Reasoning your way through the FSAE design process

[Big Bird]

Greetings all,

I’ve been sitting down in the odd spare minutes I’m getting here and there, and slapping together a bit of a thesis about what I think of design, specifically in the FSAE context. I’ve written the odd wordy response here and there on these boards, but as with the nature of these forums they tend to get scattered in the morass of information. I figured I’d slap it all together in one place and see if it sinks or swims. Over the next few weeks or so I’m going to slap up a few different pieces relating to FSAE. It will be mainly to do with the philosophical side of the event, given there is a wealth of information here relating to technical design issues.

The following is around 4000 words or so. It might be rather painful at one sit, so you might want a beer or two to see you through.

My contention has always been that this even is won and lost on good management principles. Unfortunately we are not taught such things in our university careers. Rather we are mostly taught a collection of quite disparate facts relating to engineering science – and it is up to us to piece them together into some sort of greater truth. Therefore many of us blindly barge in with our bag full of engineering formulae and software skills, and attack an engineering design problem the way it is taught at uni. Given the repeated failure rates (usually around 60-70% fail to complete all events at most comps), and the large disparity in points across the top 10 at most events, I think that what we have been taught is falling short to some extent. This competition isn’t anywhere near as close as I think it could be or should be.

Whilst many of those attempting this project have excellent technical and analysis skills, something is getting lost between the design stage and the implementation stage. We are often seeing engineering as a purely technical exercise, whereas in a real project we have to take in a lot of outside factors that can conflict with, or even overwhelm, our technical aims.

The key point is that we have finite resources, and this is true of all project situations. Sure, in F1 the limit of those finite resources is somewhere up in the stratosphere compared to what we have to deal with, but even at that level the resources aren’t infinite. And when you are dealing with a finite resource base, then your design decision making process needs to reflect those limits. Not only do you have do decide whether a certain component or design will make your vehicle faster (if that is your design goal, but more on that later), but you also have to assess whether it is the most feasible direction for your team to find car speed

So rather than just say that “this is all about management” and leave it that, I’m going to try to put my money where my mouth is and convey what I consider to be good holistic design principles. I don’t consider myself to be a guru of any sorts when it comes to such things, but after viewing around a dozen of these events I feel I have seen enough common failure points to at least offer my thoughts. At least once I have committed all this stuff to screen, I might feel as though I’ve said enough and won’t have to bore you all senseless by hijacking your threads in future.

Design Management Structure
The following is a bit of a structure I’d follow as an FSAE vehicle design process. You’ll note that the thread I’m presenting below is focussed on the actual vehicle design itself, since that is what we talk about most in FSAE circles. Once you have read through it you might recognize that we could generate similar trains of process for the static events, and these would link in at the top end of the process. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

For the sake of readability I’ve labelled the below Levels 1 to 4, although this does not imply any order of importance – they are all significant in their own right. You might think of them as a design hierarchy, but I’d say each level has its own type of expertise required to make a success of this project.


Level 1
DETAIL AND COMPONENT DESIGN
This comprises design and manufacture of the individual vehicle components, and this is the level we are probably most comfortable with after our university training. This is the level where we are designing parts, calculating loads, masses, stresses, stiffnesses, heat transfer rates, etc. We are using typical engineering design and analysis tools such as CAD, FEA & CFD software, maybe engineering formulae, (stresses in shafts, bearing loads), etc. It is probably the area where we can best get advice from our academics, given this level requires expertise in specific areas, and generally academics tend to be people with deep expertise in a particular field.
Types of questions asked at this level: How do I make this part lighter? How do I make this stiffer? What material will we use? How do we manufacture this component? What physical tests do we need to perform on these components? Do we want a magnetic or Hall effect sensor for our crank angle sensor? What spring stiffnesses do we need?

Level 2
VEHICLE LEVEL INTEGRATION
This is where we are joining all the components together into a complete functioning vehicle. It is also the level where we identify conflicting goals that may arise between different components and sub-systems.
Types of questions asked at this level: What are our performance trade-offs at a whole vehicle level? How does our suspension geometry match up with our differential choice? How does our engine packaging tie in with our need for easy access and servicing? How do we address tradeoffs between engine mass and output torque/power? How do we address the conflicting demands of cockpit packaging and front suspension geometry?

Level 3
COMPETITION LEVEL INTEGRATION
Given the whole vehicle at level 2, how does this design tie in with our overall competition strategy.
Types of questions asked at this level: How do we score the greatest number of points at competition? What are the inherent trade-offs in our own design at event level? For example, how does our vehicle speed strategy tie in with fuel economy? Are there conflicts between our dynamic event performance and our static event performance? What are the risk factors that could possibly jeopardize our competition performance?

Level 4
PROJECT-LEVEL MANAGEMENT
This is the over-arching management of the whole project – how the competition performance ties in with other managerial level stuff like time and budget management, usage of human resources, etc. Functions performed at this level: Holding the whole project together so that you deliver this year, keep everyone reasonably happy, and hand over a healthy project to future teams
Types of questions asked at this level: What are our goals for this project? Are they feasible given our resources? How are we going for budget, time, material resources, etc? Are our key stakeholders (e.g university, tech workshop staff, sponsors, supporters, team members etc) happy with our project? How will our project affect future teams? Are our team members working in harmony? Are we leaving this team in a better state than we found it?

Remainder of this post found on page 19

[MalcolmG]

a very thought-provoking post, good work http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

I think breaking the project up into the 4 levels is a useful way of breaking up the tasks and objectives of the team, as I read it occurred to me that a very simple and probably quite effective way of defining the roles of people within a team would be to assign their responsibilities to a level. Using the management structure our team uses, you would have:
Level 1 - General team members
Level 2 - Subgroup leaders
Level 3 - Chief Engineer
Level 4 - Team Leader

And typically the goals for each level are set by the person responsible for the level above, e.g. subgroup leaders give team members briefs/instructions for component designs to help them achieve level 2 goals, chief engineer gives subgroup leaders performance targets to help level 3 goals be met and so on.

As I'm approaching the end of my final year in FSAE, I certainly wish I'd spent more time to get out of level 1 and 2 and put some good analysis into level 3. I guess the interesting thing here though, is that while spending time on the analysis of level 3 aspects of the design has the possibility of being very fruitful in terms of competition success, it's the details in level 1 which can make or break a competition, as the detail design will really be what dictates whether the car is capable of achieving any of the higher level goals, and obviously whether something fails in the middle of endurance - so it's not suprising that most teams will devote considerably greater effort to the lower levels. edit: although more high-level analysis would undoubtedly reduce the workload and add direction to the lower levels

[ed_pratt]

Kudos to Geoff!!

