are generally able to display dBC. The
committee is also considering a reduction in the noise level.

Coming from a single cylinder team, I have to ask why? There are some single cylinder teams that have admitted to cheating to get through noise (when we asked after they had a few beers), and I have a feeling those 3ish teams are why you agree with this (all of them competed in Germany last year). If the goal of the noise test is to quiet down the cars on track, then test noise on track and take away points for being over a certain noise value. Currently, you can buy an off the shelf muffler, slightly alter your tune, and pass noise with a single cylinder. You may be at 110 dbA, but you can pass. We had our car checked in dbC at Lincoln last year, and the same exact setup tested at 119 dbC. If that rule is implemented, then you are going to remove the possibility of running a single off the shelf muffler from a team's set of options, and they will either have to run 2 mufflers or custom build their own. For us last year, it was a conscious choice to simply buy a muffler that we knew would get us extremely close, and spend the time it would have taken to design/build a complex muffler on other things. We were a team where we had some money, but not many man hours to work with (less than 10 people that actually put in time), so anything we could do to save those man hours was done.

If the goal is an engineering exercise of designing a muffler, then well, any rule set can do this, and I think it's stupid, personally.

hughm

03-29-2014, 05:33 AM

Coming from a single cylinder team, I have to ask why? There are some single cylinder teams that have admitted to cheating to get through noise (when we asked after they had a few beers), and I have a feeling those 3ish teams are why you agree with this (all of them competed in Germany last year). If the goal of the noise test is to quiet down the cars on track, then test noise on track and take away points for being over a certain noise value. Currently, you can buy an off the shelf muffler, slightly alter your tune, and pass noise with a single cylinder. You may be at 110 dbA, but you can pass. We had our car checked in dbC at Lincoln last year, and the same exact setup tested at 119 dbC. If that rule is implemented, then you are going to remove the possibility of running a single off the shelf muffler from a team's set of options, and they will either have to run 2 mufflers or custom build their own. For us last year, it was a conscious choice to simply buy a muffler that we knew would get us extremely close, and spend the time it would have taken to design/build a complex muffler on other things. We were a team where we had some money, but not many man hours to work with (less than 10 people that actually put in time), so anything we could do to save those man hours was done.

If the goal is an engineering exercise of designing a muffler, then well, any rule set can do this, and I think it's stupid, personally.

The point to avoid hearing damage for track marshals and spectators. Not really stupid.

MCoach

03-29-2014, 03:29 PM

mdavis, proper exhaust system design does not mean it needs to be complicated. I also participate in the Clean Snowmobile Challenge where we have won the noise event (make the sled the quiestest) the past two years. Here is a picture from our muffler from last year where we were able to hit 73 dbA at WOT. It has a 'flap design' and weighs about 3 lbs. The system is a 600cc ACE 4-stroke turbo 2 cylinder with a catalyst and tiny muffler. We were still able to make north of 90hp in testing.

http://www.mtukrc.org/csc2013pix/Monday/imagepages/image95.html

As a single cylinder formula team, we run a very similar design, just a bit longer and no flap and passed at Lincoln very easily at 107(?) dbA I believe.

https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-frc3/t31.0-8/976356_592465004118214_1133516883_o.jpg

BeunMan

03-30-2014, 05:03 AM

The point to avoid hearing damage for track marshals and spectators. Not really stupid.

And on track limitations, like at silverstone and hockenheim, it is also not a bad idea.

mdavis

03-30-2014, 07:47 PM

The point to avoid hearing damage for track marshals and spectators. Not really stupid.

So then a car that is legitimately 110 dbA on track should not be a problem. A car that cheated the noise test and got through, pulled the plug out of their exhaust and then is running louder on track should face consequences. Don't punish all teams for the actions of a few.

mdavis, proper exhaust system design does not mean it needs to be complicated. I also participate in the Clean Snowmobile Challenge where we have won the noise event (make the sled the quiestest) the past two years. Here is a picture from our muffler from last year where we were able to hit 73 dbA at WOT. It has a 'flap design' and weighs about 3 lbs. The system is a 600cc ACE 4-stroke turbo 2 cylinder with a catalyst and tiny muffler. We were still able to make north of 90hp in testing.

http://www.mtukrc.org/csc2013pix/Monday/imagepages/image95.html

As a single cylinder formula team, we run a very similar design, just a bit longer and no flap and passed at Lincoln very easily at 107(?) dbA I believe.

https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-frc3/t31.0-8/976356_592465004118214_1133516883_o.jpg

Did they test dbC with your car in Lincoln? I would consider your car to be quiet (even though I'm sure our engine guys could easily find 3dbA on our car last year if they tried for about 20 minutes), especially compared to some of the other singles. I agree it doesn't need to be complicated, but could you get that design down to 105 dbC or a similar value? How much extra weight would it add?

-Matt

03-31-2014, 12:03 AM

I know of at least a dozen of my old team's Alumni that would be up for building a budget formula student car. It wouldn't be to compete against the student teams, but just to go along and have a bit of fun.
...
these would probably be self funded, so would really demonstrate how a group of perhaps slightly more experienced engineers would go about designing and building a car with very little time and very little budget; demonstrating some very efficient engineering.
...
Being able to show all the current teams what a bit more thought and experience can do with less money and less time (hopefully opening them up to more outside the box ground up thinking, rather than copying the standard formula)...

I am very much in favour of this sort of "teaching". Also allowing other similar sized, but non-FSAE "racecars" (eg. go-karts) to do demonstration runs in, say, Accel, Skid-Pad, and AutoX, to show the students that much, much, simpler cars can have similar performance to the top FSAEers.

It is becoming increasingly obvious to me that the vast majority of FSAE students have very little idea of the full range of car-types that could potentially do well in FSAE. Instead, each new generation of students simply copies the same-old, same-old, standard configuration FSAE car that they have seen before. And then they make it a bit more complicated...

Most "learning" done by H. Sapiens is of the "monkey see, monkey do" type. It is a fact! For example, young footballers only ever learn the highest skills by watching, and then mimicking, the best players. It is simply impossible to instill these skills in a "theoretical", classroom-like, way.

Currently the students are simply mimicking the "standard cars" that they see at FSAE comps. Most of their classroom teaching isn't helping them break out of this cycle. (In fact, it doesn't seem to be teaching them much of anything, at all!) The best way to break out of this cycle, IMO, is to expose the students to an as diverse as possible range of potentially winning solutions. Which means introducing outside thinking...
~o0o~

By way of analogy :), imagine an English class full of FSAE Team Captains. The teacher asks each of them to write an original short story of the "mystery" or "horror" genre. I would bet that 99% of the essays (Edit: well, waaay too many) would begin with something like:
"It was a dark and stormy night..."

Teacher - "I said ORIGINAL!!!"

FSAEers (all in chorus) - "Awww, but honest Sir, I thought it up all by myself..."

Here are some more literary equivalents of the "we are aiming for ultimate simplicity and reliability" type of thinking that is often heard in FSAE, but rarely seen...

"It Was A Dark and Stormy Night..." competition winners. (http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/lyttony.html)

