Looking for a video from compeition...

[Dr Claw]

hey,

I think it was the friday that we had the big rain storm, a group from a 'mystery formula team' was taping a dodge ram and a RV hot lap through 4 feet of water for like 45 minutes. 25 foot high waves, and lots of fun was had, but no copy of the tape to remember/prove it happened.

If any of you know which team, or ARE that team, do you think we could work out a way to get a copy of that tape?

[Dr Claw]

hey,

I think it was the friday that we had the big rain storm, a group from a 'mystery formula team' was taping a dodge ram and a RV hot lap through 4 feet of water for like 45 minutes. 25 foot high waves, and lots of fun was had, but no copy of the tape to remember/prove it happened.

If any of you know which team, or ARE that team, do you think we could work out a way to get a copy of that tape?

[Alejandro]

Any videos or photos of the car that rolled over in the test track? I dont remember wich University was.

[-]

The car that rolled I believe was the U of Maryland. From the rumors that I heard, a university from Florida was recording their acceleration runs or braking and caught off in the corner the car from maryland going for a tumble. It would be a good sight to see if anyone has this..

[fsae racer]

I've got the video that your referring to. Its pretty cool. However, the only version that I have is 95 megs. No one on our team could figure out how to compress it, but I will send it over aim one day, if you got the time.

[Dr Claw]

I hope you were refering to the video i was looking for...at any rate though, my aim is 'Dr Claw 130'

what school are you from anyways?

[fsae racer]

I've got the maryland roll over. one of team members was filming us, Florida, as is happened. The car comes into the screen on the top left, already upside down. my aim sn is nicklickingood.

[Charlie]

Removed at the request of UM

[A Reinke]

anyone else have video online yet?

you can also email me any files you want, reinkster@hotmail.com - as a retiree of FSAE i want to save the memories. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

[RiNaZ]

Anybody know what made the U Maryland car roll over? Design flaw or the car hit something?

[Charlie]

I'll be getting some video up in the next few weeks. I've been sifting through and doing some editing. I'm on dial up right now so uploading is not worth doing yet.

[A Reinke]

c'mon Charlie, get to it. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

...i moved to NC, so i'm on dialup too.

but not at work! http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif

[1975BMW2002]

I think I know what made the Maryland car flip over. I've analyzed it quite a bit with a race car engineer in Detroit, and with memebers of my team. I designed the suspension, and managed the building of it. The flip comes back to Lack of two things.. sleep and experience.

The lack of experience comes in when we did our wheel weights on ground that we assumed was perfectly flat, but was actually not at all. It turns out our diagonals added up to a few hundred pounds away from each other. Amazing how about a quarter inch of travel on one wheel can throw a car out of whack.

Second, the lack of sleep reared it's ugly head when the shocks were pumped up. We used air shocks--I'll never touch them again for other reasons--It's all a blur now, and the pressures were changed before I got a chance to look at them, but I think that the rears were pumped up to 135, and the fronts to 85, where as it should have been the other way around. The next day we set the front to 140, and the rear to 90. It worked well.

So the car was pitched forward, had a really solid high rear end with a messed up static roll center, and the front would cave at the slightest hint of braking or turning. It was hard to see that the fron was caving since there was only 2.3 inches of travel.

Prior to the roll the inside rear was lifting in turns. It had never done it before competition, and I thought maybe we had hurt the frame somehow. It never occured to me that the pressures or wheel weights were messed up. sleep is a wonderful thing.

We tried to remedy the lift by softening the rear sway bar, and firming up the front, but it only helped a little, and some remember it as hurting it.

So we got out on the practice track again, and my theory is that the front was caving on the outside corner, and the back was lifting, and we just happened to time it just right putting more steering on as the wheel was lifting, and the momentum added up to a bit of two wheel driving. The driver was convinced that the car coudl not flip, and didn't try to take off the steering at all. So once it went up it just kept going. Even afterward he was asking"what the hell just happened?" It baffled him that he could flip it. I was worried when he asked the question for the first time that he had gotten smacked on the noggin. In reality his head stayed quite far from the ground.

Thankfully he was fine. His parents were there and watched the entire thing. His father, being a doctor accustomed to seeing people in less than perfect condition, told his wife that he was sure their son was fine, and didn't seem all that concerned. In the mean time we were all racing to shut the car off and right it.

The straps worked, the harness worked, the roll bars worked, the fuel tank oneway valve worked, the emergency cut off worked. The frame didn't bend.

We wound up snapping a rod end because of the way our geometry allowed our front bellcrank to come dangerously close to the pullrod when the wheel was unloaded. Well, once the left front wheel took a pounding from above it moved that bell crank far enough to hit the rod and load it in bending. That same rod at that instant in time had the weight of the car times 2 on it loaded in compression. Actually much more, the car was falling on it.

So in the end, we broke a rodend, and bent a rim pretty bad, but nothing else. we came out the next day, after yet another night of 2-3 hours of sleep, and drove in my opinion pretty well for a first year team with a car that would not run below 5 grand. Even with those difficulties, we wound up I think 54th in autocross, and 56 in skidpad, which is not wonderful, but running middle of the pack suggests nothing was horribly wrong.

I really think that the flip bonded our team even more, and that we learned a whole bunch from it. The university wanted us to stay quiet about it since it is bad publicity, and if they ask me to remove this I'll consider it, but I think that other teams should be allowed to learn from our mistakes. That is the idea of the competition.

Some other factors that may have had a part in it are... in no particular order.

--We had a tall car with a narrow track. The tall was an accident. Things look different in real life and in I-Deas. Not enough obsessing about getting stuff as low as possible. WE had a sedan seat in a formula car that set the drive very upright. great vision, horrible weight placement. The narrow track was my idea. I figured it would help in the slaloms that I had seen in videos of competitions. However, those were likely formula student or australia, not fsae, which has much more room, and fewer slaloms. Looking back on it, I'd go with a relatively narrow track, but not our 45/43 inch tracks. Perhaps more like a 48 or 49 on front, and a 46 to 47 on back. Theoretically we could only go a little past the 60 degree mark. Actually, we should have taken it as a sign when one of our wheels lifted on the tilt table. The strap was slack though. They made us try it again facing the other way and the wheel at the opposite end of the car lifted. That should have alerted me to the fact that the wheel weights were way off. There's that sleep thing again.

You should learn from this:

--Don't adjust settings on a car when you have had no more than 3 hours, and sometimes zero hours of sleep a night for the last 6 days.

--Buy a really good long level to set up the area where you do your wheel weights.

--If opposite wheels are lifting, your wheel weights are messed up.

--Wear arm straps--his hands went up like he was going to catch himself and the car. Yours would too.

--Don't design a car for a slalom course if there is not any significant slalom on the course.

I'm sure that there is more in here too.

Have a great day
Bill

[Charlie]

Thanks for the post. Honestly I don't think you guys have anything to be ashamed of at all. I don't see why the school wants to be so hush hush about it. That makes it look like its worse than it was. Posts like that make your team look good, you should not be on a gag order in my opinion.

If it makes you feel any better the narrow track was the way to go for the old FSAE autocross. There have always been slaloms in the endurance race too, until this year. So your thinking was more on track than you might have seen, but the (unannounced) course changes bit you.

[RiNaZ]

Great post Bill, i think i learn more from mistakes than just listening to discussions.