I think we've all been waiting a few years for this post!

I'm glad to finally see someone with some a wealth of experience sit down and write a fairly definitive (although i'm sure Geoff will protest otherwise!) top down explanation of how to do this project.
It's great for new teams and also really good for established teams to take a step back and have a good look at whether or not what they're currently doing is helping their cause.

I hope the mods sticky this one as I think it will alleviate a lot of the simple questions which seem to have been plaguing the forum recently.

Thanks again Big Bird.


Ed

[Jersey Tom]

That's excellent stuff, Geoff. Everyone should read that.

I totally agree, and think a particular note of importance is that design should be driven from 4 to 1, not 1 to 4.

IMO, 1 to 4 is "tinkering" whereas 4 to 1 is "engineering."

To save time you can certainly work on Levels 1, 2, and 3 simultaneously. The key though is that the high levels drive the lower ones, not the other way around. Using my Formula 1000 project as an example, I have spent a fair amount of up-front time on "Level 1" design, but in a manner that's easily configurable. I can have a rough idea of where A-arms, rockers, and dampers are going to fit and go together.. and once I determine my upper-level targets I can change a few sketches and the L1 components re-build themselves as necessary. You don't need to worry about what A-arm planes and specific hardpoints need to be.. when you define upper-level parameters they all fall into place as the only unique solution.

In my experience while doing this stuff, as talented as we thought we were, we barely had enough experience to really grasp the Level 1 part of things. Only a very few people really had any knowledge of REAL materials selection and manufacturing.. or stuff like the experience to avoid bare aluminum suspension spacers as they have the tendency to warp and gall and stick. Likewise there was always a learning curve regarding all the suspension and engine terminology, much less having in-depth real understanding of tire/vehicle dynamics.

As such we fumbled around at the 1-2 level, organized by a leader ("captain") who was taking their first stab at project management and inevitably wound up biting off more than they could chew. I readily admit I was no exception.

Given that most engineering curricula are geared toward developing a "Level 1" engineer, it is difficult to truly orchestrate a diverse, talented team that operates on all levels. At least from CU it would have been nice to have courses in systems engineering and management. I'd imagine the way to really develop people beyond the 1st Level in FSAE is to have lots of engagement at the underclass level, and work very hard on knowledge retention. Otherwise you're starting all over from scratch every year.

The other point you make that I really strongly believe in is to separate the high-level design drivers from the low-level details, at least initially. Start simple. I really like the example of building a simple lap sim that uses only peak acceleration values. Forget all the other crap initially. Once there's some comfort level with the basics, start moving incrementally toward more detail.

Overall a very good and well-written thread.

[VFR750R]

Originally posted by Big Bird:


Reality Check
The greatest lesson I learnt by working through the above process is how little effect the potential performance of a design really plays out on final results. For example, my own model indicates that a 1kg weight saving is worth around 1 point in the overall event. If we can see that for instance, a 5kg saving is worth maybe 5-10 points in terms of overall potential - and then we see that the top 5 in a comp may be spread by 200 to 300 points – it puts perspective on all that time you spend saving 1kg out of your chassis or a few hundred grams out of your uprights. And that if your team ended up 250 points behind the winner, or even 50 points behind the winner, it is not going to be a change in your vehicle’s performance specs that is going to bridge the gap.

Cheers all,

Geoff

I know I've been waiting years for someone to put some kind of number on points/kg.

Your post is what I'd call System Engineering. It is a master program at Cornell and the team works much the same way. We mostly look at the points system first and determine sensitive areas. In general we're looking for more power/less weight, but how we achieve those goals is often driven by a systems approach where we try to determine ahead of time our "biggest bang for the buck".
Project management is one of the most important areas for success because it's very easy to waste man-hours on things that don't contribute to the overall goals. And due to the limited number of man-hours all projects are prioritized.

Unlike Malcolms team we don't however have a chief engineer or single team leader. It stops at level 3 with a team committee of sorts. There is typically a team leader for each of the following; chassis, engine, electronics, and business. This is usually driven from the fact that no one person can be responsible for everything, nor is an expert in every system. It also means there is a specialist in each area present when hard team decisions are made. We do have subteams (and subteam leaders) in both chassis and engine, which report to the team leader in their area. The car is broken down to just about every last component, and team members are made responsible for those components. Subteam leaders need to know everything going on in the subteam so that at least two people are experts on every part. That way if someone can't be reached when there is a problem, someone else can be contacted. For some stuff this never is a problem, but for some electronics stuff there really may only be 2 people capable of troubleshooting.

I think not enough man-hours, and weight has been aimed at final tuning of the car in the past. With the tire consortium, I bet that this has been improved overall, but a lot of teams worry about every last hp when designing intake and exhaust systems, and then throw it way with a bad engine tune. Likewise on the chassis, our team struggled one year in doing simple toe, camber, and tire pressure matrices that are critical in taking full advantage of the tires. It's a lot easier to throw away 50 points then it is to find 50 in design.

[moose]

I agree here with everyone - I think that this should be nearly mandatory reading for anyone joining a team, and especially for those taking on any sort of leadership roll. While none of the thoughts are necessarily earth shattering, why its great is that its in a great, simple structure which helps drive home the point. We can debate all day over the individual points, or how its broken out, but the main message gets through very well - and really makes it a valuable read (just like the rest of your posts).

The hard part for teams, even that agree and want to follow this path, will be working this in to understand how to best manage all of the forces pushing them towards just doing what is easy in the momemt (#1) and the benefits of avoiding taking that path.

For instance - everyone knows that as much testing and prep as possible will certainly help with competition performance. So in response, with an eye towards getting the build moving, teams say "ok lets start designing and building as soon as possible". They then run off in 5 directions to get going by delegating work (if possible).

For many small teams, the core group of 2-3 probably feels it necessity to spend as much time "working" on designs/building as possible, rather than thinking about how to best prioritize and where the extra time spent by the best people on the team will yield the best results.

This is why some very small teams can do surprisingly well.. if you are just that short on man-power, you have to make these decisions, and spend a little bit of time thinking where can I spend time, and where do I have to just do something quick and dirty (or just buy it). At the same time, these teams will have 1-2 people doing all of the design so there is automatically a more holistic view of things.