Note that you win this competition by having the WORST, most awful, most turgid, most unnecesarily complicated, and least elegant, opening line to a novel. Hmmm, a lot like many FSAE cars! :)
~~~~~o0o~~~~~

Originally posted by Dunk:
I feel that having a long rule book to learn is counter-productive for the competition. Some are turned off, others do not do a very good job of reading the rules and it costs time in scrutineering. I would very much like to see a rulebook that is at least under 100 pages, 80 or below would be ideal.

Again, agreed. And apparently many others here agree too.

But I cannot see this ever happening while the current Rules Committe (or similar ones) are making the decisions. Essentially, I reckon the current committee members are all trying to win the above "Worst Possible Prose" contest! (I have just had another skim through the Rules, and there is some shockingly over-complicated, inconsistent, and meaningless gibberish in there.)

FWIW, all Engineering Documentation Standards that I have ever seen from around the world, have a clause somewhere up-front that says something like:
"The Documentation Package must be complete and concise...
... 'complete' means that all the relevant information must be included ...
... 'concise' means that each bit of information (eg. dimension, etc.) MUST ONLY APPEAR ONCE!..."

This is NOT EASY TO DO. It takes practice, and even then some people never get good at it. I suggest that anybody attempting to become a Rules Committee member must first past a test. Perhaps something like:

"Write complete and concise guidelines for acceptable dress at:
1. Births,
2. Weddings,
3. Funerals,
(ie. at "hatches, matches, and dispatches")."

Any more than 30 words and the applicant is marked "Never to be on the Rules Committee!!!".

My guess is that most current Rules Committee members could easily manage 30 pages! :)

Z

sjfehr

03-31-2014, 08:21 PM

I'm a grad student looking to participate in FSAE, but the rules aren't very clear as to whether all degree-seeking students and grad students are eligible to participate (A4.2), or if students with work experience are ineligible under A6.1 and A6.3. It's not particularly clear, either, how much work experience is too much- is a single internship or autocross enough to disqualify someone? What's precedent, are working professionals in degree seeking status presently permitted to participate? Likewise, how much "racer" experience is too much- does a student attending a single autocross render them ineligible?

A4.2 Student Status
Team members must be enrolled as degree seeking undergraduate or graduate students in the college or university of the team with which they are participating. Team members who have graduated during the seven (7) month period prior to the competition remain eligible to participate.

A6.1 Student Developed Vehicle
Vehicles entered into Formula SAE competitions must be conceived, designed, fabricated and maintained by the student team members without direct involvement from professional engineers, automotive engineers, racers, machinists or related professionals.

A6.3 Professional Assistance
Professionals may not make design decisions or drawings and the Faculty Advisor may be required to sign a statement of compliance with this restriction.I received clarification today from SAE that A6.1 and A6.3 only exclude outside experts, and do not apply to degree seeking FSAE team members. So, fortunately for many of us, working for a few years before going back to school doesn't disqualify us from competition, nor do autocrossing or time trials. Though I'd imagine SAE might still have an issue if a bunch of bored retired ex-F1 drivers decided to get PhDs and start a team :)

I recommend changing the language of these rules to clarify this:

A6.1 Student Developed Vehicle
Vehicles entered into Formula SAE competitions must be conceived, designed, fabricated and maintained by the student team members without direct involvement from any non-team members, including professional engineers, automotive engineers, racers, machinists or related professionals.

A6.3 Professional Assistance
Only team members may make design decisions or drawings; professional assistance is forbidden. The Faculty Advisor may be required to sign a statement of compliance with this restriction.

Dunk Mckay

04-02-2014, 02:10 PM

Without going too into detail about current rules, can I add another suggestion? It'd be nice to be allowed a small amount of bodywork to poke out the side between the wheels, as a cooling scoop.

A lot of teams that a moving to aero, with bigger and bigger front wings are encountering cooling issues due to poor airflow to their radiators, so being allowed bodywork that pokes out maybe 2" (50mm) out the side between the front and rear wheels, for cooling purposes only, would go a long towards mitigating that. Now I realize that teams should be making good engineering decisions and compromising between aero and cooling airflow, but the issue I see is that so many teams go out in endurance due to overheating as it is. Many teams do testing in autumn/winter with the previous car and think their temperatures are low and can get away with less. Again it's not excuse, but teams that want to go fast are just going to slap big aero on and think they can figure it out afterwards if the car gets too hot, at worst they can just take the aero package off. In fact, even if teams are on the limit with temperatures they are so desperate to go fast that they will risk it, and kaboom, engine overheats.

So in conclusion: Bodywork allowed to protrude outside the width of the widest wheels, but below the height of the top of the tallest wheels) by 2"(50mm), for redirecting air primarily for cooling (or symmetry thereof).

mech5496

04-02-2014, 02:30 PM

Pete Marsh

04-02-2014, 08:38 PM

[QUOTE=

So in conclusion: Bodywork allowed to protrude outside the width of the widest wheels, but below the height of the top of the tallest wheels) by 2"(50mm), for redirecting air primarily for cooling (or symmetry thereof).[/QUOTE]

What rule is this you are referring to? Only aerodynamic devices are restricted in overall width, there is no such limit on bodywork. Although it is not in the rules, there is plenty of precedent for a side pod to be regarded as bodywork even though it's function of channelling air to the the radiator technically makes it an 'aerodynamic device'. UWA has run cars with side pods wider than the wheels in the past without question. A decent definition of bodywork and aerodynamic devices would go a long way to improving the rules IMO. Might also help with the leading edge radius questions.

Pete

AxelRipper

04-03-2014, 09:07 PM

Personally I'd like to see a bit of reduction in the aero rules. At least making the "Open wheel" more, well, Open Wheel. If you haven't seen MRacing's (U of Michigan) car yet, I'd advise you to do so. Full rear bodywork over the tires. I'd personally say it IS legal, per T2.1, and the rule that defines

"The top 180 degrees of the wheels/tires must be unobstructed when viewed 68.6mm (2.7 inches)
above the plane formed by the tops of the front and rear tires"

2.7 inches? REALLY???? My street car has that. My truck has more. I'm fully expecting more people to exploit this as the season goes on, and truthfully hope someone takes full advantage of this and does a full LMP/DSR style body over it. Maybe its just the crotchety "Came from a no-budget school" man in me, but I think the aerodynamics have gotten a bit out of control. At least shrink back the front wing size and make the area above the tires at least be fully open vertically to infinity.

As far as taking away the template rules? No way. I've driven a pre-template car, and the biggest thing to me that the template changed was the steering rack placement. It used to be inline with the upper control arms because, well, bump steer or something. Therefore you had your steering rack basically ready to take your knees out if you hit something. Also, we had a car designed to template. Like, had to spread the frame after it came off the template and had to move brake lines because it was so tight on template. If you think ergo can be ignored because of the templates you're wrong. At least for a guy like me (6'1", 220 lbs) it is not easy to fit in a car (Mind you, this is the same car that 5'2" MCoach had to fit into as well. He never complained about the ergo).

I'm sure there are other rules I could complain about too, but I've spent too much time in the Nascar rule book as of late to remember most of the things that I would have complained about. Mind you, that book is far smaller than the FSAE rule book.

MCoach

04-03-2014, 11:11 PM

To be fair, Alex, this year's car was designed to fit you comfortably; Big Hershey (5'8", ~300+lb) also fits in the chassis for once. I think I also suggested just bringing a 450cc turbo DSR after the U of Michigan car came to light. I agree with the crotechety view point. But, on the other hand resources and money are useless if you just throw it at carbon like it will solve all of your problems.

Also, not 5'2"(lol). Nice try.

Because this came up in conversation where I work today (and there may be someone on here who has some say in the rules who I talked with), I would like to bring up the topic of Electronic throttle control. The gesture was that FSAE teams are not advanced enough enough to succesfully use such technology and it's more dangerous than useful. In the Clean Snowmobile Challenge, ETC is allowed without a second thought. Of the top 4 teams this year, only one of them had a them had a cable actuated throttle. One of them didn't have a throttle at all (diesel)! Didn't seem to be a problem with run away engines there. As a team with a sufficiently interested powertrain culture and controls guru, we're eager for more.

Keep a look out for next year's car if the rules stay consistent:
http://level5motorsports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/DSR.jpg

BeunMan

04-04-2014, 04:29 AM

Dunk Mckay

04-04-2014, 07:56 AM

Dunk, IMO there is no point in that suggestion, if you re-read your post, it is part of the actual engineering to compromise between those two. Or between aero and increasing the CoG height by using a rear mounted radiator. Or any compromise for that matter.

I understand that, as I said, but could not the rule makers compromise between the drive to push for a perfect and true engineering competition (which it's not anyway) and the need to actually make the competition appealing for budding engineers. Many of whom (including a large proportion of my old course mates) see the FS/FSAE competition as a bit of a joke for a number of reasons, two of the main ones being the sheer number of cars that simply don't finish, and also the fact that much of motorsport is dominated by aerodynamics, yet at least half the cars in FS/FSAE don't bother with it cos there's too much compromise and work there. Yes people can have a rear mounted rad, yes people can have top mounted cooling ducts (if they somehow don't obstruct driver egress), but they don't. Unless they rule makers are somehow going to force teams to start thinking for themselves for once and try a few things that are outside the box (in this case matchbox), then my suggestion was that we make a very small concession on the engineering education side of things to try to get more students involved. Unless they ban either carbon-fibre or double A-arm suspension one year, or both, that'd do the trick.

However, as Pete so kindly pointed out a cooling duct doesn't necessarily count as an aerodynamic device so would potentially be allowed as the rules stand. But it would only take one official to decide that it does to give the team a hell of a bad time at comp trying to make their car legal, which is they do successfully do they will probably have compromised cooling and die in endurance anyway! Which brings us back to the whole clarity of definitions argument, which most people seem to agree needs to be addressed.

Ooh, another idea: A budget cap! Yes, it's probably impossible to monitor how much teams are actually spending. But, who the cost report works needs an overall anyway. So have the cost event be for 1000 cars, yeah sure. But also, purely as a sporting regulation, (cos after all that's why most people do it) throw in an additional few formulae (which wouldn't require any additional data entry from the teams) that figures out what the costs are for a single car, all of a sudden your "re-usable" machined moulds for carbon become very expensive indeed, among other things. Then start adding penalty points on for every $500 over $30,000 for example. The cost report may still only gain you 75-100 points, but it could cost you just as much again.
Summary: Since when was throwing money at a problem a good engineering compromise?

JulianH

04-04-2014, 12:04 PM

Dunk,

I like the idea of a way to cut costs.

But still, the Cost Report is a joke.
There is no team out there that has a precise Cost Report, it is simply impossible to do it and also just not rewarding (precise report usually equals a more expensive car...). I read Cost Reports from different teams according to which they have wings out of rectangular foam cores which don't have to be machined and so on. Needless to say that they placed Top3 in Cost.
Other teams just leave expensive parts out of the Report and take the penalty because the gain in less cost higher.

Overall the Cost Event is more about "can you show how it was done" compared to "did you use the cost-wise solution for part X".
For example the "worst cost-cars of 2013" (4WD electros) placed 8th,11th,21st,22nd in the UK (out of 88 cars) and very good in Austria and Germany (3,9,12,15) too. To be fair these are all really good teams with good reports but when it comes down to cost, they all are well yes, expensive.

If someone finds an intelligent solution to make the Cost Report "real", I'm all for making it more difficult to have an expensive car.
Maybe it must go away from "every screw, every zip-tie, every hole" and more to a big-picture approach (like in the Sustainability in the UK) to make it useful.

Cheers

sjfehr

04-04-2014, 02:54 PM

I understand that, as I said, but could not the rule makers compromise between the drive to push for a perfect and true engineering competition (which it's not anyway) and the need to actually make the competition appealing for budding engineers. Eliminate fuel efficiency scoring, too.

Also, shouldn't the budget cap be $10k, seeing as this is supposed to be a $10k car?

apalrd

04-04-2014, 07:01 PM

I'm the guy mcoach mentioned that wants to implement ETC. We are already running an ETC clean snowmobile.

I think that, with a few safety considerations, the system wouldn't be any more dangerous than the current mechanical throttle systems.

-As long as the kill switch controls fuel and spark, the driver can always push the kill switch as they can now to shut off the engine.
-There should be a requirement for redundant petal sensors as there is in fsae electric. A failure of a single sensor should result in ETC power free (ETC motor power is shutoff so the throttle returns to spring position).
-There isn't a need for much more, as the kill switch can always shut off the engine.

Trevor

04-04-2014, 07:29 PM

T15.13 Efficiency – The efficiency event is being reviewed to determine whether the influence of lap time on
the efficiency score is in line with the intent of the rule.
(I haven't quite figure out what the proposed equation would do, but seeing as teams are already awarded a huge amounts of point based on time, I think if we're going to try to promote good fuel economy at all then all that really needs considering at all is the amount of fuel used. Teams are going to want to go fast anyway, so using lap-times as a factor when looking at fuel consumed is just going to promote more time thinking about speed and less time thinking about fuel economy. That being said, you don't want a team to trundle round slowly purely to win fuel economy, so put a reasonable 1xx% rule in there, but based on the average lap time, not the fastest.)

"This car sure is fast, but I wish I could trade some of that speed for fuel efficiency!" - said no autocrosser, ever. Why does this part of the competition even exist? Seriously, fuel efficiency plays no part, whatsoever, in autocross. I'd pour 2 gallons per run in my car it made me faster.

Eliminate fuel efficiency scoring, too.

Two points on fuel efficiency -

-The event is important to the competition because it rewards more aspects of powertrain development than all out performance. This is directly in line with the goal of the competition to prepare college engineering students to work in professional industry, where there are many conflicting customer needs and many tradeoffs must be managed. Whether or not a weekend autocrosser cares about fuel economy is irrelevant, the 2014 rules have dropped "autocross" from the vehicle design objectives. it now reads:

For the purpose of the Formula SAE competition, teams are to assume that they work for a design firm that is designing, fabricating, testing and demonstrating a prototype vehicle for the non-professional, weekend,competition market.

And this was our response to the proposed rule change:

T15.13 Efficiency –
Our understanding of the intent of the efficiency rule is that that the event rewards teams for using fuel or energy most effectively to propel the vehicle. In production cars this goal is most well associated with fuel mileage - miles per gallon or liter per 100 kilometer as production vehicles are tasked with moving people and goods over distances. A race car’s purpose is to cover a given distance in the shortest possible time, therefore a race car’s efficiency should be based on how much fuel is used to propel the car for a given lap time.
We agree with the format of the current rule and would say that the results show it to be meeting the intent, the cars that win the event are using fuel most effectively to go quickly.
The old fuel economy rules, which gave points based on overall fuel used, did not seem very appropriate because the cars that won were considerably slower than the leaders. If two cars use the same fuel, the faster one is clearly a “better” or more efficient use of that fuel.

sjfehr

04-04-2014, 08:30 PM

For the purpose of the Formula SAE competition, teams are to assume that they work for a design firm that is designing, fabricating, testing and demonstrating a prototype vehicle for the non-professional, weekend,competition market.Still pretty obviously autocross, given the timed competitions. But even if you imagine it to be gymkhana, autoslalom, short track, dirt track, time trials, wheel-to-wheel racing, or any other amateur motorsport, when you're talking about competition, nobody cares about fuel efficiency. Maybe if you get to the point where FSAE cars are competing in hours long enduros and fuel efficiency would allow fewer refueling stops... but until then, it's just a huge turn-off. Let the teams focus on power and reliability instead.

Dunk Mckay

04-05-2014, 02:57 AM

I understand the points made above about fuel efficiency, suggesting it is either irrelevant to any form of motorsport or that the goal for a race car is efficiency for speed round the track. But as you said Trevor, it's about training students for professional industry. There is plenty in this competition that has nothing to do with actual motorsport (most race teams don't plan to build 1000 cars a year). So to suggest that fuel efficiency should include speed, which is already massively rewarded anyway feels a bit shortsighted, as all it means is that teams that don't have as much resource or time and have to select a few things to focus on to get most points, are simply going to ignore fuel efficiency and focus on speed. How does that make the competition relevant?

If you really want to go deep into the meaning of fuel efficiency, it's not just about how fast, but also all the other forces overcome, inertia and drag. Are we going to calculate those too? Should heavy cars score more? There are big and small cars in industry, lorries (trucks), vans and coupés, surely all of that is relevant to fuel efficiency for budding engineers.

My team last year had a reasonable car. It didn't break any records, but it was well built and finished every single event at both FSUK and FSG. We pretty much tied with Huddersfield (Team Hare) for least fuel used at FSUK, with only 2.7L used, and we weren't overly slow (we had the fastest lap so far when we finished endurance at FSG). However due to the way the scoring system works based on the fastest lap time of the entire event (not of the most fuel efficient car) we didn't score any point at all! Huddersfield were if I recall a little faster (top UK team I might add), but only scored a couple of measly points. How does the least amount of fuel used not score or score barely any points?

Markus

04-05-2014, 03:29 AM

JulianH

04-05-2014, 07:35 AM

sjfehr,
I like the $10k budget cap, it would forbid electric cars. Nobody needs them :) (The battery alone (!) of a competitive FSE car costs $7.000 in the Cost Report, doesn't matter what it cost in real life).

Dunk,
the problem with the FS UK scoring is due to the mixed class.
When we look at FS UK 2013 our car had an average laptime of 66.3s, the Brunel car of 94.1s (28 seconds difference..) while we used 3.4kg CO2 the Brunel car 6.3kg... I mean yeah there is an aweful lot of difference there...
TU Graz used 1.8kg fuel while being 18 seconds faster than Brunel. Huddersfield still was 9 seconds per lap faster, I count that as more than "a bit faster"...
I have no experience when it comes to Combustion cars but if the scoring would be 300 Points on Time and 100 Points on "Fuel". All Electric cars would go into crazy fuel saving mode. (For our cars it is "10% more energy used equals 1% laptime gain" with a risk of more errors, cones, etc.!).
I think Formula One and Le Mans show that Fuel Efficiency is "a thing" and I think it should be kept in the competition as an additional factor. Just using less fuel by being slow is not a real challenge in my opinion. The whole debate about "well it's an auto-cross car, nobody cares about fuel" is not really justified in my opinion. We all know that it is not really about that anymore...

Markus,
that's what I basically meant. Doing a good Cost Report hurts... $26k is a lot for an combustion car, yes.

Thijs

04-05-2014, 09:06 AM

Dunk,

I was going to point to the mixed classes as a main cause for scoring that low as well, but Julian beat me to it.
