Message from a Design Judge

[PatClarke]

Hi all,
I have been aked to post this message by one of the design judges.

.........."I would like to please remind all competitors that it is to their advantage to read rule 4.5.12., and submit a photo album when presenting your car for design judging. By 5:30pm Thursday evening, each design judge will have looked at up to 16 different cars. Each car will have been seen for a scant 20 minutes each. That leaves only 9 to 10 minutes for the judges to collaborate and score that car, before we have to judge the next car. In those 9 minutes we can only write down a limited amount of notes. At the end of the day when it comes time to send 1 to 2 cars forward to semi-finals from each que, it is extremely helpful to have pictures of the different cars to look at. This rule is not mandatory. It is more of a suggestion, but if you have the chance to get your car in front of the judges later in the day so that they can recall critical details to your design, wouldn't you want to take advantage of that?


At last year's event a team leader asked what the previous team had given me as they left design judging. When I explained that it was photos of the car and the rules permitted them to do that, he smoothly went on to do his team's design presentation, and left. Thirty minutes later he returned, and handed me a folder with his team's car photos in it. They had quickly taken digital photos right after being judged, printed them on 8.5 x 11 paper, and bound them in a folder. It impressed me that they were observant enough to see the other team hand me photos, and then react fast enough to get their own photos quickly turned in. If I remember correctly, those photos helped bump that team up several places when we tallied our results at the end of the day.

An anonymous Motorsports Design Judge"

PDR

[rotor]

thanks pat see you in a few weeks.

mark hester
rmit

[James Waltman]

Pat,
Thanks for passing on the heads up. Shortly after we went through the Design Event last year the judges asked us for a few pictures of the car. We had to scramble around a bit to print some up.

(Pat - I replied to your PM a while ago - in case you're as bad at checking them as I apparently am)

[Ninja2]

If I remember correctly, those photos helped bump that team up several places when we tallied our results at the end of the day.

Doesn't this seem a bit off to anyone else? Somehow printing out photos can help you improve your position in a competition about the DESIGN of your car?

Im aware of the realities of marking a few cars in a relatively short space of time, but the cars should be given marks based on the merits of the design rather than the judges ability (or lack thereof) to remember it. If the judges don't have enough time to mark them properly, then give them more time!

[Matt Gignac]

Ninja,

Unless your car has some nifty feature that a judge would likely remember (maybe some wings, a turbo, monocoque, etc), the judges will probably have in their mind just another 600cc inline-4 with double a-arm suspension. You can use these pictures to your advantage to remind the judges of certain little parts of your car that you're particularly proud of, so that is what they will remember when they do the grading.

I wouldn't fault the judges for not remembering a design, but I think it is up to the team to make the judge remember, be it by a wicked presentation or perhaps some photos.

Matt Gignac
McGill Racing Team

[Denny Trimble]

The design event is judged by humans, not robots, so it's in your best interests to make sure they remember your car, by any means necessary! It's YOUR fault if they don't, it's your job to sell it.

And if by "make more time", you mean get the judges out there earlier than the 8AM start time, and extend the design semifinals past midnight, well that's asking a lot.

[ben]

Originally posted by Ninja2:
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">If I remember correctly, those photos helped bump that team up several places when we tallied our results at the end of the day.

Doesn't this seem a bit off to anyone else? Somehow printing out photos can help you improve your position in a competition about the DESIGN of your car?

Im aware of the realities of marking a few cars in a relatively short space of time, but the cars should be given marks based on the merits of the design rather than the judges ability (or lack thereof) to remember it. If the judges don't have enough time to mark them properly, then give them more time! </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

Having done 4 comps as a student and now 1 as a design judge I'd like to comment on this.

I had 8 cars in my judging group so that's 8*8 pages of design reports plus 8*2 pages of spec sheets, i.e. 80 pages total to read prior to the event. I took a day of my annual holiday to judge and stayed for the weekend just because I like the event. Please don't ask us to stay any later, that's not the reason you didn't score as highly as you felt you should.

If your trick bit of kit is that good you should be able to articulate why in the allotted time. Strange that the Cornell's, Washington's, and UWA's of this world seem to manage fine competition after competition.

I disagree completely with you on the photos. It doesn't matter how good an idea is if it's presented poorly. Some photos of how it was built and the progression of the build could add some important context to the decision making process.

Ben

[rjwoods77]

I have a neat idea. What if the judging was done after the comp. Here is the deal. You submit your design report and a marketing report. Design report is the same thing but the marketing report is for those points based on looks and general desireability of the product. You run the car throughout the race. You results are compiled and the design event is the comparison of your results versus what you claimed in your report. Basically if you broke or if your subsystem didnt perform as intended then you get raped on that subsystem design report because what you stated in the report will essentially be bs. The best teams will still do well but this wil shake up the middleground. I was looking at the stats and there were a bunch of teams that got dnf's in the enduro but good scores on their design report. So that says to me that either they should get a small penalty for the odd freak occurance(incorrectly soldered connection) to almost no points for having your aluminum rod ends in bending busting your front wheels off the car. Or some derivative of this all. Just tossing it out there.