Unlike a normal corporate environment, the people on the team taking the lead roles will also be doing a bulk of the work. Finding the time to really step back and spend a few hours at the start of every year/month/etc to plan and prioritize, in the same way as any compay does when it projects the next quarter's earnings, etc, and which divisions will provide that $, is something that really can be invaluable, and something that I can say I certainly didn't do enough of in my time. Having good direction at the lower levels of a group, makes doing work much faster/easier, as you aren't trying to think about what your boss/group lead is thinking about - but instead can focus on executing. We have all designed many quick parts standing at a mill, and it took no thought, because it was just a matter of already having all the main constraints set - and being able to do as much of that from the start of the project makes integration and moving forward with everything probably that much easier and faster


Matt

[murpia]

Excellent post Geoff.

Just one thing I'd like to expand on:

In between Level 1 and Level 2 is what I believe to be the single most effective way to build a good racecar: minimising the parts count. Parts you don't have weigh nothing and cost nothing and cannot break.

I'm not suggesting another level to the Systems Engineering approach but it's important when cascading out the design from Level 2 to Level 1 that you don't have too many parallel paths.

I don't have much time to discuss further today but I wanted to get the comment in ASAP. I have in the back of my mind a 'thesis' on the Minimal Parts Count Racecar. One day I'll have the time to write it.

Regards, Ian

[PatClarke]

Thank you for that post Geoff.
Hopefully it will be 'stickied' for all new teams to find easily.

Cheers

Pat

PS, I emailed you at your RMIT address earlier today.

[Mikey Antonakakis]

Geoff, thank you for that post. Trust me when I say I'll be doing a lot of thinking about that this week (when I should be studying for two midterms haha).

Having read it, I can say there are some higher level things I already do/do automatically, and some that I never really thought about. Your post will help me figure out how to fill in the gaps. Being good friends with both of our past chief engineers (one graduated) has certainly helped. The way we are structured is:
-Team members
-System Heads (including a new system, sponsorship/fundraising)
-Chief Engineer and President (CE being in charge of design, president in charge of administration, although both of us being MECE juniors means that we do a lot of consulting, and he is chassis lead)
We have traditionally been a "small" team, with usually 10-15 solid members at any point in the year, but this year we grew quite a bit, and I can say that going from being the only engine guy to being trusted with heading the entire design (now with, say, 20-25 solid members, many freshman) is almost overwhelming. I already have some clear ideas of how I would do things differently, given a second chance at this (I DO have another chance, if the team wants me to be chief engineer again next year). We are having to make compromises at this stage that I was hoping to avoid, but the project must move on.

I hope this gets stickied, it is probably the single most valuable post on these forums (of what I've managed to read so far).

[J. Vinella]

Thanks for the post Geoff. It was a good read and I have to agree with you on many of your major points.

The only thing I would add is...have fun! http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

[Dualsaber]

Thanks for the article.China will hold a event such as the FSAE this year.And it is a very helpful for our work.

[mumbles]

Great post Geoff. Pretty much summed it up perfectly. I can't wait to read more. I'm sure a few of our alumni could probably post up some of their similar writings. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_wink.gif

Although a bit long, I enjoyed every word of it. These are the type of posts we just don't get anymore, its sad

[Adambomb]

Very good, very solid, I'm making this mandatory reading for all our team leaders! I'm taking a systems engineering class this semester, and a lot of the stuff here sounded pretty familiar (especially the "V" diagram...that's a key figure in the text). The funny thing is, that class absolutely bores the hell out of me. Not because it's unimportant, but because after so many years in Formula, I've already learned a lot of these things the hard way! One important take-away from that class though is the "ideal" amount of systems engineering effort to ensure the project is done on time, within budget, objectives are met, etc. After several empirical studies it turned out to be about 15-20% of the overall effort. Sure makes for a lot of work for us "level 3" folks!

Breaking it into the separate levels is very important. Going beyond that, you can really classify the stages a team goes through by the highest effective "levels" that they are proficient in. I would say that until around 2002 ISU was very much a "level 1" team, maybe level 2 on a good year. We usually got a car bolted together, but were never really competitive. I've seen some documentation that focused on some of those disconnected "wants," for example "this year we're going to dominate competition because we're using an aluminum chassis," or some "innovative" gewgaw. From 2003-2007 we got some good folks in charge, developed at least some sort of rudimentary vision for what the car was supposed to "be," developed some basic points strategy and became a level 3 team, which paid off in some fairly consistent top 25 finishes, including 7th in 2006. Unfortunately we were still lacking in our level 4 strengths, and suffered poor membership, got our shop closed for 2 months for "safety" reasons, and were basically left more or less starting from scratch personnel-wise in 2008. I've been working hard on the level 4 stuff, but it is so true, it's not the kind of thing they teach in classes!!! The best I've found for that is to seek out classes on project management (at our uni it's called OSCM 320, in the business college), systems engineering, etc. Finding people with leadership and management skills who are willing to commit themselves to the team is a harder task, and for that I'm open to advice. Best I know so far is that when you find someone who seems to have some sort of knack for it, seek them out! Don't wait for them to come to you! I'm a military man myself, and I have found that a lot of the military leadership training I've received has been very useful, so that's always a good option. Hell, being in Formula is an awful lot like being in the Army!



Originally posted by murpia:
Excellent post Geoff.

Just one thing I'd like to expand on:

In between Level 1 and Level 2 is what I believe to be the single most effective way to build a good racecar: minimising the parts count. Parts you don't have weigh nothing and cost nothing and cannot break.

I'm not suggesting another level to the Systems Engineering approach but it's important when cascading out the design from Level 2 to Level 1 that you don't have too many parallel paths.

I don't have much time to discuss further today but I wanted to get the comment in ASAP. I have in the back of my mind a 'thesis' on the Minimal Parts Count Racecar. One day I'll have the time to write it.

Regards, Ian

Another very good point. I also happen to be taking a class that goes over DFMA this semester, I'm finding it to be another one that is particularly easy after spending some time in Formula. That's actually one of my biggest pet peeves, a lot of folks want to just get in there and start drawing parts up with no clear conception of its functional requirements, and end up with a doodad bolted to a gizmo bolted to another whatsit welded onto the frame. And usually all of those bolts need safety wire http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif. So much easier to just design one part that attaches to the frame, even if it does take a couple more iterations in CAD. Minimizing parts costs perhaps a tad more forethought in design, but saves CONSIDERABLE time in manufacturing, assembly, maintenance, not to mention the "free" benefits in weight, reliability, and cost. Not to mention results in a much cleaner, prettier car. This definitely ties into that "ideal" 15-20% spent on systems engineering.

P.S., I like the Cornell leadership structure, I've been toying with a similar idea for a couple years now. So that's you guys' secret after all these years http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_wink.gif.

[js10coastr]

My name is Justin Jang and I approve of this message...