But to drive the point home: at FSG, under similar rules but in a separate combustion class, you guys got a whole 71 points, while being 15 seconds a lap slower and using 22% more fuel than the fastest car. Seems like pretty good deal.

For some time now, this has been the most obvious example of why mixed classes won't work in the long run. EV's and ICE's are just too different to be judged in the same ranking. I don't think anyone will come up with a fair set of rules that manages to really level the playing field. The Austrians figured it out, it's probably a matter of time before the Brits do too. Until then, I'm guessing every new year will be more fun than the last for EV's at FSUK.

Cheers

Dunk Mckay

04-06-2014, 12:57 PM

You guys make a fair point. I will acknowledge that my memory may have been a bit selective on that one.

The avg laptime your quoting for FSUK is that before or after penalties? I'm not trying to argue against what you're saying I'm pointing something else that would be good to clarify in the rules: We "missed" our running order as FSUK because many of the cars ahead of us didn't turn up on time (so our estimated start time was thrown out), we were 21st on the list but 14th car on track I think (rough estimate), but the car roughly 25-26th in the list was the 13th car out (one ahead of us anyway). Still, we aimed to turn up earlier than needed, but there was a massive mess up at fueling; we were forced to let cars ahead of us in the running order go in first even if they had joined the queue long after we had. If that hadn't happened we'd have made the start before being undercut. We (along with a few other teams) then got into a long debate at race control as to whether or not the marshal in fueling was right for letting other cars through first, they weren't, but we should have filed a complaint then as it was too late to do anything after the event. At the end of the day the decision was that for the first half hour fueling was open no one was there so we should just have got in earlier, which I guess is fair enough. I would hope we won't be making the same mistake again (but knowledge transfer being what it is I can't speak for future team iterations).
But it's still annoying that the event running order should not have any say in the entry order for fueling but in that FSUK case did because a marshal decided it was so. Not much the rules can do about it, except have a nice clarification teams could point at in future when someone is trying to jump the queue.

At FSG we had both a sensor and a starter motor issue out of the blue on the Sunday, long before we were due out for endurance. But fixing that meant we barely made it in time for our slot. Again, many cars were jumping ahead when cars in front of them in the list were there and ready to go. We were fortunate that a team that would have caused us to fall into the penalty category kindly let us go in the correct order (forever grateful), but I feel marshals should be enforcing that anyway. I mean if your car is there and ready to go on time, and I mean on time, not turning up at the moment you should be going out on track, then why can't you go out in your running order just because somebody else turned up really early?

The trouble is it only takes one car to turn up really early and go out and that's a 2 minute penalty for all the cars ahead of them in the running order that don't turn up insanely early (if all 50 cars in the morning session turned up an hour before the start is would be a mess trying to get people into the correct order. Maybe combining the running order rule with a time slot or time deadline would help? So as long as you turn up to the queue and have an official confirm you are there and ready to go then you don't pay a penalty, and cars can turn up early if they want without people scratching their heads and trying to sort out a queue of cars that are in the wrong order. Cars that want to turn up early can do so, and if there is a gap because a few cars are late then they are also free to go out on track to keep the event running on schedule. The first ten cars in the list would need to be there before the star time, and then assuming there are 5 cars on track, with an average time on track of 20min (remembering that a lot of slower cars don't actually finish), so have then next five cars needing to be there 20min after the start, the next five 40, the next five an hour, and so on. Thoughts?

I know it may sound like I'm only complaining about things that have hurt me and my team in the past (or other teams like us) but these are the things I can think of that we found to be unfair, this is a forum for debate, so I'm happy to recognize other points of view and insights.

I've already made my thoughts on mixed classes pretty clear in my initial comments about rulebooks. Does anyone know of another event where electric vehicles compete directly against combustion ones?

04-06-2014, 07:50 PM

Does anyone know of another event where electric vehicles compete directly against combustion ones?
Dunk,

A. The "Market Place".

For the last ~120+ years the electric cars have been consistently the losers. And still losing... :)

Z

Dunk Mckay

04-07-2014, 10:56 AM

Dunk,

A. The "Market Place".

For the last ~120+ years the electric cars have been consistently the losers. And still losing... :)

Z

Very good. And true, for now at least, and hopefully years to come too. But that's not exactly the point I was making. I'd like to see if anyone has ever written a rule book and come up with a fair scoring system. I'm betting not.

Thijs

04-07-2014, 12:58 PM

...and hopefully years to come too.

Without wanting to start a completely off topic separate discussion, I have no idea why you would want that to be the case.
Surely the few people that enjoy loud engines can keep enjoying them if they want to, without electric cars having to be 'losers'.
Most people just want to get from A to B. As soon as range issues are resolved, why use petrol for that at a third of the efficiency.

BeunMan

04-07-2014, 01:45 PM

Dunk,

A. The "Market Place".

For the last ~120+ years the electric cars have been consistently the losers. And still losing... :)

Z

In the early 20th century, a lot (if not most) of the cars were electric. You don't hear much about it as they were eventually replaced completely by combustion powered vehicles. The landspeed record was held by an electric vehicle for years since the end of the 1880s. So it's more like 100 years :)

Though in case of FSAE, separate classes is in my opinion the best idea. Since the limit for electric vehicles is still the power capacity compared to the weight it is in a whole different ballpark as the combustion class. While there might be enough similarities, if a judge has to judge both an electric and combustion car in the same class, I doubt it can be done fairly (on both cost and design). Not that the judges are not impartial but the way you would look at a car being electric or combustion would give a preference to one of the two, either consciously or unconsciously.

Dunk Mckay

04-07-2014, 04:21 PM

Without wanting to start a completely off topic separate discussion, I have no idea why you would want that to be the case.
Surely the few people that enjoy loud engines can keep enjoying them if they want to, without electric cars having to be 'losers'.
Most people just want to get from A to B. As soon as range issues are resolved, why use petrol for that at a third of the efficiency.

I'm all for efficiency, I'm not trying to plug big gas guzzlers. But electric cars purely move the energy generation issues somewhere else, and increase the manufacturing emissions somewhat. So it's not such a clear-cut argument. Ultimately yes, I'm sure electric will win out. But as most people on here are probably motorsport fans, I'll point out that motorsport is driven by the automotive industry. With all the debate about the engine noise in F1 these days being a major downer, I'm thinking most people won't like it if all motorsport goes electric. While I don';t have a huge gripe with the new F1 engines, that's my main motivation to keep combustion cars around, noise is fun.

Which segways nicely into my next plug for separate classes; separate endurance events. Running the EVs on Saturday evening, or some time after noise curfew, makes a lot of sense to give plenty of time to run the event, it seemed to work at FSG in the past and running them separately (not just the top however many) also helps narrow the gap in track conditions between cars of the same class.

JR @ CFS

05-13-2014, 10:14 AM

An addition in some way to Rule D10.1.

If FSAE is a "learning experience" and not a "race" then shouldn't students be receiving educational credit for their work? There have been complaints from judges that students are not understanding the basic principles of engineering and I wonder if this is as a result of students being in the team for 3-5 years and sticking with what they know or what has been done before? There are plenty old engineers out there (myself included) who will have heard or even said the phrase "but, that's the way we have always done it?" as a form of justification. That never answers "why" they have done it. Is FSAE also having too big a negative impact on students careers and reducing their grades thus risking future employment opportunities? There are some teams who either actively encourage, endorse or turn a blind eye to their students taking 1 (or more) years out of full time studies to undertake the project and how is this affecting their fundamental education (I am well aware of the practical education a student receives undertaking FSAE and also that employers love to see this). Any UK student will know that all employers ask for "minimum 2.1" and some are now asking that only students with a 1st should apply!

My proposal is to limit the participating students (lets call them "project engineers") to 1 year and to demonstrate a minimum amount of educational credit for their work (equivalent of a Thesis perhaps?). This limitation could be tracked through students registered for competitions. Allow only those project engineers into the Design, Cost and Sales event and perhaps even limit who can work with the vehicle while at the competition. But to think that an FSAE team could function with an entirely new team each year would be unrealistic, right? So why not have a "learning" year and a "leading" year, but limit these to 1 year (maximum) each and there could even be a minimum requirement on the educational credit required for this (half a Thesis or less?). These learners and leaders could also be restricted from entering in any of the static events or working with the vehicle at the competition.

That is easy for the teams who already have the project well integrated into their education system. What about those who do this in their spare time or who see obtaining their universitys blessing as a real uphill struggle? Give any school between 1 and 3 years to achieve a minimum educational credit for their team members and to present a plan at their Design Event or a submission (like the SEF) and for this to be revisited each year to track progress and award points accordingly. If they don't achieve this within a given time frame, either exlude them from the competition (a little unfair as we want students to learn) or either heavily deduct points/not award points at all. This could then be used as a carrot (or stick) when discussing with the University.

So what about those students who are project engineers, surely previous students could just design a car for them. They will therefore do well dynamically and they can have less focus on the static events. Since it is an educational competition, then the number of points received for the design, cost and sales can be increased to account for this and any teams found to be showing a complete lack of understanding will receive 0 points for each of the events.

Perhaps not a popular suggestion but speaking from my own personal experience at Chalmers (and a prior University), we are well integrated into the education system. We have seen first hand the benefits from this approach. Not only in resources but also in raising the eductional experience of the students, their employment opportunities and also in the results we have achieved at competitions.

I must add, the views above are a personal reflection and in no way represent the views of Chalmers Formula Student or Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.

JulianH

05-13-2014, 02:19 PM

JR,
I think this will not work.
The number of universities with an "included" FSAE program is very limited.
At Zurich, we have a similar system compared to Chalmers, basically everybody is working on the car for just one season. We have some "advisors" that participated in former years and few "freelancer" but that's about it. This is a very good (and successful (apparently the 2012 and 2013 winners of FS UK ;) )) model, I liked it.

Still, I think you can't force other universites to adapt such a system. Most universities would just refuse to sign such a paper and we then would not have any FSAE teams anymore.
Additionally, there are a lot of members that don't want to spend as much time on the project as a thesis would require. Some just want to design a part or two and that's enough.
Furthermore, I think it would be bad for the FSAE community if there would not be any "old guys" still hanging around. I don't know how it is at Chalmers but comparing Zurich with other teams from like Germany, we have exactly one Design judge, noone in the organisation of events, and I think overall two redshirts. If every team would have such a high fluctuation and therefore not "committed FSAE guys", the events would have a problem.

I did my internship at a German car OEM and what I saw there (at least when talking to the responsibles of my department) is "FSAE first, then look at the grades". I think this is not the case everywhere, but the educational gain of FSAE is still there when it comes to employment.
Overall, I "lost" about 8 months due to FSAE and don't regret it. Don't know how my grades would look like without FSAE though...

All in all, everybody is old enough to decide if they want to risk some bad grades or losing some studying time for a project like this.

Bemo

05-14-2014, 10:18 AM

I'm with Julian here. An additional problem would be how to define what educational credit a member has to gain as you have to find a definition which works for every form of university in the world. Experience shows that it is already almost impossible to find a proper definition of student status.

At my team in Stuttgart, we were organised pretty much independantly from university except that we got some rooms for our shop and office etc. But the whole team organisation was solely up to the team. There was not a single person from the university involved in the development of the car. To be succesful with this approach you definitely need at least a couple of members who stay active for a couple of years (I was two years a member of the Rennteam and one year of GreenTeam - and this is by far not the longest "career" in our team). A lot of other German teams have similar approaches. Nowadays I work for Porsche motorsport and when I look around I see quite a lot of faces I know from my FSAE time - and these are also the ones who did that for a couple of years.

And the aspect about the volunteers I can also agree with. There is quite a number of alumni from Stuttgart involved in all aspects of organising/judging at FSAE competition. And in general you can say that those are exactly the people who were team members for a relatively long time. People who do this only one year usually (not always) disappear and close the FSAE chapter immediately.

But you still have a point. At the end of my FSAE time we had discussions about this as we had some cases in which team members focused so much on the work in the team that they didn't just have not too good results but did so bad, they got expelled from the university. There were also examples that people had to go to therapy because of burnout. This is certainly a state which is not desirable and therefore it was realized that the team has to take more care about its members. But it is still hard to put this in clear rules. It is more about being aware of this topic and having a bit of an eye on each other.

tromoly

05-14-2014, 11:27 AM

I agree with Julian and Bemo on this one. My school runs their FSAE car as a capstone project with 100% turn-over every year, and every year the same bad designs go on to the car, there just isn't the knowledge transfer to build anything different. Then again, there are absolutely zero classes on vehicle design offered here, so that may have more of a contributing factor, and then there's some more managerial issues behind the scenes that mess things up every year, but having been involved as an "Underclassman" last year I personally think having members with experience on a team is far more beneficial than having "green" members every year who have to learn all the sub-systems from scratch. Just my $0.02 on the matter.

Alumni

05-14-2014, 06:45 PM

Since the season has now begun - and tensions are no doubt high - here's one that some will love and others won't quite grasp:

In order to better align the competition with the spirits of the competitors, as well as increase potential sponsorship opportunities for teams and organizers alike, beginning with the 2016 competition year, the rules will be re-written to make the competition more "motorsports" based. This includes the appointment of someone (we will call him Mr. France, after both NASCAR and the country of standards) to head overseer of competition. Mr. France will be present at all competitions.

During tech inspection, he will approach the ten teams he decides most likely to have a chance at winning, and require them to run restrictors that are 2mm smaller. Further, the top 5 teams must add 15kg of ballast. Neither restrictors or ballast will be provided to teams, but must be implemented before teams are allowed to pass through tech. Re-calibration of engine maps may only be done in the practice area. Lower tier teams have the option of running 2mm larger restrictors.

Further - all tires must now be purchased, mounted, and balanced at competition. You must mark all tires in sets and location on the car. Only three sets will be allowed per competition weekend. Tire changes will be permitted during endurance, but the time in the pits will be added to your total time. Each team is allowed only 1 wheel gun (max pressure 300psi) and two crewmen to work on the car at a time. Unused tires must be returned at the end of competition.

In addition, Prior to the season beginning, Mr. France will tell you how wide your tires are allowed to be, and of what diameter and compound. It will vary from team to team.

Teams with adjustable aero should also expect an early (or maybe late) visit from Mr. France so that he may tell you which settings you are and aren't allowed to use during the race.

Team transporters must arrive on site fully loaded 1 day before competition. However, they may not be opened - even to set up tents - until the following afternoon. They must depart the track 2 hrs after the completion of the respective team's endurance.

Every few years, Mr. France and his cronies will mix up the Formula SAE "formula" to keep things interesting, drastically redefinining what is allowable for engines, suspension, electronics and aerodynamics. [Wait a second...http://www.fsae.com/forums/showthread.php?11731-Survey-about-new-aero-rules]

The cost event will be replaced by a yet-to-be-named event in which strangers will take hundreds of pictures of you while asking things like "How fast does it go?" and "Can I drive it?" while others will mutter things like "My Camaro could beat that thing" and "DANG. I GOTTA GIT THAT FOR MA CA." Teams will be judged not only on how professionally they act in front of the crowd, but how unprofessional they act out of view of the crowd.

"Ground breaking" and "game-changing" technologies will be reserved for use by those team which provide the competition organizers with the most sponsorship dollars. [picture it now...Formula Student Germany presented by X University...] Of course, the use of such technologies will still be at the discretion of Mr. France, and will be considered on a race-by-race basis.

Certain teams will, quite frankly, be allowed to do whatever they want.

If Mr. France thinks that track conditions may have changed throughout the running of any event, be it due to weather or debris, the organizer's flag may be displayed, at which point all competitors must re-run that event from the beginning. You know, just to keep things interesting.

And lastly, as part of the marketing/business presentation, you must convince the judges that your car is based off of a production Ford Mustang and is a prime example of how you are working to improve thier street car through racing.

So. Any takers?

Charles Kaneb

05-14-2014, 10:10 PM

One advantage to the way Texas A&M does it is that all of the team members have had machine design, dynamics, experimental methods courses already. I think 2012 got through the entire season without a mechanical failure of a student-designed component.

Menisk

05-19-2014, 11:53 PM

I think I saw it mentioned somewhere further down in the thread, but something needs to be done about the tilt test. It's entirely possible to build a car that will pass tilt test but is still incredibly dangerous on track. Prime example is the UQ 2013 car.

https://www.facebook.com/UQRacing/photos/a.449560091196.234248.261116511196/10152219456046197/?type=1&theater

Our car passed the tilt table and yet was on two wheels all over the place. We specifically had to drive it slower to keep it safe. During testing I had the bottom of the inside wheels at waist height, in a car that was completely comp legal.

05-20-2014, 12:10 AM

Menisk,

Out of curiosity, do you know the overall width of the car (outside of tyres), and its CG height? Or was something else happening?

Z

Menisk

05-21-2014, 07:10 AM

Front track was 1100, rear track was 1058. So with 7" Hoosiers the overall front width was somewhere around 1220 and the rear 1175. We measured CG to be around 340 (we had the driver way too upright).

The problem we had wasn't helped by the narrow track and high CG but was more to do with the way we transferred the weight. We built the car around a spool and intentionally inducing diagonal weight transfer to jack the inside rear up to counter the understeer. It was a car designed to put power down hard (it does a pretty damn good job) but ultimately a combination of high roll centres inducing jacking force and the rear inside lift seemed to raise the CG enough that it would wedge the front up too, at which point it was all over and you could get it to 45 degrees if you didn't back off in time.

To put a figure on it, during recent testing it seemed to be not too far past 1.4G that the front inside started to come up. Very much a slow in fast out kinda car if you wanted to keep the horizon relatively level.

Dunk Mckay

05-22-2014, 02:21 AM

The team at Brunel is pretty well integrated with the course. We usually have a team of 5-10 managers in their 4th and final year of a Masters course, and 20-40 team members in their 3rd year or either the Masters course or the Bachelors (in which case final year). The course integration is done through individual dissertations (3rd year) and a group dissertation (4th year). There are pros and cons to this.

A large part of the work done for these projects has got nothing to do with work for the car, as many as half of the 3rd year projects are defined as "research projects" which means they look into various technologies that are not part of the current vision for the team (weird suspension designs, different engine types), but investigate the potential for change. In theory that sounds good, but in practice, as these are non-critical projects they get given to the "less than enthusiastic" students by the management team. The team managers do get to decide who does what, but we don't get to not give out projects to people that apply. A lot of people apply because they don't know what else to do for a project, and end up doing nothing for the actual car but are a drain on the management team's time. The management team are usually given 5 days (during freshers week) to define the individual projects, send out application invites, receive applications, interview students and allocate all projects to all applicants; not enough time.

The individual projects supervisors have no interest in FSAE, most have never been to competition, many have never been even to the workshop. They don't care about are car getting built, they have boxes to check and that is it.

Additionally very little work gets done on the project from the end of our last event (start of August) to the start of the new term (end September). This is because the project supervisor (yes one specific person) refuses to allocate roles until students are officially enrolled for the course that year, even if the entire group of students know exactly which roles they want etc. So no work gets done because many don't want to start work on their technical area because it's possible they might get told actually they are doing a different role, or potentially are not even officially on the team for whatever arbitrary reason (if you knew the guy who makes the call you'd wouldn't put this past him). Those that are happy to get to work during this period regardless struggle because the others aren't around, so those initial concept decisions and prep work don't mean much if 2 months in the other half of the management team turn up and vote to go down a different design path, or bring expertise or knowledge that changes what the team have the ability to do and so the decision become unanimous. So almost nobody comes in. For the record I did, every day, with one other (part timer) and it wasn't overly productive.

Also, as I said everyone that wants a role is given a role (in 3rd year) but the can be overruled at any-time by the project supervisor, as can the decision as to what role you get. Some years we end up with a Team Principle who is massively under-qualified for the role, which leads to huge time wasting as debates in meetings never get settled, because the person in charge really isn't as they don't have a clue. If there are too many 4th year students for a single group project (over 7) then there are two group projects, two group leaders, who are supposed to integrate into one management team. These are usually outlined as "Test" and "Design" teams but these have absolutely nothing to do with what they actually do (my first year I was designing drivetrain parts, but came under the Test team banner) so again time is wasted because no-one is really in charge.

I could go on and on and on...

The pros are the usual ones, we get university funding, some relatively decent facilities (despite the university's best efforts it often seems) and in theory a full time dedicate workshop technician split between the team and a five man electric bike project, although in practice the overall project supervisor (yes him again) tends to have said technician working 75%-100% on non-FSAE stuff during some of our most critical build periods.

So there is plenty not to like about having the project integrated, so if you currently run the project reasonably well as extracurricular I would probably encourage staying that way. Having said that, I do not believe that if the project at Brunel was not integrated into the course then it would not exist at all. It's only benefit would be as a recruitment tool, and if it's not being advertised as "part of the course" then in the universities eyes it doesn't serve that purpose, even though it's still something you get to do if you go to the university and in theory actually opens it up to students from a far wider range of courses.

05-22-2014, 09:50 PM

... something needs to be done about the tilt test. It's entirely possible to build a car that will pass tilt test but is still incredibly dangerous on track. Prime example is the UQ 2013 car.

https://www.facebook.com/UQRacing/ph...type=1&theater
...
Front track was 1100, rear track was 1058. So with 7" Hoosiers the overall front width was somewhere around 1220 and the rear 1175. We measured CG to be around 340 (we had the driver way too upright).

The problem we had wasn't helped by the narrow track and high CG but was more to do with the way we transferred the weight.
... ultimately a combination of high roll centres inducing jacking force and the rear inside lift seemed to raise the CG enough that it would wedge the front up too, at which point it was all over and you could get it to 45 degrees if you didn't back off in time.

Menisk,

Yes, I suspected jacking might be your problem, but I couldn't find any end-view photos that showed the suspension geometry clearly enough. The high RCs, combined with narrowish track and high CG, does it every time!
~o0o~

To those FSAEers contemplating high RCs, note that they are useful in preventing your RCs "migrating" sideways too much. But look at above photos, know that ground level RCs "migrate" to the edge of space in the blink of an eye, but DO NOT JACK, and then take your pick... :)

Apologies for being slightly off-topic here, but if anyone else finds themselves in a similar position to above (ie. with inner wheels at eyeball height!), then here is a short list of "quick fixes" (with easiest first).

1. "Droop-limit" your suspension. Your suspension can still be soft in compression, but don't let it extend downward from the static ride height. This can be done at the dampers, or by "stops" that prevent the rockers moving in droop, or even by "ropes" that prevent the suspension moving downward (ropes go slack in bump). Droop-limiting gives the suspension a falling-rate, and so jacks the car down in corners. So as well as preventing jacking, it actually lowers the CG (slightly).

2. Widen the track. Usually easiest done by fitted larger "offset" wheel rims. If you can't afford these, then fit longer wheel bolts/studs and a spacer between the wheel and hub (though this arrangement should be tested for strength well before the comp). This can mess-up your front steering geometry, so at the front (and in FSAE) making longer wishbones and toe-links can be quite easy. If you do this at the rear, then you also have to get longer driveshafts, which gets more expensive.

3. Lower the RCs (ie. make lateral-n-lines more horizontal). Possibly the easiest way to do this is by only lowering the chassis pick-up points of the bottom wishbones. A couple of centimetres (~1") can make a big difference, and won't mess up your frame design too much. Lengthening the wishbones (as in 2 above) usually also lowers the RCs slightly.

4. Lower the CG. If this was easy, then you would have done it in the first place! The only easy option here is adding ballast at floor level, which is NOT desirable in FSAE (a NO-minimum-weight formula). So back to 1, 2, or 3 above.

Your final option, of course, is to drive more slowly with a point-and-squirt style (as Menisk noted). Not my idea of a fun way to end a year of hard work! :)

Z

Dunk Mckay

05-23-2014, 06:59 AM

As you've mentioned the fact that it's a no-minimum-weight formula, Z, I'm going to take the opportunity to segway into the subject of a conversation I was having last night with an old FSAE team mate and work colleague.

Which is what would actually happen if a minimum weight limit was set.

If it was:

120kg - it won't make a difference to anyone.

140kg - it probably won't make a difference to anyone either, maybe Delpht.

160kg - all the lightweight teams are going to be throwing weight at aero and improving stiffness (or extra batteries for EV's)

180kg - a large number more teams are going to throw the weight at aero and improving overall stiffness (or batteries), so teams may start to ballast. There was also the thought that some really keen teams would put drivers onto diets to save as many kilos over other teams as possible.

200kg - this is where things get interesting. If aero rules to restrict size are implemented a lot of top teams are going to fall well under this limit with their current cars, and there's plenty that can be done with 20-40kg of mass other than tons of lead hanging off the bottom of the car. So what would it be used for? More cooling? Superchargers? 4WD? What would you do if you were told you had to add 30kg to your car?

In the end we concluded that 200kg would be a good limit to set if you wanted to push already good teams to try to do something new, any less than that and most are likely just to thicken, strengthen and ballast what they've already got (although this could help level the performance playing field a smidge). Move closer to 210 or 220kg and teams that haven't really mastered what they are already doing with their cars are going to start trying to do more and will be stretched to thin, and the really lightweight teams are going to be struggling to add weight with excessive amounts of ballast.

The only issue we really saw with this is that it would make choosing which engine to use mostly a no-brainer for lightweight teams. The " applying good engineering practices" challenge would kind of still apply to engine decisions for those teams that are currently 210kg or more. Having said that what do the lightweight teams really gain from that? There are plenty of other challenging decisions to be made elsewhere when a minimum weight limit is implemented, and as has previously been suggested, increasing engine size limits to 650 or even 700cc would open a whole new can of worms in that regard for all teams regardless of minimum weight. A nice combo of rule changes if you ask me.

Bring on the abuse...

MCoach

05-24-2014, 03:09 PM

Dunk,

would this rule be proposed to be met at all times, before or after endurance?

There are some curious repercussions with a minimum weight limit in Formula and the implementation of ballast. We had a small team discussion yesterday about the current scales process and how little that number really means at this current time. Currently, teams can roll though with an arbitrary value of fuel in the tank, call it "full", use a 9v battery to show that the car is "functional" (turns the brake light on), use tires that are corded, no coolant, etc of lightweight trickery before going through tech and obtain a weight of 350lbs. This, of course is rewarded in design when judges are impressed that the vehicle is built to an extremely low weight value. Of course, in the meantime, this hypothetical car did not pass tech immediately, had to make several changes which added about 10lbs in weight to vehicle before passing, needed to add 1.5 gal (~5.7L or the displacement of a Chevy small block) of fuel to meet the fill line, change to a new set of tires, etc. and rolling onto the track at an actual weight of about 420lbs. Currently, it's not out of the question and I wouldn't blame anyone who takes such a route as it's obviously rewarded. We had a member make a very valid proposal to move the weigh "event" to after the brake test.

This would cause some problems with teams actually making it though all events before making it into design and having a weight to show, and in my opinion drive a bit of a wedge between the prepared teams that roll through first thing, and those who hit a snag on the way though...which just may be fair.

JR @ CFS

05-27-2014, 10:36 AM

Dunk Mckay

05-28-2014, 06:44 AM

Dunk,

would this rule be proposed to be met at all times, before or after endurance?

That is a fair point, there's plenty of opportunity for teams to cheat by having drivers or team members add ballast during or after endurance or any other event. So I would probably suggest that weight be recorded right before endurance, with the tank filled and sealed, and whatever condition tyres the team want to started endurance with. After this point the only person allowed to touch the car is the first driver for the event. Two team members may push the car into position with the push pull bar but not touch the car itself. (Devices that allow the push pull bar to somehow remove ballast from the car upon removal will be pretty easy to spot and result in immediate disqualification).

Hopefully teams won't be dumb enough to starve their drivers to the point of malnutrition for the sake of a few kilos. The strength and focus they will lose if this is the case and if they avoid drinking before hand will probably cost them more time than it gains, so this shouldn't become an issue. Alternatively (and this is potentially even more fair) drivers could be weighed up pre-race and the cars ballasted (predefined ballast loading bay would be located within a predefined area on the car) to ensure driver weight does not become an advantage. Although this last addition starts to add complications to a rule book that is overcrowded as it is.

JR, i will hopefully be at FSUK on the weekend. If i can find you and you're not too busy i might just take up you offer. And maybe drag one of the new guys along to give them some pointers.

tromoly

05-28-2014, 02:12 PM

dr. ill

05-28-2014, 06:15 PM

Jay Lawrence

05-28-2014, 11:08 PM

dr. ill,

If you had weighed more (or failed noise/wing measurement) post endurance, would you have lost design or endurance points? Or been disqualified or something? Personally I think that design should be held after endurance, so that cars that fail to meet their primary design objective (finish) lose points, but that's another kettle of fish.

dr. ill

05-29-2014, 05:00 PM

Taken from FSG cCar rules. https://www.formulastudent.de/fsc/2014/rules/

7.2 Car weighing
All cars will be weighed prior to Engineering Design Judging. All cars are to be weighed in
ready to race condition. The fuel tank must be filled to the fuel level line. All lubricants and
coolants must be in the car.
This weight will be the car’s Official Technical Inspection weight. There will be a penalty if the
car weight changes during Dynamic Competition. The allowable weight tolerance is ± 5.0 kg.
In the case of overweight or underweight in comparison to the Technical Inspection weight,
the team will be penalized -20 (twenty) points for each kg (or portion of a kg) of additional or
missing weight. This point penalty will be deducted from the Engineering Design Event score.
(Each 0.1 to 1.0 kg = -20 points)
Example:
If the car is 5.3 kg underweight: 5.3 kg minus the 5.0 kg tolerance = 0.3 kg equals -20 Points
If the car is 7.8 kg overweight: 7.8 kg minus the 5.0 kg tolerance = 2.8 kg equals -60 Points
If the car weight changes due to replacement of broken parts, the car must be presented for
tech inspection and then re-weighed. It is the team's responsibility to have the car re-weighed
before entering a dynamic event after changing parts.

Jay Lawrence

05-29-2014, 10:42 PM

Ahh sorry, wasn't familiar with the FSG rules.
I don't remember there being anything like that at FSAE-A (though that was a while ago and I could be wrong).
I was going to add something applicable to turbo teams, that due to the compressor/oiling issue they'd lose mass in oil, but I guess 5kg covers it :)

05-30-2014, 12:19 AM

I think this issue has been covered before, but I can't remember where. So, out of curiosity...

How much mass difference is there between new tyres and almost completely worn-out ones? I would guess that it is of the order of 1 kg per tyre? (Edit: Or after a quick calc, possibly quite a bit more for the larger tyres!?)

I also guess that oil burn, coolant loss, and/or brake-pad wear, will be a lot less than 5 kg. And any "natural" weight gain from dirt pickup, etc., should also be quite small.

If so, then it looks like tyre wear alone can get you close to that 5 kg margin. (Edit: or well over it?) Note that it makes sense to choose tyres that are close to worn-out at the end of comp, otherwise you are just carrying around a lot of excess tyre.

So, the points-loss either potentially penalises teams that have made a GOOD tyre choice, or it is encouraging them to, ahem, cheat, by adding ballast at the initial weigh-in, then removing said ballast before the dynamic events.

Given that FSAE is a no-minimum-weight formula (which IMO is a good thing), I do not understand the point of this Rule???

Z

Markus

05-30-2014, 12:55 AM

Z,

Your estimation is quite accurate, the difference is generally around 1kg new versus old tire. But it takes ~3-4 endurances to wear the tires out (13" at least), so the max you can wear would be around 1kg total.

How worn tires you choose depends also on the tire you use. For example we've noticed from 13" tires that Hoosiers get slower the more they're worn and Goodyears get faster.
It's also worth to note that you don't have to have new tires to weighing and you are allowed to change to a new set during comp (scrub-in might be a problem though, for example in FSAE-M). So you can weight the car with tires worn close to what they would be in the end of comp.

I've understood that the point of the rule is to ensure that teams can't cheat on the weighing to gain more design points. Storys tell that the cheating has been quite intensive in the past years, you can shed quite a lot of stuff from the car and still pass tech.

How much design points are given based on weight of the car is another subject for debate...

Dunk Mckay

05-30-2014, 07:30 AM

Dunk,

What if weighing was done after an endurance stint, similar to how the BTCC has the podium finishers drive up on a set of scales before parking the cars? As each car pulls off for a driver change / end of endurance, have the vehicle stop and shut off on top of a set of scales, get a weight, then it can be pushed off to either the driver change area or straight off track. Thoughts?

The issue with this for a minimum weight limit is that a number of factors come into play that could complicated things. Fuel consumption is one, of course. But also the fact that you could run car that is quite under weight with your first driver and rack up some fast times, then send your second drive in with some hidden weights on his person that he could easily deposit into the car (under a floor panel or something) for final weigh in, and still only just graze over the limit. Yes, this could be found in post race inpections, but it just complicates things and would cause nothing but debate.

Best to measure the car as the last thing done before the event, as this is the point in time when the team want there car to be as light as it possibly can be.

---

To add a note regarding design points for weight. In my experience it's usually a case of judges asking the team if they think the weight of their car is reasonable for the concept they have (aero/non aero, 1/2/4cyl, 10/13" wheels, etc.). It's then a case of saying either yes or no, then justifying what you think your weight should/could be without compromising stiffness/strenght and for the other objectives you have. A team would be well justified saying there weight target was higher because they were aiming to build a car for less than $10k, so exotic materials and manufacturing methods were out of the question. You certainly shouldn't be marked down for this if you justify it well. Teams with such low budgets should know they are never going to win the design event, because cheap isn't usually pretty and aesthetics count, although they can still do very well. And unless they have a stroke of genius and figure out how to make a cheap and relatively heavy car go like the clappers, they're never going to be outright competition winners. Which brings me back to: minimum weight limit. (I won't bother moaning about better cost assessment or things like budget caps).

MCoach

05-30-2014, 09:27 AM

Kevin Hayward

05-30-2014, 10:00 AM

Ahh..

Design weigh-in and cost reporting. Two areas where a teams score can be enhanced by lying effectively. The further from the truth the more points you gain. I always hated this as a student. In a competitive team it was common knowledge that there was an acceptable amount of dishonesty required in these areas. We had other top level teams run us through the process of cost report lying for instance. Simple things like leave out a significant number of parts. Sure they catch out a few and you get double costs applied, but you took out more than double the amount of parts that were found.

Similarly if a comp didn't have a reweigh (i.e. Australia) it is well known practice to weigh in with all sorts of things like gutted engines, shaved tyres, missing parts and so on. For comps with a reweigh you become aware of how much margin you have and you use every bit of it. I am aware of what we did as a team while I was a student, and although I know for a fact that we were far from the worst offenders we still did a few things. Obviously a tight weigh-in window such as in Germany is desirable if you want to use a weight figure as a factor in points allocation. When I went through the US window was around 16-20lbs (by memory) which was far too much.