Thanks for putting all of this together Geoff, now I don't have to go about putting my thoughts together and on paper/web, and can just reference students to this.

[Ludwig Smedberg]

Great reading! Looking forward to more posts concerning these areas!

[js10coastr]

Some further thoughts/rebuttals to some of the other comments...

its not all about "reducing part count" or DFM. There are areas where that is important, but they are not a "cure all". I'm tentative to put a label like "systems engineering" on it too... just because most catch phrases don't go far enough into the actual heart and soul of the issue. (Mostly untrained) Managers will throw around these types of catch phrases without really understanding what it is about, and so I will not try to summarize Geoff's post in a few words.

It may surprise a lot of the new SAE students and the "club racers" but professional racing varies quite a bit from those ranks. Instead of trying to "shave every ounce" pro racing is more about finding out what is most important and optimizing that.

There are a few items that I would like to point out in the Level 2 area. There are a handful of "parameters" that affect the overall performance of the car that are essentially free (as in, it has little to no financial cost to you and you don't have to put it in the cost report). These include the WD, track, wheelbase, gear ratio, runner lengths, fuel map, spark timing, suspension geometry/settings... among others. One of the first things I did for my formula hybrid team was to take simulation runs on these parameters... the result? We could work our asses off and spend our entire budget on a carbon/titanium/unobtainium car trying to save 75 lbs... or we could choose the right gear ratio for our car.

On a side note, the level 1 and level 2 are pure engineering. Level 4 is mostly management, and level 3 is strategy... which has a class in the college of business, so I guess that is management, but you'd better have someone who understands the engineering behind it.

[Big Bird]

Thanks for the positive feedback everyone. I hope you've found the above to be useful and not too demeaning. I'm trying to write such that FSAE novices aren't too overwhelmed, but also so that the old hands don't find it too trivial. Tough line to tread....

Apologies that the first post was a bit lengthy. I just wanted to get a bit of a backbone in place, onto which I can build a bit of a "thesis" over time. I know from prior experience if you try to cut corners on these boards then there are any number of mis-interpretations that can get thrown back at you, and the thread gets hi-jacked into all sorts of unexpected and often trivial directions.

Over the next few weeks I'll tack on a few related pieces to try to summarize my FSAE experience. I've been primarily writing this for my own team so that they understand the principles on which our original design was based, but there is no harm in sharing it around. FSAE is primarily a learning exercise after all.

Agreed with Jack - firstly and foremostly don't forget to have fun. We can overanalyze these things to death, and I've probably done that above. Get the relevant research out of the way, and then get stuck into the fun bits.

Murpia, I like the idea of the "minimal parts count racecar", I think it has quite a place in this event. Z was pushing this very concept on these forums around 4 years ago with his "brown go-kart", but the idea was lost on most. If I had design leadership over a number of years this was the direction I would like to have gone myself, systematically cutting back on complexity until a minimalist baseline was reached. But most of us only get a year or two in leadership before we have to move on and let others have their go (and quite rightly I'd add).

VFR, I was quite a fan of the Cornell system, and was fortunate to get some very helpful guidance from Michael Jones very early in the piece. I only wish we had some good Systems Engineering guidance over this side of the world, I've struggled to find it.

Cheers all, and I'll add another piece soon if anyone is interested.

[Big Bird]

Anyway, following on from my first post….

Potential vs. Execution

The point-scoring merit of a particular vehicle can be roughly broken down as follows:

Total Points = Track Speed points + Fuel Economy points + Static Event points

I have already stressed that design decisions made to increase track speed, may not necessarily have a positive effect on fuel economy or static event points (think of what a supercharger can do to fuel economy, or what a carbon tub might do to overall vehicle cost). So when I hear arguments that “design option X” makes the car faster, the first question that comes to mind is whether the designer has considered, or even cares, about the rest of the project (or whether they might even be deliberately ignoring the other aspects in order to “sell” their pet design). Any proposed design needs to be fairly assessed across all the above criteria.

Anyway, the argument I wish to make with all the above is that “Track Speed points” can be broken down even further into three interrelated factors:
• Design Potential: How the car will perform according to the calculations / lapsims that we’ve discussed earlier
• Vehicle Completeness: How effectively we deliver the designed vehicle to achieve its full potential.
• Driver Skill: How effectively the driver delivers the full performance of the vehicle
I’d combine the latter two factors under the term “execution”.

Now I’ve seen plenty of examples where all the focus was on the “design potential” side of things, but the final execution didn’t deliver on that potential. Examples include cars that don’t run properly on competition day, or drivers who obviously lack experience in the car. In our own team s I’ve seen examples where months were spent labouring over a couple of kgs (effectively a couple of points), but on competition day a swag of points gets lost because the acceleration event driver hasn’t driven the car before.

For most teams, the design potential of the vehicle may be worth around 0-20 points relative to your competition (and in many cases the decisions we are labouring over are maybe worth single points if that). Failure to complete the vehicle properly is a penalty of up to hundreds of points relative to your competition, and well trained drivers could be worth up towards 100 points. (I’m being a little vague as it depends on the team and where they are at – but certainly the penalties for poor execution are much more serious than the gains most of us are aiming for in our design stages).

The critical issue is time. We have a limited allocation of time that we have to share across the above three factors, and each deserves attention. Unfortunately the design stage has to be completed first, which is when we are at our least knowledgeable. Therefore we over-allocate time to the design side of things, maybe commit ourselves to a design which overstretches our manufacturing resources, and effectively short-change ourselves of time allocated to the more important latter stages of the project.

The overall point I’m making, with this and the earlier post, is that the parameters we often use to measure the worth of our vehicles is misguided. It is very easy to be convinced that a kilogram or a kilowatt is important, as we worry about the respective spec sheets of our’s and our competitions’ vehicles. To assess the true worth of (for example) a kilogram we need to understand:
• How that kilogram converts to overall competition points (in terms of potential performance)
• How the time cost of that kilogram might effect our final execution of the whole project

Enough for now, I'll get back to this next weekend.

Cheers,

[murpia]

Originally posted by Big Bird:
Murpia, I like the idea of the "minimal parts count racecar", I think it has quite a place in this event. Z was pushing this very concept on these forums around 4 years ago with his "brown go-kart", but the idea was lost on most. If I had design leadership over a number of years this was the direction I would like to have gone myself, systematically cutting back on complexity until a minimalist baseline was reached.
Thanks Geoff,

The idea has been in my mind for a few years now but what inspired me to post it was a recent anecdote I heard.