Unfortunately we could never bring ourselves to do what was required for the truly good cost report scores. One year we were advised by a cost judge that our report had far too many parts in it, and we should delete some. This was a surprise given that our car had more parts than the cost report had. Thankfully much of this situation was improved with the rework of the cost event, but frankly I have never thought there should be a significant weighting to final cost. Or at least the final cost should be very coarse at the conceptual level, not at the part level. i.e. cost at the conceptual systems level where the car can be costed by a judge with a clipboard.

At this point I will put the disclaimer that these comments in no way reflect the actions of the current team I am a faculty advisor for.

Fundamentally I believe that we shouldn't have any rule or points scoring opportunity that is hard to police, or easy to contravene. Another obvious cheating candidate is the total fuel used for endurance, which by design is very easy to contravene, while being hard to detect. In this case I am not directly aware of any teams doing so, as I am sure any top teams found to be cheating in that area would never repair the damage to their reputation. It is just not as acceptable as cheating in cost and weigh-in.

The other obvious situation are the blatant mis-truths that are encouraged in the marketing event, where year after year teams make the case for a business case for cars that could never be profitable to make and sell ... ever. I think however this is well understood as an abstraction and doesn't have the same problem as the weigh-in and cost report.

I think the whole weigh in before design should be scrapped. The design judges can tell whether a part or system is too heavy. It is also very easy to tell the range the car weight will be in anyway. If teams are only trying to do something on the car for the design event they are missing the whole point, and this includes weight. A design is good or bad based on how it performs vs. its competitors. This is as true in the real world as it is in FSAE. Ultimately the best and fastest cars will be in the lower weight ranges (not often the lightest), so the desire for light weight vehicles will always be in the competition as long as there is no minimum weight.

Kev

Trevor

06-02-2014, 12:20 PM

FSAE has just released another survey, this time for the engine displacement rules. The survey can be found on their facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/FormulaSAE. A direct link to the survey is: http://ow.ly/xp6FT

bob.paasch

06-02-2014, 01:14 PM

Ahh..

Design weigh-in and cost reporting. Two areas where a teams score can be enhanced by lying effectively. The further from the truth the more points you gain. I always hated this as a student. In a competitive team it was common knowledge that there was an acceptable amount of dishonesty required in these areas. We had other top level teams run us through the process of cost report lying for instance. Simple things like leave out a significant number of parts. Sure they catch out a few and you get double costs applied, but you took out more than double the amount of parts that were found.

Kev

Kevin, I agree. And at this point I will also put the disclaimer that these comments in no way reflect the actions of the team I am faculty advisor for.

A few years back the FSAE Rules Committee was considering increasing the cost portion of the event to an effective 200 points. Here was my response to the committee:

We feel this is a really really bad idea. The problem is, the reported cost figure is still a student selected number. While I applaud the progress that's been made in standardizing the costs for standard components, I believe there are still a lot of cost reports submitted with little relation to reality. The cost report can be easily gamed. Some examples:

1) There is no way for the cost judges to know if the wheel bearings are $20 each or $325 each. There are 8 on each car, and yes, some teams use $325 wheel bearings. Matter of fact, I think they're 325 euros in Germany.

2) Unless they take a magnet to each part, there is no way to tell a steel part from a titanium part. Cost the titanium part as stainless steel or aluminum and even the magnet won't help. Yes, there are titanium parts in the competition. I doubt many make it into the cost report.

3) I've yet to see cost judges with enough technical knowledge in motorsports to be able to tell a $150 shock absorber from a $850 shock absorber if the manufacturers identification is removed or changed.

4) Similarly, brake calipers can be bought for $50 each. They can also cost $500 each. Can the cost judges tell the difference? Mufflers, radiators, sprockets, steering racks, wheels, all can vary about 5X in cost.

5) There's no way to know if the steel tube used is 1020 or 4130. And leave the heat treat off the cost report, there's no way for the judges to tell.

6) There's no way for the cost judges to know the weight of carbon-fiber parts within 30% without removing them from the car. Depends too much on number of layers, core material used, and the number of and material used for inserts.

7) Put a layer of paint over a carbon part and you can cost it as fiberglass. If the cost judges scratch off the paint you might get caught. Put a layer of kevlar on the outside of the carbon and the cost judges have no way to tell if the part is carbon or "fiberglass."

8) The differential hidden inside the diff housing could be a $150 ATV diff, or a $2000 Drexler.

9) The circuit boards from a $4000 Motec M800 can be placed in a student made housing and costed as a $400 student built ECU.

10) The cheapest way to cost a part is to leave it off the bill of materials entirely. Some of these might get caught, but most will not if you're clever about the parts you leave off.

This is just some of what comes to my mind in about 15 minutes of thinking. Give a couple hundred very bright student engineers several months to think about this and I'm quite sure they will (and have) come up with many other creative ways to "massage" a $16,000 cost report down to $10,000. Right now, you reward that with about 20 points. If you do what you propose, you will reward this with 80 points, and this will get much, much worse. The pressure on the students to get "creative" will intensify, and the reports will be even more of a fiction than they are now. This is what happened in BajaSAE with the change in cost from 40 points to 85.

I understand the reasons for the cost portion of the competition, and support the inclusion, but the basic weaknesses are unfixable.

Bemo

06-03-2014, 06:03 AM

As some people already pointed out, the +/-5kg rule at FSG is to avoid that teams cheat to much in the weighing before design. You can show up with a tiny battery, almost no coolant, half the oil you are going to use in endurance etc. Normally teams show up for scrutineering and weighing with old tires, so the weight difference between new and old tires shouldn't be a problem here.
In general to my experience as a scrutineer during the last two years there was not a single case when a team had to come to re-weighing and was out of the tolerance.

The discussion about cost I can only second what has been said before. In 2010 we even got points deducted because our report was "too extensive". We asked back if this really meant they wanted us not ot least all parts of the vehicle as we weren't sure we understood the judge correctly - and the answer was that this was exactly what he meant. In fact it woudn't have been a problem as he didn't look at our car once. So we could have handed in any report, he wouldn't have noticed if we would have had costed a steel frame car although we had a CFRP monocoque.
If you just leave some percentage of material in every part you already save a lot of cost while the risk of being caught is very low. The only possible way to get rid of this problem in my opinion is to not give points for the total cost. The event should focus on the quality of the report and that's it.

JulianH

06-03-2014, 12:43 PM

I think Kevin is absolutely right. Cost is useless in this form, the more you cheat, the more you gain. (In mixed events, the batteries of an electric car cost as much as a finished small combustion car itself, btw :)).
Cost should be about the main aspects like the Sustainability report in the UK or the event should be moved to a part of the Design judging where one judge just looks into the question: What trade-offs can the team justify when it comes to selling the car.

Weight is also a bit too important when it comes to Design. I heard that Stuttgart (E) missed Design Finals in Germany 2012 with the sole argument "You are too heavy". (I know that this is probably not entirely true, but still, often the lightweight cars have a large advantage there, it just bedazzles some judges). But still, weight is important, the teams should have a weight-sticker on the car when they are judged, I think the German solution is as fair as possible, you can "cheat" (worn tires) a bit, but nothing too serious.

The question about engine displacement is interessting. I think the limit could be increased. The fastest combustion car out there at the moment is a 450ccm single cylinder car, so if a team still thinks they can get more performance with a 800ccm engine, they should try it.

Will M

06-03-2014, 02:27 PM

MMM, the business case presentation.
After getting reamed one year for presenting a car that would not be competitive in the real world I asked what we should do.
I was told we did not have to present the car we brought with us.
I asked a well known design judge if we should lie (I intentionally used that word).
He said yes.

Next year my presentation was 95% made up, except for what engine we used and some basic specs it was all a lie.
We did much better that year.

-William

MCoach

06-04-2014, 10:20 AM

Will and Julian,
As consolation, I was told by a design judge at FS-Lincoln last year that our car would never make design finalist because our car follows the "spirit of the rules" too closely. I was told that if we want to do well, we shouldn't be building "the weekend autocrosser's car", instead we "need to bring a mini-F1 car, like the other good teams". I was not very happy with that response.

I tried fitting a function and averaging cost scores for Michigan 2014. Basically, it turns out the lower the initial cost, the more penalties that were given out. This doesn't correlate to report score at all....and report score doesn't seem to correlate to much of anything. But, the top 5 averaged about 8 penalty points, the top 10 were about 6.7 penalty points, and the trend drops immediately to about 3 points for everyone outside the top 10, and then somewhere near top 50 the trend drops to about 2.5 points. Lesson of the day, don't get audited.

I think cost in this form is 'ideal' but not very measurable correctly or accurately. Everyone would have to get audited, not just the top select few. Report score clarity would need to be measurable by something else other than some arbitrary value that is handed out like candy. It's also frustrating to hear in the cost report event, "X part is not in there", and having to go through the book to find it to show them, because something like 'catch can mount' is in the frame section, rather than in the powertrain section because there is not a standardized way to classify parts. When dealing with parts we don't use, such as a tachometer gauge we get a response of, "Well, we needed to go searching for all these parts we thought you were missing but just don't exist at all and that wasn't made clear in the cost report, so that will be reflected in your cost score."

What, really?

We were told to show in the cost report that we explicitly don't have items. Example: We don't have a tachometer, so we should put in the cost report that we explicitly don't have a tachometer so they know that. I think if something is in the report, it should be assumed it doesn't exist on the car. Other things that we ran into they wanted us to put in the cost report that we DON'T have: seat, oil pressure gauge, coolant temp gauge, 'engine on light' for driver, oil pressure sensor, battery voltage gauge, and all of the relays we don't use. The explanation I got was that these are all standard items that each car reasonably should have, and because we did not include them or explicitly state we don't use them, our cost report score could be decreased. It kind of boggled my mind because there's nowhere in the rules that says this 'standard list' must be explicitly excluded if we're not using them. Furthermore, when asking where I could get this list, which seems to be the checklist they use at every event, I was told that information cannot be given to teams. So...I at least have an issue with the way cost is currently run. Never mind our extra-long, 1 hour, 7 judge, cost audit at MIS...

With that said, I can respect Bob's stance on the cost event, it has its issues, but other than an exhaustive way of checking all teams, I don't know how to address it.

JulianH

06-04-2014, 02:34 PM

MCoach,

about the "design finals that you will never make":
After long discussions with guys like Sam Collins (Racecar Engineering Editor, Business Judge in the UK and commentator), I learned that it is mostly a matter of "philosophy" what kind of car you build.
When I was in the team, the only goal in designing the car was to maximize the points in a typical competition. If that "car" would have been a dragster or a monster truck, we would have built it.
If that car is "suited" for a weekend racer, was never a concern. We said: The best car in this competition (best = the car with the most points, not subjectively) is the car that every customer wants to buy, if he can afford it. It's like Ferrari or McLaren are charging a $1 million (or even way more) for a LaFerrari or a P1 and they all are sold out. Yes, there are way cheaper cars with "close that" performance (like a Caterham R620 or a Porsche GT2 RS) but if the customer has the money, he is looking for the "best". I know that we made it "easy" for us but I think the results speak for themselves, we never missed the Design Finals in four years and I think 12 events (all others didn't have finals) and were able to compete for at least Top3 at all events. If Rule A1.2 (I think that this is) would have been "enforced" like Sam calls it, yes we would have lost some Design points (even though, I think it is not possible to enforce such a "wishy-washy" rule) but still would have made up for it on the track.

But(!),
if another team says: "Hey our goal is to build the best possible car with our resources, we will not make excuses for using cheap parts but still will have a really good performance on the track that will interest a lot of weekend racers" (like a Caterham compared to a hypercar), then this is totally fine by me and should NOT exclude you from Design Finals.

The problem probably is, that those teams often lack in knowledge or can't present their philosophy.
I think, often the "way" for teams is to start cheap, without knowledge and easy, then get sponsors, gather knowledge in the team, build cars that are more complex, that are faster and end up a "good team with a mini F1 car".
For example: Bath built an awesome little steel space frame car in (I think) 2011. It was light weight, it also got an "honorable mention" in the UK design review. It was reaally fast.
And now? They have a CFRP monocoque, and awesome aero package, and probably all fancy control stuff in it.

If a team is able to justify why they build the "brown go kart" and they know their stuff, I would gladly promote them to the Design Finals. Sadly, those teams seem to be rare...

When it comes to Cost:
I don't know how Cost is run in the US and I'm not an expert in Cost...but looking at the German Cost results (Combustion 2013) all "good" teams scored really well in the "Discussion" which means they did a good job on their report. Therefore I can't say that "cheap teams are better checked" in Europe, never thought that...
The Cost itself is not weighted as much as in the US though.
I think comments like "you made a report that is too complex / too "full"" are just wrong. We got comments like "wow you even put the screws in your report" in Italy last year too, that's sad.
The reports are too big though. In Germany last year, we handed in 300 sheets of report + 54 pages of additional information. I think there were about 110 teams at the competition and maybe 20 Cost judges? I think every judge had to read like 10 of them (2 judges per team) and compare them with other teams... Just think about the number of pages and parts they should check. That just does not work.
And once again, you can't enforce what you can't check. It's like speeding in your road car.. everybody does it. Some more, some less. Those who do it more often probably "have an advantage" most of the time but also have a higher risk on getting a speeding ticket (points deduction).

Therefore I think Cost must get easier, so that it is more transparent and everything can be checked. Right now, it is just ridiculous.

Alumni

06-04-2014, 07:51 PM

Charles Kaneb

06-04-2014, 10:19 PM

Wait a second, there was at least one tube-frame weekend autocrosser's car in the design finals at Lincoln last year! It had a stock dirtbike engine, a very straightforward wing package, about 1000 miles of running before competition, and so many features deleted from it to get down on weight and real-$ cost that we could see design judges mentally skipping questions before asking the ones they did have.

MCoach

06-05-2014, 12:47 AM

Julian/MCoach/Design Judges,

Do you think that, presentation skills and knowledge aside, a Caterham or Ariel Atom would make it to design finals against current offerings from Ferrari, McLaren, Koenigsegg and the like?

Of course not! But nobody wants to admit it, and that's the first step that must be taken to solve the problem!

Anything that handles opposite lock like a champion has my vote any day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tka1E95cIhw

Charles, are you talking about Texas A&M?
I was told by one of the other judges during feedback that they narrowly edged us out of design finals.

JulianH,
I'm currently gearing up for FSAE West, Lincoln and our car should be much faster on track after the troubles we had at Michigan. We hit a freak powertrain problem that would only show up while driving under load, so we weren't able to diagnose it until we got back to campus.
The vehicle philosophy is something I've struggled with for a while as I've wanted to be able to take on complex, new systems such as an aero package or maybe some extensive testing, but our team has neither the resources nor the funding to do such things, so I rely heavily on simulating many of the systems on the car, and trying to cut costs as much as possible. We were the cheapest car at Michigan and still way over budget in the eyes of the school. But, as long as the theory is solid and car is quick, we can still show up and make a name for ourselves.

"But(!),
if another team says: "Hey our goal is to build the best possible car with our resources, we will not make excuses for using cheap parts but still will have a really good performance on the track that will interest a lot of weekend racers" (like a Caterham compared to a hypercar), then this is totally fine by me and should NOT exclude you from Design Finals."

This is a decent summary of the team pitch, but I'm refining it a little further and aiming for gold. The Caterham just happens to be one of my favorite cars, by the way.

On a main note, I think many of the suggestions that are listed here and their wide range of topics would merit their own threads if anyone would like to further those specific topics. Whether it be the overall structure, big rulebook, cost, scoring, etc., there have been some very thought out suggestions here.

JulianH

06-05-2014, 04:05 PM

MCoach,

thanks for your reply.

Couple of follow-up questions (I don't have the experience there):
- Why is your school interessted in how much money the car costs? Our university gives us room to work and have a look that we work safely but that's about it. They don't care if we spent 5.000 or 500.000$ on the car...
- Why is testing so difficult for you? I always assumed a small under funded team would do anything just at least to test as much as possible. Yes the tests cost some money but still it is quite cheap compared to buying stuff. What about your old cars for testing? To you make sure that they run after the season?

Is it so difficult to get people involved?
I mean you are from Michigan, yes the economy is bad (it is always..) but it should be "easy" to get people (students and sponsors!) to help in your project.

We are from Switzerland, the people are not reaally interessted in cars here, so it is difficult to recruit good people for the team, but still, we always were able to get awesome partners in the industry to help us out. Of course we are in a very (!) lucky situation. We are (so far at least, until Bern/Biel joins) the only team in the country, we have a couple of good firms around us, but still I can't count the number of refusals from companies that we tried to get as sponsors.. we just used the shotgun approach for some stuff. At least one bullet always hit the target.

Is the sponsorship-management not a priority in your team strategy? I heard from some teams in the UK (I think it was Southhampton) that they just don't look for sponsors, they take the 10.000 Pounds of the university and build the best that they can do. I think that is the wrong approach to get the full learning experience.

Good luck to you and your team in Lincoln. Go Caterham!

MCoach

06-05-2014, 05:34 PM

To not derail this thread, Julian, I have pm'd you.

06-08-2014, 11:43 PM

The last few pages give strong evidence that, to a large degree, the Static Events are BROKEN!

That is, to do well the teams are expected to, or are even TOLD to, lie, cheat, etc. It is quite bizarre that the one of FSAE's stated core goals of encouraging the students' "creativity and imagination" seems to be mostly directed at fiddling these Static Events, rather than to the design of the car.

This is not good for the intended "education of young Engineers".

So, below is a briefly suggested reworking of the whole competition, mainly via a revised points system and changed emphasis of the Static Events. (Apologises to Geoff for not following his format as per first post, but the gist is here.)
~~~~~o0o~~~~~