Apparently one of the big customer racecar manufacturers won the contract to replace a grid of 'open' cars with a 'one make' car. They went through their current design and took out as much cost and complexity as they could, reduced the parts count, integrated the design, utilised symmetry as much as possible, made the car easy to work on, etc.

They didn't need to chase performance beyond an acceptable level for the class, so they chased profit instead. But, they actually ended up with a lighter car, with better installed stiffness of the suspension. It was an aero formula, so outright performance was about the same, but in a non-aero formula that approach would have resulted in a faster car!

As a Design Judge it's these kind of design philosophies that get me interested these days. Any team can come along (and many do) and say 'we targeted lighter weight, better power, more grip, etc.' but very few then go along to add 'and we achieved it through... (insert clever thought process of some kind).'

Regards, Ian

[Jersey Tom]

Disagree slightly on the minimal parts bit, though it depends on where you're looking at it.

While it's nice to have lots of features integrated together in one unit (ex: tripod housing integrated into hub), in my experience it tends to add complexity to the manufacturing process.

In a pro shop, doing larger quantities, taking advantage of castings or tooling that's already set up, I'd suspect the minimal part approach works well. May even take less total time on a per part basis if you can take advantage of custom tooling. In a one-off amateur level series like this, especially with very limited fabrication equipment and time, in a lot of places I'd rather use two simple easy-to-make parts in place of one complicated one. There's certainly the opportunity for losing some rigidity, but the manufacturing timeline is critical.

From personal experience, my senior year I machined somewhere around 70-80 parts at a total of ~180 hours, including programming, setup, and run time. A lot of those parts took the "simple and modular" approach. At ~20 hours a week of machining just in itself (on top of welding and everything else), that added up to more than a couple months.

If I had consolidated those parts, stock material cost would have gone up substantially. Since my machine time was free, stock was the only realized cost. Would have also meant more intricate, longer setups, I suspect more run time, and higher chance for scrap.

There's definitely a balance between number of parts, and manufacturability... and for me, manufacturability was a huge design driver in getting the car done as quickly as possible.

Just my 2 cents.

[moose]

Originally posted by Jersey Tom:
Disagree slightly on the minimal parts bit, though it depends on where you're looking at it.

While it's nice to have lots of features integrated together in one unit (ex: tripod housing integrated into hub), in my experience it tends to add complexity to the manufacturing process.

In a pro shop, doing larger quantities, taking advantage of castings or tooling that's already set up, I'd suspect the minimal part approach works well. May even take less total time on a per part basis if you can take advantage of custom tooling. In a one-off amateur level series like this, especially with very limited fabrication equipment and time, in a lot of places I'd rather use two simple easy-to-make parts in place of one complicated one. There's certainly the opportunity for losing some rigidity, but the manufacturing timeline is critical.


I think this being what is is, a one-off situation, "part count" can really be liberalized a little bit to consider a sub-assembly essentially one part. If your tripod housing consists of one or two parts, it doesn't really matter in the final scheme of things, its still one piece of the car that needs to be there. Its getting designed as one, and made as two. Where part count matters more in my opinion is when there are separate interacting designs to be placed on the car.

One example of this that I dealt with, was making what at the time was, a back-up pedal tray out of aluminum for one of our cars (we had broken one on an older car - so wanted to have a super strong spare - but ended up using it for real). I could have made it out of about a 3" thick plate, or ~1" thick piece (still mostly hollowed out) that had a few tabs bolted on. Doing it in 1 would have reduced the overall piece by piece part count, but certainly would have taken a lot longer to make, as I would have had to remove about 250% more material in total - and used ridiculously long tools for some features.
This is where the higher-level and lower level design needs to come together some.
If the management goals disseminated to the level 1 guys is to "minimize part count whenever possible" then I could have spent $300 on matl, and hours and hours making it. Instead, it was quicker to make, cheaper, and ultimately simpler.

[murpia]

The kind of thought process I'm trying to encourage is this:

Following the systems engineering approach we have some nice design targets for the rear hubs, and for the rear tripod outer. The 'Level 1 guys' get their assignments, design their parts, do a good job and the 'Level 2 guys' make sure they bolt together properly. The car runs fine.

But, where in the process is the guy who says 'don't make a separate rear hub and tripod outer, just machine the tripod detail into the hub and throw away those bolts etc.'?

Take that approach on the whole car and I think you'll get somewhere.

Also, BTW I don't think sub-parts of fabrications etc. really come into this. Imagine a catalogue of spares, and reduce that list to the minimum. Assemblies like brake calipers are just one item, I'm not advocating counting every o-ring like the OEMs do!

Regards, Ian

[Brad Tollefson]

Thank you very much for this Geoff, I am definitely going to send this around to my teammates. As a first year team we will definitely need this. Also, I am definitely looking forward to any updates that you have on this topic

Brad

[Big Bird]

Thanks Brad,

I never really got back to this. The thread dropped off the front page rather quickly and it seemed like very few were reading it. But I'll think of what else I can add and post it in due course (i.e. when it fits around my postgrad stuff!).

Cheers

[Big Bird]

Moose & Murpia,

A belated response, but agreed to the intent of both your posts. It might be the "minimal process count" racecar that is the common ground here. I don't think anyone would reasonably suggest overly complicating individual parts just for the sake of reducing a total parts count.

Cheers,

[Tom W]

Originally posted by Big Bird:
Thanks Brad,

I never really got back to this. The thread dropped off the front page rather quickly and it seemed like very few were reading it. But I'll think of what else I can add and post it in due course (i.e. when it fits around my postgrad stuff!).

Cheers

Geoff I can guarantee you that a lot of people at UNSW have read this thread. We may not have had much to contribute to it but I know that it has provoked a lot of thought in the UNSW team.

[Nick Renold]

As a level 2 guy in the NU team working on our team's second car, I can tell you that many of us have read this and are definitely thinking about it, because it is what we have tried to do this year with restructuring our team.

One member from the 2008 team has come back to be our level 3/4 project manager and we have worked hard to grow from the 4-5 seniors who finished a car for 2008 but did not transfer knowledge well to any new members. Thanks for giving us some insight into what we are doing with our team now and how to make it sustainable for future years.

[Scott Wordley]

Nice work Geoff, cant wait to hear more.

All sounds very sensible and rational.
I've seen some good teams and exceptional team members through the years who, after much experience, loosely follow this process informally and instinctively. You see this in teams that have have a good year or two.

The challenge is formalising it so that it becomes ingrained, top to bottom in the team culture, and one that even new team members can work effectively within it. You only see this in the teams which have left a legacy of top performances over many many years. Cornell and UWA spring to mind.

Im very interesting in hearing your thoughts on developing those kind of LEVEL 4 management systems and processes, which can endure through the years even long after the initial managers have departed.

[ed_pratt]

Mods, can you please sticky this!!!

[Adambomb]

Originally posted by ed_pratt:
Mods, can you please sticky this!!!

+1

[Charlie]

Just saw this Geoff. Well done.

I have been practically begging every team I've judged in design to incorporate a lapsim program. Even basics can be valuable, as you've proven. Unfortunately I've never had a chance to have a team like this in any competitions I've judged.

[Big Bird]

Hi gents,

Thanks for the kind words. I'm afraid I've had a few too many work commitments and not enough time to commit to further writing, but I'm sure that is the same for most of us. I've only managed a few minutes today as I've just got home from the dentist - so apologies if I'm slurring my words...

Scott, to be honest mate, I just don't know. I sometimes (often?) doubt that you can really "teach" good management practice, as the best teacher seems to be experience. FSAE is designed to be a brilliant experience, and with appropriate reflection you can take away a lot of good info that is invaluable for your professional career. But not many come in with that experience, and it is up to the individual as to how quickly they can work through the experience / reflect / learn process.

Some unis tend to attract students with a lot of practical experience, and RMIT has certainly benefited greatly from this over the years. Sometimes it backfires, for example when team members with racing backgrounds barge in and force pro-team motorsport "wisdom" on what is in many ways a non-motorsport project. (This often reveals itself as blown budgets, expensive componentry, some highly refined vehicle details but an unfinished car overall)

Anyway, I see three key aspects of knowledge transfer.

The first part of good knowledge transfer is the material itself, and in this case design and event reviews, prepared CD's for new team members (welcoming docs, team history / philosophy, etc), shared network drives, etc can be really helpful. Scott, the Monash initiation CD I saw in 2005 was brilliant.

The second part is the human "teaching" side of it - how the existing team attempts to share the info with the incoming team. This is where mentoring, theory / philosophy seminars, and especially social events come into it. Getting alumni and senior team members to mix with the newbies can be gold as far as initiating them into the team's philosophies. The best teams I've seen are usually the more social ones, and have approachable and encouraging seniors and team management.

The final aspect is the learner themself, and this is where we have least control. Some want to learn, some think they already know it all, some just want the outgoing crew to hurry up and ssip off so they can get on with doing their own thing. It's a culture thing, you can do your best to engender a supportive learning environment, but there will always be those who think they are above being helped.

Dinner's ready so I've got to run, but just one point very quickly. Edward De Bono was on ABC radio recently, speaking about critical thinking. His point was that it is presently fashionable to think of critical analysis as finding fault. This leads to a culture of dissatisfaction and often change for the sake of it. Critical appreciation is a much rarer and finer talent. Something to keep in mind when your team is redesigning its pedal tray for the 10th time in 5 years...

Cheers all,

[bob.paasch]

Originally posted by Big Bird:
Scott, to be honest mate, I just don't know. I sometimes (often?) doubt that you can really "teach" good management practice, as the best teacher seems to be experience. FSAE is designed to be a brilliant experience, and with appropriate reflection you can take away a lot of good info that is invaluable for your professional career. But not many come in with that experience, and it is up to the individual as to how quickly they can work through the experience / reflect / learn process.


I think one of the most under appreciated aspects of the FSAE/FS experience is project management practice that students get. I'd guess the majority of the participants in this forum are mechanical engineering students or alums. Most ME undergraduate programs just don't do a very good job teaching project management. Participation in FSAE/FS forces these students into project and organizational management roles, and they will almost universally learn from it.

Geoff, I go back to your original post in this thread, and the discussion on Level 4. There is a tremendous opportunity within FSAE/FS to create/innovate at the project and organizational management levels. This is difficult to duplicate in industry, what CEO is going to let you completely redesign the organization or its processes? But in FSAE/FS you can try a new management process or organizational structure and see if it works better than the old one.

One of the best things that happened to the OSU Formula team was when our Dean combined the Industrial and Mechanical Engineering Departments into a School. The IE's bring a background in process design, and we've put them to work on redesigning manufacturing processes, supply chain processes, upper level organizational design, and design of temporary organizations (think FSAE/FS competitions). The other best thing was when we started exchanging students with Ravensburg. The Global Formula Racing team is an example of innovation that is possible at the organizational level. Where else but FSAE/FS could university students design and run a global organization of this size and complexity? Experience/reflect/learn/redesign, and hopefully we can improve the organization whilst continuing to give the students an experience like no other outside FSAE/FS.

[oz_olly]

I'm not sure if this belongs here or in the thread currently running on objective engine selection. The ideas certainly link to Geoff's 4 level approach to the FSAE competition (note: not the design of an FSAE car).

Looking back on our teams history you can extract some interesting bits of information which may provide insights into our lack of success. We have never designed a concept for our approach to the FSAE competition and we have never sat down and dissected the functional requirements of the FSAE competition. Our car designs have been a mixture of guesses, incremental developments and copy ‘catting’ other designs. There has been a reasonable amount of research go into subsystems but it has never been well integrated.

We have often run out of money, time and people. Unfortunately when looking for reasons behind our lack of success, we have compared ourselves to other teams and then put it down to not having what they have (money, people, machine time etc). I think FSAE teams could really benefit from taking a very thorough look at their team including: university support (facilities, access to machinery, workshop space etc), team numbers (also looking at individual strengths and weaknesses), time and budget. Once this is well understood a team can start to work out a concept. This is where the old sporting catch cry of 'play your own game' really comes into play. Others have touched on it before and I really agree, the successful teams with carbon everything, titanium, interconnected suspension etc do a really good job of psyching out the opposition. When aspiring teams look around they see the successful teams with this sort of technology (generally acquired over several years at great effort) and immediately think they must also have it to be successful. By playing your own game you can work up a solution at this conceptual level that best fits YOUR teams' strengths and weaknesses.

We have been building space frame, independent suspension, 4 cyl 600 cars since we started, with the exception of 2009 (the beginning of a new era). Conceptually I would say our cars have had 85-90% of the theoretical max performance of an FSAE car and through poor analysis of resources and constraints we have blown schedule and budget maybe extracted 75% of the 85-90%, so that leaves us with a performance of about 64-68%. Poor competition results and blown budgets quickly draw the attention of critics who very quickly and vocally start asking 'what's the value for money/resource with this project?'