Total comp still scored out of 1,000 points, but divided as follows:

STATIC EVENTS (300 points).
======================
Changes are mainly to reduce incentives to lie, cheat, peddle bull-dust, etc.

1. PRESENTATION (100 points) - This is currently a boring BS-fest, especially when prefixed with "Business Case...". A lot of real Engineering is even more boring. But everyone knows that good "team-spirit and morale" goes a long way to building a winning team.

So, make this event about "Raising team-spirit in the workplace". Find your best singer, dancer, stand-up comic, juggler, sword-swallower, magician, acrobat, whatever... and get them up there on the stage! Any student who can do all of above, while at the same time spruiking how good their car is, automatically scores 100! Such co-workers really do make the workplace more enjoyable. :)

This would be the most subjective event to judge (in fact, entirely so), so the subjectivity should be spread out by having all the Teams judge the performances. Maybe only 5 minutes per Team (or less for big comps), with all the other Teams in the audience rating the performances from 1 to 5. All score cards then collated to determine final scores.

To lessen the influence on the overall score, a minimum score of 60 points might be given to anyone making at least some effort, no matter how embarrassing. Well, a Team giving a really boring speech about how their car is a great "business proposition" might only get 50 points. Zero points, of course, if no one in the Team has the balls to get up on stage.

So, there are still winners and losers, but a really enjoyable way to start the comp. So everyone wins!
~o0o~

2. COST (100 points) - The Tax Man has his independent auditors, and so should FSAE. There must be some recently graduated FSAEers who have a very good idea of which dampers cost $50, which cost $500+, and so on for the rest of the car. A small team of these auditors assess the cost of every car, INDEPENDENTLY of the Team's opinions. The car with lowest "Audited Cost" scores 50 points, and more expensive cars score lesser points on some scaled basis.

Meanwhile, the teams also submit Cost Reports. To keep it simple, these have at most 10 costed "major assemblies" (eg. engine, frame, etc.), with each subdivided into at most 10 costed "sub-assemblies" (eg. engine-intake, ECU, etc.). So a couple of pages at most. This should encourage "big-picture" engineering thinking (ie. let the bean-counters fuss over the detailed costings). Teams that get within 1% of the auditors similar costings score 50 points, with bigger deviations getting lesser points.

(BTW, one day some of you students might get to play this game with the real Tax Man! :()
~o0o~

3. DESIGN (100 points) - This is far too subjective these days. In the past I have suggested a Bang-For-Your-Buck approach, where Total-Dynamic-Points are divided by a realistic Cost score. But this just repeats the results of Dynamic and Cost scores, so is redundant.

So, perhaps the subjectivity can again be spread out by having all Teams rank each others' cars, best-to-worst, with overall best getting 50, and worst getting 0 points.

This makes the current Design Judges redundant, which they will not like. There is also the issue of "testing the students' knowledge". So, give all the Teams a ~1 hour written "theory" exam for 50 points, with the questions supplied by the DJs. For example, one such question might be;
"Explain how a 'Roll Centre' which 'migrates' significant distances sideways can send confusing signals to the driver."

Note that if a Team gets the answer, ahem, "wrong", perhaps by answering the above question with "It doesn't!!!", then they can officially request that the DJ who gave the question defends his version of the "correct" answer. This should be done publicly by the DJ, in front of all the assembled students, as a "bonus educational event". A post-lecture Q&A session should be encouraged.

At the very least, someone at the competition should learn something from this process.
~~~~~o0o~~~~~

DYNAMIC EVENTS (700 points).
=========================
Only small changes here.

4. ACCELERATION (100 points) - This and Skid-Pad are the two "purest" Dynamic Events (ie. they test pure longitudinal or lateral-Gs). They are also the best measure for comparing Teams in different parts of the world, and in different years.

I have long argued that unlike almost every other motorsport-like competition, FSAE has shown negligible progress over the years. The cars are NOT getting significantly faster. The average times for these events are all but static, when they should be steadily dropping.

Note that any new records being set here are a result of the "bell-curve" getting wider, but not of its centre shifting to reflect generally faster cars, or better educated students. (This is my opinion based on memory of rough times. A more accurate statistical analysis would be appreciated, anyone?)

The implication is that the stated goal of FSAE, namely to provide an improved education system for young engineers, is NOT HAPPENING. This lack of significant progress shows that today's students know as much, or as little (!), about Vehicle Dynamics++, as the students having a first shot at it 20+ years ago.

This lack of progress might be changed by giving these two events more prominence. That is, more points, so more incentive to try harder to learn how to go fast in a straight line, or around a circle. Come on, boys and girls, break some records!

And BTW, a simple RWD combustion-car should be aiming for the low-3-seconds here. Above 4 seconds is a disgrace! [Angry-face icon!!!]
~o0o~

5. SKID-PAD (100 points) - As above.

The times you should be aiming for here are in the upper 3-second bracket, or at the very most, the lower 4s (this assumes a reasonable-grip surface). If your best times are only in the mid-5s, then you should concentrate on the Presentation Event. :)
~o0o~

6. AUTOCROSS (100 points) - This event is the one most influenced by driver skill. Reducing points here reduces the influence of an especially skillful driver.

Acceleration and Skid-Pad make can be done well with less skillful drivers, so are a better measure of the car design. Since (IMO) this whole competition is supposed to be about educating students so that they can "engineer" a "good car", rather than train (or hire?) really good drivers, I reckon shifting points from AutoX to Acceleration and Skid-Pad is warranted.

Also, many of the performance factors that are important in AutoX are already tested, and rewarded, in Enduro. This makes AutoX somewhat redundant. But a team can lose all points in Enduro with an unreliable car, or even "bad luck". So being able to get points from just one fast lap in AutoX is still a worthwhile test of the team's ability to engineer a fast car.

And, a round 100 points is ... a round number!
~o0o~

7. FUEL ECONOMY (100 points) - Similar points to current Rules is OK.

But this should be returned to being purely about fuel ECONOMY. Namely, car with least amount of fuel used gets 100 points, with more fuel used getting lesser points. Including the speed of the cars in the scoring formula, as per the current Fuel "Efficiency", is again redundant, as speed is rewarded elsewhere.
~o0o~

8. ENDURANCE (300 points) - Without a doubt, this should still score the most points.

This for similar reasons to those given from the beginning of FSAE. Namely, "To finish first, first you must FINISH!!!". Reliability is hugely important in any engineering, so it is right to reward it generously here.

Enduro is also a better test of the ergonomics of the car than AutoX, giving another reason to lessen AutoX's points relative to Enduro. I note that current passenger cars seem to be developing progressively worse ergonomics (some of it bordering on criminal negligence!), so any encouragement to improve ergo is worthwhile.
~~~~o0o~~~~

IN SUMMARY - Static Events that are more fun, more educational, less of an incentive to lie and cheat, and less of a distraction from the core task of building that "inexpensive but fast weekend autocrosser...". (And let's face it here, the Design Event is currently a huge distraction from this relatively simple task.)