We are now moving to a new strategic concept where we will be aiming to design a car with maybe 75-80% of the theoretical maximum and extracting 99% of that potential. Straight away you can see that we will be ahead of our past experiences and we may find that by being thoroughly tested, we may have 75% of the theoretical potential, a reliable car, thorough entries to the static events, documentation of designs (so the future teams now why we decided to do this and not copy the worldwide top 5), maintenance and team admin procedures, well maintained sponsor relationships, semi decent grades and most importantly in my mind (as a postgrad student) a sustainable FSAE program for the benefit of students to come.

I think I have some more to say on this area but I better let my thoughts ripen a little more.

Cheers

[BrendonD]

Originally posted by oz_olly:
....We are now moving to a new strategic concept where we will be aiming to design a car with maybe 75-80% of the theoretical maximum and extracting 99% of that potential....

This. So much this for us during this year.

[Matthew Bell]

Bump to get this back to the top of the discussion board.

Just wanted to let BigBird know that his ideas have made it into endurance racing. I'm in a school at Le Mans, and we're building a car for the VdeV championship. The previous students have lacked a direction, which is reflected in the design of the car. After realizing that it sounded a lot like my last seven years of FSAE, I'm adapting the topic of this thread to a management manual for our team.

Does anybody have any "success stories" they can share? Or even better, "failure stories"?

[Big Bird]

Hi Matthew,

Thank you, that is really flattering. Please keep us posted as to progress, sounds like a cool project. I've always thought endurance racing to be the ultimate goal for a motorsports engineer, it seems to have a lot more scope for ingenuity than the more controlled forms of motorsport.

In regard to case studies, I slapped up a follow up piece about our (early) RMIT project back when I wrote the above, but never posted it. I'll give it a bit of a cleanup and post it in the next day or so.

Cheers,

Geoff

[Big Bird]

Hi all,

I wrote the below quite some time ago as a follow-up to my original post, but then thought twice about posting it. On re-reading it, I don't think it really gives away any info that I haven't posted already on these forums at least once over the past few years. But for those of you who haven't experienced the full tedium of my earlier random postings, this will neatly condense them into one space - in total a sure cure for any FSAE-induced insomnia you may be suffering.

Please forgive any perceived self-indulgence about the below. I don't believe we are particularly impressed with ourselves, but it does show how we used the design process explained above to our advantage.

To give the relevant context to our choices and decisions, I will outline a little of our history first.

RMIT History, circa 2003
At the start of 2003 we were in a rather ordinary position. We had failed to complete either of the two previous years’ events, and there was talk around the uni of the project being cut back or even closed down due to abuse of privileges and huge money being wasted on a project that was giving no results. The engines we inherited from previous teams were pretty well stuffed, a couple of the team’s previous sponsors had dropped out, and when we finally got the go-ahead for the project our effective budget was about a quarter of what the previous team had spent. Also, Uni of Wollongong had proven to everyone here in Oz that they were just going to punish any team that wasn’t 100% ready for the event. We didn’t have anywhere near the money required to compete with UoW at their own game, and we were going to have to come up with something unique and cheap.

A crew of us had attended the previous 2002 Oz event (where UoW and UWA had pretty well hosed everyone), and in my own notebook I had taken down the following:
? Of the 22 teams entered, only 4 were looking anywhere near competitive on track (UoW, RIT, UWA and Stralsund from memory)
? Of the 18 struggling teams, nearly all of them were having engine problems of one sort or the other (i.e. engine wasn’t operating at its full potential, if at all)
? Our own team tried to win the comp mainly by focussing on a gun engine (read turbo…), and were way off the pace before they eventually blew up
? The struggling teams were all showing similar signs of poor time management – incomplete cars, harried team members, poor pit management, etc.

The overwhelming conclusion that we drew was that the majority of teams were attempting too much, and failing to get anywhere near completing the project. This opinion was shared by a number of motorsport industry people we spoke to at the event, who were despairing at how most teams were overcomplicating their designs and struggling to pull it all together.

Given that many were struggling to get their engines sorted, the big question we asked was, exactly how important is the performance of the engine? If engine reliability is such an Achilles heel for most teams, why does every team seem to mess around with their engines so much? Could we find a simpler solution that would lessen risk of engine failure? If we decided to take a step back from excessive engine development, would it be possible to gain points in other areas?

Setting Project Goals
Starting with the above observations, we had to start setting some directions for our design. Very roughly, below is a representation of our train of thought.

Level 4 goals / directives / constraints:
* MUST complete every event at competition;
* MUST complete project for under $(insert figure here);
* Need to find project strategy that leaves enough time for static as well as dynamic events;
* Need to have vehicle running by start of November at latest (December comp);
* Need to develop strategy that minimizes impact on uni workshop resources;
* Very important to source donated engine;
* Very important to reduce student workload compared to previous years;
* Very important to attract new sponsors;
* Will be difficult to compete with UoW on equal terms, so need to develop comp strategy that attacks them from “left field”.

Level 3 goals / directives / constraints:
* Focus on points that other teams aren’t seriously chasing (fuel economy, static events);
* Ensure competition completed by simplifying design (reducing number of parts, dump turbo);
* Allocate appropriate people and resources to static events;
* Reduce vehicle mass to aid fuel economy as well as track speed;
* Focus on cornering over straight line performance (cornering acceleration being “x” times more effective in returning points than straight line acceleration);
* Allow some deficit in engine performance due to low points sensitivity to straight line acceleration on FSAE tracks;
* Majority of corners on typical FSAE track taken with very little or no braking so design suspension accordingly;
* Vehicle must be rugged and easily serviceable at the event itself

Level 2 goals / directives / constraints:
* Overall vehicle mass target under 200kg,
* Engine output at least 50hp max,
* Steel space-frame chassis imposed (constrained by finances and team knowledge);
* Targets were set for overall vehicle geometry such as wheelbase, track, trail, scrub radius, roll axis geometry, etc;
* Design constraint of 10” wheels set for unsprung and suspension designers (for mass and rotational inertia reasons);
* Design for torsen diff (already owned by team);
* Suspension geometry to be biased approx 80% towards cornering over straight line acceleration, etc.

Level 1 goals and directives
* Component mass targets set to achieve sub-system and whole vehicle mass targets,
* Timeline / budget / material constraints imposed on component designers, etc.

The above goal-set is not exhaustive, but just representative of the types of reasoning that was being employed at each relevant level. Note that the Level 1 goals and objectives were the simplest of the lot – once you reason your way down from the top, develop your overall strategy and work it through to the individual components, individual component weight, material and budget constraints are pretty well defined. From there, we work back up the other side of the “V” to the event itself, and then final project wrap up, reporting to supporters & sponsors, handover and knowledge transfer etc.