Dynamic Events quite similar to current Rules, but with a bit more emphasis on the two (Acc & SP) that give a good measure of progress, and hence whether FSAE is actually working as a long term EDUCATIONAL exercise. (To repeat what the Grumpy-Old-Fart has said many times before, you can pluck almost any toothless-hillbilly out of the back-woods, and they will know more about going fast in Acceleration than almost all of you FSAEers put together. :))

Z

Charles Kaneb

06-09-2014, 08:18 PM

Z,

I like what you did there, but maybe some other changes to the static events might make it more spectator-friendly.

FABRICATION (replaces presentation): Two team members are given six empty clean soda cans, a box of Harbor Freight pop rivets, a packet of JB Weld, and drawings for (for example) an oil tank, a radiator fan shroud, a battery box, a throttle-body-to-air-filter adaptor, a wing-to-endplate insert, and a brake-cooling scoop. They have two hours to form two items selected at random. These items are then dimensionally checked and tested - the oil tank for maximum lateral and longitudinal acceleration that maintains outbound flow, the fan shroud for flow through a test radiator, the throttle-body-to-air-filter adaptor for pressure drop on a mini flow bench, and the battery box, brake cooling scoop, and wing-to-endplate destructively strength-tested.

DESIGN (written): 5 vehicle areas, one student for each. 5 calculations per student, 1 hour, solve four problems, half the points for a complete drawing, the other half for the right answer. Closed book.

DESIGN (presentation and questioning): How well you know your team, its methods, and its limitations should be a factor - if TAMU-13 had been given the choice to punt the design finals in exchange for a 125-point score at Lincoln I'd have been one of the votes in favor.

BILL OF MATERIALS (replaces Cost): Ten items will be selected immediately before the event by the judges for inspection. If the part in your bill of materials isn't identical (finish, material, dimensions, part number if COTS) to the part in the BOM, you get no credit for it. If your car doesn't have that part, you get full credit for not needing it.

DYNAMICS: A CRG Kali 32/Rotax Senior driven by the local kart star can set a high, consistent, attainable standard in each event. 2/3 of full credit for beating her (his?) time.

Jay Lawrence

06-09-2014, 10:33 PM

Z, I don't think your gripes about education/progression are warranted. The point of the event is to make better engineers, and I can guarantee that it does. However, you have a small group of engineers starting from scratch a lot of the time, not necessarily building on previous knowledge (they have none) to create the incremental improvements that you aren't seeing. If you had a team of the same people for 3+ years and they made no improvement to accel/skid then you have a point, but that's generally not the case.

Dunk Mckay

06-16-2014, 07:31 AM

Ultimately what it comes down to is what are the objectives of the actual events themselves?

In the case of COST it seems to be torn two ways:
-A vain, half-hearted attempt to try to level the field because different teams have different budgets, and the organisers don't want to alienate universities that don't have five figure budgets.
-Assessing the teams ability to compile an accurate and high quality BOM and cost report.

There are a few problems here.
-Firstly the points allocated for the event are nowhere near significant enough to discourage teams from throwing money at the project to make a better car. It simply doesn't make the cost vs. performance a tough decision, which is not reflective of the industry.
-Secondly it's impossible to truly assess the accuracy of the report, which means a team can easily slash what their vehicle actually costs down to a much less penalising level, further accentuating the first problem.

So what to do?
Well one thing that can be assessed is the quality of the report, although extremely lengthy reports make this quite tricky. Solution: have teams pick a system on their car, with a minimum number of components (and a maximum) say 50-200, and write up a details cost report about that.

However this doesn't help teach budding engineers to make cost vs. performance decisions as they would have to in industry (which can also push them to come up with far more clever solutions). Nor does it solve the problem of budget extremes, from very low, to insanely high. This I think is something that could be addressed in the "DESIGN" event. I put it in inverted commas because I think we also need to start from basics as to what the goal of that event is:

So DESIGN event, what's it for?
-Assessing the skill of the students to design a good racing car. But what for what purpose? Under what conditions?

I think the event needs to be broken into two parts.
-A high level assessment that will give the team the opportunity to justify their overall concept, what they decided their objectives would be and why, and how they planned to achieve those. The judges will allocate a score based on whether they think the team made the right decision, had the right objectives considering their situation. The playing field in this would be level for all teams, and allows new poor teams to do just as well as experienced rich teams, solving the cost issue for static events at least.
-The second part focuses on the execution at a technical level with the assumption that the teams overall objectives are the benchmark for assessing their engineering/design decisions, with a more part/system specific focus.

In theory both of these are already covered, and a good team can make the point well if they are good at presenting and can get the message from "part 1" across at the start of the current design event. But if no, when a judge starts asking questions about a specific part, there's a good chance he's already got an opinion, so even if the student is then able to explain that actually, X and Y means that it aligns perfectly to their overall objective, which is in fact fully justified, but the judge just hears this as excuse rather than full justification. Essentially in this situation the team is being penalised for poor presentation. But since when was this supposed to be about assessing presentations skills?
Another situation where this merged approach doesn't work is if the high level objectives are poor. Perhaps they were a new team that set some goals at the start of the year they didn't quite understand until they got to the event. The decision they made based on these objectives might actually have been very good, but that won't help them much if the judges decide that their initial assumption was wrong therefore the whole lot is wrong. And there's plenty of grey area in between.

06-18-2014, 09:52 PM

FABRICATION (replaces presentation): Two team members are given six empty clean soda cans, a box of Harbor Freight pop rivets, a packet of JB Weld, and drawings for (for example) an oil tank, a radiator fan shroud, a battery box, a throttle-body-to-air-filter adaptor, a wing-to-endplate insert, and a brake-cooling scoop. They have two hours to form two items selected at random. These items are then dimensionally checked and tested - the oil tank for maximum lateral and longitudinal acceleration that maintains outbound flow, the fan shroud for flow through a test radiator, the throttle-body-to-air-filter adaptor for pressure drop on a mini flow bench, and the battery box, brake cooling scoop, and wing-to-endplate destructively strength-tested.

DESIGN (written): 5 vehicle areas, one student for each. 5 calculations per student, 1 hour, solve four problems, half the points for a complete drawing, the other half for the right answer. Closed book.

Charles,

Yes! I was going to include a "design and fabricate a small bracket to carry this load..." in the 50 point "Theory" section of Design Event. I left that out because there might be problems if 100+ teams all strike their arc-welders at once (ie. black-out of nearby suburb). And it might be argued that they have already done this sort of problem by designing/building their cars.

But many teams do very little ORIGINAL design each year, instead simply bringing a slightly re-hashed version of earlier cars. And it takes them all year to do so! So, to reflect the urgency and unexpectedness of "real" engineering, how about this?

One week before comp a "WT! Design Challenge" is given via public posting on some website. The acronym reflects the nature of many real-world engineering jobs, where you arrive at work one morning, and "WT...!". :)

This might be worth 20 or 30 points of the Design Event. Well organised teams that have completed their car many months ago can put their full effort into this problem and score useful points. Poorly organised teams forego any points here, and continue in their mad panic to finish the car before comp...

The design problem could be similar to those in your above quote. Preferably something that is easily tested for "goodness" at the comp. Part of the problem specification might be a formula relating weight, cost, stiffness, flow-rate, pressure-drop, etc., that must be "optimised" for the maximum score. Here is an example.

"Design a bracket to satisfy the following.
* The bracket must have four Attachment-Points (APs) that are arranged in a horizontal rectangle 1 metre by 1.5 metres (see Fig. N for details of APs).
* The entire bracket must be contained within a rectangular box defined by the plane of the underside of the four APs, in plan-view by the outside of the four APs, and extending no higher than 1 metre above the bottom plane.
* Three of the APs will be fixed to a "ground-frame" in a manner that constrains only their vertical movement.
* The fourth AP will have a vertical downward load of 3 kN (~300 kg) applied to it.

Scoring will be as follows.
* If, on removal of the 3 kN load, the bracket has more than 1 mm of permanent deflection at the loaded AP, then zero points scored.
* The vertical deflection of the loaded AP, from no-load to 3 kN applied load, will be measured as 'D' mm.
* Total mass of the bracket will be measured as 'M' kg.
* Total cost of the bracket will be taken as 'C' $, this based on Table N "Costs of Various Materials" [this giving $/kg for mild-steel, alloy-steel, various aluminiums, CFs, different types of wood, etc...]
* Total score is determined by... [some equation which combines D, M, C in a weighted fashion to give a final score...]"

The above is obviously boiling the job of an FSAE chassis down to its most essential elements, namely providing sufficient strength and maximum torsional stiffness at minimum mass and cost. Hopefully this "simplifying" of the problem would teach the students more about good design than (for many of them) their "let's just do something like last year, again...". (BTW, the above problem is very easy to solve efficiently.)

Also, cycling each year's problems through structural, kinematic, fluid-flow, heat-transfer, electronic-sensors(?!), etc.+++, should give enough variety to prevent the students getting in a rut and saying "Well last year's winning bracket was made from 3-D printed Titanium, so we should do that...".
~o0o~

DYNAMICS: A CRG Kali 32/Rotax Senior driven by the local kart star can set a high, consistent, attainable standard in each event. 2/3 of full credit for beating her (his?) time.

I am also fully in favour of at least letting karts demonstrate at each comp. Also doing same with any other FSAE-similar cars. Perhaps even a good SAE-Baja car, lowered and fitted with slicks!

FSAE students SHOULD be doing a lot more "benchmarking" than they currently do. Certainly they should be looking a lot wider afield for the many possibilities of better performance. Currently there is far too much (and far too narrow-minded) "Let's do what we've always done, or what some other FSAE teams are doing, but maybe move it a bit more towards F1.".
~~~~~~~~~~o0o~~~~~~~~~~

Z, I don't think your gripes about education/progression are warranted. The point of the event is to make better engineers, and I can guarantee that it does. However, you have a small group of engineers starting from scratch a lot of the time, not necessarily building on previous knowledge (they have none) to create the incremental improvements that you aren't seeing. If you had a team of the same people for 3+ years and they made no improvement to accel/skid then you have a point, but that's generally not the case.

Jay,

"... to make better engineers." Better than what?

I fully accept that students that have been through the FSAE mill are better than similar students who have not gained any practical experience at all. But non-FSAE students who spend their weekends at, say, the local drag-strip might be much better again.

My main "gripe" is not with the students, but with the education system itself. Namely the vast numbers of "teachers of FSAE" (eg. supervisors, lectures of VD, etc.) who seem to be having NO MEASURABLE EFFECT on the education of the students. This shown by the negligible drop in Acc or SP times.

"...you have a small group of engineers starting from scratch a lot of the time, not necessarily building on previous knowledge (they have none)..."

Huh??? What about the squillion terabytes of "knowledge" just on this Forum? (Well, sure, most of it is buried under even more terabytes of junk, but it is here.) And the countless FaceSpace sites, and Team sites, and official Results-page sites, etc., that Newbie-Teams can use to get up-to-speed on their required "knowledge".

For example, why not this type of thinking from a Newbie-Team?
"We have studied many past FSAE cars, and have drawn up this table listing their horsepowers, frame-types, tyre-types, WEIGHT-DISTRIBUTIONS (<-hint!!!), +++, and have found that their maximum launch acceleration is G-gees. But we have also studied the toothless-hillbillies at the local drag-strip and have found that they can manage TH x G-gees during their launches. Hmmm..., have we learnt anything here?"

For reasons that are beyond me, it seems that the "teachers of FSAE" are not directing the students to study any of this vast knowledge base, and thus take advantage of it. In fact, there seems to be remarkably little teaching of any sort going on. (The exception is the very small number of winning Teams, who, frankly, do not have to try too hard.)

It is indeed an unfortunate truth that most teams do "start from scratch", make the same-old-same-old mistakes, over and over again, and thus make NO PROGRESS.

But why (the bloody hell!) am I as a tax-payer paying for all those schools! May as well let the kiddies run free. In fact, we could re-boot society every generation by simply going back to living in caves! Aahhh... cave-life, ... so easy... :)

Perhaps an FSAE-Invent-The-Stone-Wheel competition?

Z

Jay Lawrence

06-18-2014, 11:49 PM

Z,

To clarify, I was referring to the education system as far as FSAE is concerned. Outside of it, I am somewhat in agreement with you. Yes, non-FSAE students who spend their time at a drag strip may know how to go faster in a straight line than those who don't. Those who are fortunate enough to be involved with racing prior to leaving uni and earning some money to support the activity may be better equipped to educate some other FSAE students, but not everyone is that fortunate (on a side note, Wollongong had not had a decent accel result since 2004 or 2005, despite having by a long way the most potent engine package. I did a bunch of tuning in 2009 and got us up to 3rd for that event, having never been to a drag strip in my life). When I started FSAE, I had done 0 racing previously, and IIRC that was the case of everyone in my team. I had done 0 machining previously (same deal). I had done 0 project management (same again). Thus, joining FSAE gave me experience in areas where I had none before, thereby making me a 'better' engineer. Do I know more about making a car go in a straight line than Jim Bob at the drag strip? Doubtful, but I can manage people/projects, I can machine stuff, I can draw stuff, etc. That (I think) is the point of the FSAE program. To that end, it is achieving its goals. Just because it is not producing fields of Erik cars does not mean it has failed.

Unfortunately, regardless of the larger education system, most people get onto a FSAE team and think that they are now engineers on a race team, and want to design the sh*t out of everything. This is where Geoff's reasoning etc. needs to comes into play. Personally I didn't appreciate that approach until after uni (I remember griping about how badly we did in design, and how we were beaten by ADFA who had *gasp* beam axles!), but I have learnt a lot more and have been trying desperately to pass this sort of thing on to UoW FSAE since. In fact I believe Geoff's reasoning... thread is now required reading. That is progress, whether you see it/like it or not.

Dunk Mckay

06-19-2014, 02:37 AM

Z,

While in principle I agree with the idea of giving the teams a new problem to solve in controlled conditions to test their actual ability, I fear in practice this wouldn't work so well.
The main issue being that of chance. Depending on what school and what teachers the students have had, some may have had certain types of problem, say structural, rammed down their throat, while others will have done primarily dynamic stuff. So each year depending on what sort of problem is given out it's going to go to those that are the best at doing that problem under pressure and in a shot time span.
Given time and the ability to work as a team they might be able to come to the same result. They'd spend more time where they have less speciality and make it up with the stuff they've been taught well. So for an overall vehicle and a lengthy design and development cycle it all works out and two teams would be evenly matched. But put on the spot with one problem or the other and it's an unfair assessment.

I'd also point out that one of the major flaws that I see with the higher education system (at least in the UK, but probably elsewhere) is that so much of it is based on assessments that have nothing to do with how you will be asked to perform in industry. When between 50% and 80% of your degree is based purely on how you perform with a pen and paper in an exam, with your memory as your only resource and quite literally a ticking clock reminding you that your entire future hangs in the balance based on how you perform in that one 2 hour session.
I consider myself a good engineer, I'll let those that know me tell me if I'm better still. But I'm not great at learning formulas or procedures for solving specific problems off by heart, it doesn't seem like a very useful tool to me, I prefer fully understanding a subject matter and applying that understanding to any problem that comes my way. I've seen people that learn everything off by heart, go into an exam and finish in good time and get good results, some of these people are the worst engineers I've ever had the displeasure of working with. Yet they graduate with the same honours that I did, and in fact better honours than others I would consider to be excellent engineers.

One of the great things about FSAE is that it puts you into a situation far closer to working in industry that any exam paper, assignment or most university group projects ever could. It's not perfect, not by a long shot (it would be less motivational if it was). But if we start throwing in exam type assessments, because it's easier to objectively assess people (this ultimately is the excuse of the education system) then we will lose part of what is so great about FSAE.

... ... ... ... ...
On a side note, I'd have been happy during my studies to pay an optional premium to have all of my final assessments be a one on one with an industry expert or even an academic (or a small panel) with a problem similar to that of the written exam, but with a more practical and explanatory approach. You would demonstrate that you understand the problem and how to solve it, open book, with loose time constraints (it's expected to take 2 hours, but you have up to 3 if you need it, taking longer is obviously reflected in your score, but not dramatically so). Essentially you can explain the why of what you're doing to solve the problem, as well as the what, which imho is far more important. You'd get a nice little extra add-on to the title of your degree that would be very attractive to employers (a similar effect to having done an industrial placement, but can be added on top to be better still).
Make the fee income assessed, with partial or full bursaries given to those from poorer backgrounds.
It's still not perfect, but it is practicable as it pays for itself and wouldn't be for everyone.

mech5496

06-19-2014, 02:54 AM

Ultimately what it comes down to is what are the objectives of the actual events themselves?

So DESIGN event, what's it for?
-Assessing the skill of the students to design a good racing car. But what for what purpose? Under what conditions?

I think the event needs to be broken into two parts.
-A high level assessment that will give the team the opportunity to justify their overall concept, what they decided their objectives would be and why, and how they planned to achieve those. The judges will allocate a score based on whether they think the team made the right decision, had the right objectives considering their situation. The playing field in this would be level for all teams, and allows new poor teams to do just as well as experienced rich teams, solving the cost issue for static events at least.
-The second part focuses on the execution at a technical level with the assumption that the teams overall objectives are the benchmark for assessing their engineering/design decisions, with a more part/system specific focus.

In theory both of these are already covered, and a good team can make the point well if they are good at presenting and can get the message from "part 1" across at the start of the current design event. But if no, when a judge starts asking questions about a specific part, there's a good chance he's already got an opinion, so even if the student is then able to explain that actually, X and Y means that it aligns perfectly to their overall objective, which is in fact fully justified, but the judge just hears this as excuse rather than full justification. Essentially in this situation the team is being penalised for poor presentation. But since when was this supposed to be about assessing presentations skills?
Another situation where this merged approach doesn't work is if the high level objectives are poor. Perhaps they were a new team that set some goals at the start of the year they didn't quite understand until they got to the event. The decision they made based on these objectives might actually have been very good, but that won't help them much if the judges decide that their initial assumption was wrong therefore the whole lot is wrong. And there's plenty of grey area in between.

This is an excellent suggestion, from the perspective that it could be applied right now to the competition, and IMO how all design events should work.

Oh, and Jay, totally agree with you on your last post.

coleasterling

06-19-2014, 11:48 AM

Dunk Mckay

06-20-2014, 07:27 AM

1. Replace Marketing with a Project Management presentation.

I was critical of Formula Hybrid's removal of the Marketing presentation and replacement with a Project Management presentation until I asked them about it, and it actually makes a lot of sense. The best argument I heard for it is that automotive companies don't care how well an engineer can sell a car. It isn't relevant to their job, but project management definitely is. I think moving that direction would be good for FSAE, too. I'm not sure that it will do everything Hybrid hopes it will in terms of helping teams be better prepared, but it could definitely help highlight areas in team structure and time management that need help.

Very much agree with this. Although I think it's important to make sure there is a "customer focus" aspect to this. I've not worked in the automotive industry all that long, but I can tell you that ultimately all high level objectives are driven by customer needs/requirements. It is therefore something very relevant to good engineering practice.

2. Allow Hybrids at any competition that allows Electrics.

Hybrid has proven that there isn't any significant performance advantage to building a hybrid. They definitely won't be dominating the competition, but they CAN be competitive. Texas A&M's 2011 Hybrid car could have placed solidly in the upper-middle of the pack in FSAE. The safety concerns are well understood and there are already judges and tech inspectors that are there evaluating and inspecting full electrics. This mostly helps teams that would be aiming to compete in the Formula Hybrid event, as Lincoln is much closer to a majority of the teams and is much later. Teams could choose which class they would want to be scored in, or could be classed on their own. It wouldn't cause significant problems with scoring and there is plenty of space at Lincoln for the 10 or so teams that might go. It might even bring more sponsorship to the event? It would certainly help raise the bar for Hybrid teams that aren't aware just how competitive FSAE is outside of the Hybrid competition.

Also agreed, relevance to auto industry, etc, etc. I don't think hybrids will become the norm, but they are part of the transition to electrics (which I think will become the norm, but not for 30-50 years), so the majority of FSAE graduates will have to deal with them in some form or another at some point in their careers.

Another thing I think could be interesting, and not to hard to implement, would be to have a short written report submitted every year (along with the design report) that asks what would you have done differently if...?
The if would change each year (not on a cycle) and could include things like :"You had to have a car that cost $X000 less to make (or $X000 more), or you had to work to a specific amount (+/-5%), if there was a minimum weight limit, you had to use a single/4cyl/2cyl (you'd get one different to what you were using that year), or a combination of these. Feel free to suggest others.
Now I understand that some competitions have some small things like this (cut 10% from the cost for example), somehow I managed to not have much contact with this stuff (too busy building the car). But from what I can tell it's usually just a case of modifying what you've already done. What I'm suggesting is that you are required to completely rethink the approach top down, based on these requirements, and in theory you should end up with a significantly different car concept with different engineering decisions.
This sort of thing would provide some good evidence for who actually understands why they build the car they build, and who just copies what was done before or other teams.

Will M

06-20-2014, 12:44 PM

These are from the Formula hybrid rules; an engine that is ‘stock’ and <250cc does not require a restrictor.

****
IC1.1 Engine Limitation
Engines must be Internal Combustion, four-stroke piston engines, with a maximum displacement of
250cc for spark ignition engines

IC1.2 Permitted modifications to a stock engine are:
(a) Modification or removal of the clutch, primary drive and/or transmission.
(b) Changes to fuel mixture, ignition or cam timings.
(c) Replacement of camshaft. (Any lobe profile may be used.)
(d) Replacement or modification of any exhaust system component.
(e) Replacement or modification of any intake system component; i.e., components upstream of
(but NOT including) the cylinder head. The addition of forced induction will move the engine
into the modified category.
(f) Modifications to the engine casings. (This does not include the cylinders or cylinder head.
(g) Replacement or modification of crankshafts
****

I would add these as an alternate rule set for engines in regular FSAE .
Except I would allow up to 300cc as that (at least in the USA) seem to be becoming a regular entry level motorcycle displacement.

It think this would make it easier to smaller teams to get started. You don’t need an engine guru to have a function car.
And for established teams it would take some of the stress off of the competition.
More than anything else FSAE is too high stress, and anything improve the stress-fun ratio would be good.

-William

Alumni

06-20-2014, 08:48 PM

Another thing I think could be interesting, and not to hard to implement, would be to have a short written report submitted every year (along with the design report) that asks what would you have done differently if...?
The if would change each year (not on a cycle) and could include things like :"You had to have a car that cost $X000 less to make (or $X000 more), or you had to work to a specific amount (+/-5%), if there was a minimum weight limit, you had to use a single/4cyl/2cyl (you'd get one different to what you were using that year), or a combination of these. Feel free to suggest others.
Now I understand that some competitions have some small things like this (cut 10% from the cost for example), somehow I managed to not have much contact with this stuff (too busy building the car). But from what I can tell it's usually just a case of modifying what you've already done. What I'm suggesting is that you are required to completely rethink the approach top down, based on these requirements, and in theory you should end up with a significantly different car concept with different engineering decisions.
This sort of thing would provide some good evidence for who actually understands why they build the car they build, and who just copies what was done before or other teams.

Do you think this could be made part of the business management presentation? For example - "You designed and built a $20,000 car with 10 people. What would you do differently if the customer wanted a $10,000 car? What if you only had 8 people?"

Perhaps even just to keep the competition more light-hearted, some thing like: "The customer has seen your prototype and the PR people are not impressed with it's looks. How do you plan to fix this for the debut next week? How do you react if HR plans the mandatory company picnic the day before the debut?" Or maybe: "The wifi has gone down (again) during an important meeting. How do you plan to handle yourself next time you see your IT manager?"

In my opinion, such an event should be regarded just as highly or higher than design, as I can't remember the last time I was given a project and was only told "The customer wants X. Allow your imagination and budget to run wild." (And I've worked in professional motorsports and for the Department of Defense!)

mdavis

06-24-2014, 10:56 PM

Very much agree with this. Although I think it's important to make sure there is a "customer focus" aspect to this. I've not worked in the automotive industry all that long, but I can tell you that ultimately all high level objectives are driven by customer needs/requirements. It is therefore something very relevant to good engineering practice.

Another thing I think could be interesting, and not to hard to implement, would be to have a short written report submitted every year (along with the design report) that asks what would you have done differently if...?
The if would change each year (not on a cycle) and could include things like :"You had to have a car that cost $X000 less to make (or $X000 more), or you had to work to a specific amount (+/-5%), if there was a minimum weight limit, you had to use a single/4cyl/2cyl (you'd get one different to what you were using that year), or a combination of these. Feel free to suggest others.
Now I understand that some competitions have some small things like this (cut 10% from the cost for example), somehow I managed to not have much contact with this stuff (too busy building the car). But from what I can tell it's usually just a case of modifying what you've already done. What I'm suggesting is that you are required to completely rethink the approach top down, based on these requirements, and in theory you should end up with a significantly different car concept with different engineering decisions.
This sort of thing would provide some good evidence for who actually understands why they build the car they build, and who just copies what was done before or other teams.

I can tell you that when we did the cost cutting measures for the cost competition, we didn't start with the goal of reducing cost by 10%. Our team thought of ways to reduce cost, and then made sure that we came up with enough cost reduction to be over 10%. If we didn't meet at least 10% reduction, it was back to square one. I think the lowest reduction we had was 11%, and that was on the engine. IIRC, the other two systems were something like 17% cost reduction and 30% cost reduction. Our entire team had done at least 5 co-op terms where we worked on similar projects in various industries before starting on the FSAE project. That experience was absolutely invaluable to coming up with good cost reduction strategies.

As for the customer focus, I agree 100%. Personally, I like Alumni's thought about changing resources that a given "team manager" (or whatever name teams have for their top PM) has to work with. I think that would be a real test for teams, and potentially even better, have that part of competition be after endurance (maybe only after skidpad and accel?). That way the judges have some metrics of performance of what the current car achieved, the team claims resources that they had (cross checked against the list of team members that are coming to the competition, maybe?) and a "change" in resources is given as a situation.

-Matt

Bemo

06-25-2014, 03:59 AM

Dunk Mckay

06-25-2014, 05:55 AM

Well, the real case scenario which is part of the cost event is kind of what you suggest here, but not rewarded with a lot of points. In my opinion you should be very careful with adding more and more reports and "what-if" tasks. FSAE is not the only design competition in the world, but one of the most succesful. IMO the reason for that it is very easy to get motivated when the task is to build something like a race car. Nobody takes part in FSAE because he likes to write reports. It is important that you have to do that to a certain degree as this is part of the professional life of an engineer. But it shouldn't exceed to far.

This is very true. But I'd like to to think this could be done in conjunction with simplifying the cost report in ways mentioned before. Once you've shown you can cost a few parts manufactured through different processes, there is little educational value to be gained from repeating the process over and over for another couple hundred/thousand parts.

So another simplification idea, not mentioned above (I don't think) would be to have to provide manufacturing cost breakdowns for a certain number of parts/subsystems, that demonstrates your understanding of exactly what is involved and why things cost what they do in mass production. But then the overall reported "cost" of the car (which is pretty much bogus as it is) is purely assessed on some summarising costs for different design concepts. E.g. steel drive shafts cost $XXX, titanium ones $XXXX, carbon ones: $XXXX, and the same for everything else. If a team thinks they have a clever concept that means mass manufacture would be orders cheaper than normally expected then they can submit that as one of the demo cases and have that cost applied instead of the standard one.
I think this maintains the same educational value as the existing cost report, but with far less DISentive that the current cost report. There was a period during my last year on the team that I think the suggestion could have been made to screw the cost report and just enjoy the rest of the build and running the car and take the points hit. We're not a team that's likely to win any prizes anyway, so why not push for better dynamic results by focusing on the car. In the end professionalism and respect for the competition won out and this wasn't really considered out loud, but a few of us were definitely thinking it.

The bonus of some of the things I've suggested, is that because they are at a higher level they can all be done much earlier in the year, before the details and drawings of all the final parts are complete. In fact, if drafted up early in the year for multiple concepts they could even be used as an engineering tool...