In our case we were looking for a simpler overall vehicle design that would reduce project completion times, and were questioning whether we could trade off some engine performance for gains elsewhere. We also had some knowledge that Yamaha were about to release an electric start 450cc single (the WR450), so we might be able to “hitch on” to some marketing hype and help promote a new bike for them.

Variables of interest
So to assess how the above might translate into competition performance, the major variables of interest to us were as follows:

Acceleration (divided into forward, lateral and braking)
Vehicle Mass
Engine output
Tyre grip
Fuel economy

Now simply treating each of the above in isolation of each other doesn’t give a true assessment, since there are a number of conflicting relations linking the above variables. For example, arguments I heard early in our project that “a 50hp car needs to be under 300lbs to match the power:weight ratio of a 600/4” were a bit simplistic – power:weight comes into play only on straights, a lesser weight can help you elsewhere around the track too. Understanding the links between the above parameters was vital.

The most relevant relationships to my argument are listed below, although there are of course many more:

1. Lateral acceleration tends to increase with reduction of mass (through tyre load sensitivity),
2. Forward acceleration tends to increase with increased engine output, and with reduced mass
3. Vehicle mass would tend to increase with increased engine output (due to stronger/heavier components required in drivetrain, and in the case of different engines concepts, the mass of the engine itself)
4. Fuel economy would tend to increase with increasing forward acceleration and velocity (due to higher kinetic energy change along straights and higher wind drag effects)

So the main design conflicts we had to reason our way around were as follows:
• More engine performance will give us better forward acceleration, but will tend to drive up mass. Through tyre load sensitivity this increased mass will tend to make us slower in corners. On the flipside, if we settled for reduced engine output, we could reduce weight considerably and get an amount of return in cornering performance
• Greater forward acceleration will tend to result in greater energy demand (due to greater change in kinetic energy between corner exit and peak speed, and greater wind drag at higher speeds). Considering fuel consumption to be an energy load multiplied by the thermal efficiency of the engine, this indicates that the increased energy demand will drive up fuel consumption
• Reduced mass would tend to win all round, in that it would aid acceleration in every sense and reduce energy demand – but practically there would be lower limits to this before component stiffness and durability would be compromised

It was clear that to gain a full understanding of the competition, we had to determine sensitivity of point-scoring for each of our variables of interest. This would require a track map of some sorts (we had access to a dimensioned 2001 Oz Autocross / endurance track map, but it wouldn’t be too hard to come up with one of your own), some good estimates of power and mass, and eventually when we got the tyre data we were able to calculate the load sensitivity of the tyres and see how mass would affect cornering.

Analysis process
The process, starting with the most rudimentary analysis and moving upwards in complexity, was as follows:

Stage 1:
Simple visual scan of the track indicated 220 metres of straights and around 350 metres of corners (from memory!). There were 14 corners, of which only 4 had a straight before them and could be considered to require braking (therefore 10 corners being entered with no pitching of the vehicle). A rough estimate that about 25-30% of each straight was under brakes, gave a rough idea of the amount of time spent on full throttle. Very basic analysis, didn’t give any point sensitivity but at least gave some rudimentary info for suspension design goals

Stage 2
Given we were mostly interested in engine performance, the next step was to get some idea of how power affected lap times. The details of this rough analysis are outlined in a thread I wrote a few years ago called “Life, the Universe, ….etc” (look it up if you want). Basically, using simple constant acceleration equations we learnt in first year dynamics (v = u + at, x = ut + 0.5at^2), we started with an initial corner exit velocity, an assumed acceleration, and then experimented with how much time we saved over a straight if we increased & decreased acceleration by a few percent. These rough hand calcs gave us a point of reference, whereby we discovered an effective 20% increase in power might only return us a 1-2% decrease in lap times. More useful info than in our first “analysis”, but still a bit rough

Stage 3
To get a realistic comparison between all of the variables you really need to start looking at a more comprehensive lapsim. Now you can go to all the trouble of learning a complex program like ADAMS and do it that way, but being a bit of a simpleton I went and did it all in Excel (I like being able to see all the numbers and check that they are reasonable as I work – and I could also reduce the lapsim to only the variables I was interested in). So starting with the 2001 trackmap, we broke it up into 1 metre increments and set about writing the world’s dumbest lapsim:
• Assume constant lateral accel circular arcs through corners, car following centreline of track (this defines corner entry and exit speed). Lat Accel value defined by tyre grip limit.
• Constant decel braking to the corner entry speed, defined by tyre grip limit
• Forward acceleration calculated as a function of corner exit speed, mass, power (see Gillespie or any decent vehicle dynamics books for formulae)
• Other programming tricks that you may like to work out for yourself to calculate fuel usage, whether vehicle is grip or performance limited at each point on the track
• Etc...

The spreadsheet was written so that the following variables could be user defined:
• Overall Mass
• Vehicle average power
• Tyre coefficients of friction in lateral, longitudinal and braking orientations (at a given normal load)
• Tyre load sensitivity (derived from TTC data)
• Vehicle frontal area, Cd, average rolling resistance, predicted engine thermal efficiency

The lapsim was then duplicated, so we could calculate values for two different vehicles. Final times for autocross, endurance, accel event and skid pad were then converted to points (using formulae in rules, and assuming the faster car “won” the event for min time values), and voila – we could get a rough idea of relative points for different concepts.

To be honest, the final sensitivity analysis took about two good days to program, including food breaks, the odd beer and the intermittent distraction reading dirt bike mags and the like. It wasn’t that hard. By simplifying the path taken to simple series of straight lines and circular arcs, we reduced lap sim programming from a year long project to something that a first year dynamics student should be able to complete. By doing so, we learnt a heap about where points are gained are lost in this comp, and developed some really useful rules of thumb to help manage and prioritize the design process. Such rules of thumb included:
• A 1% increase in cornering acceleration would give “x” times more points return than a 1% increase in engine acceleration
• A 1% increase in cornering acceleration would give “y” times more points return than a 1% increase in braking deceleration
• A reduction of mass of 1kg would be worth approximately “z” points across the whole competition
• A 1% increase in engine power would gain around “a” points in lap time, but would also result in around “b” points in fuel economy
• Etc
I was satisfied that the analysis was reasonably correct – despite the simplifying assumptions it was still predicting around 15% full throttle time (depending on vehicle concept), max speeds around 110kmh, lap speeds close enough to times recorded around that track. As a means of refining shock settings or other detail refinements it would be too far off – but at the conceptual level it was cheap, quick, simple, easy to use and gave lots of easily accessible and useful info to drive the project.

In our particular case, we learnt that while we were going to lose points from straight line performance by going to the smaller 450cc engine, we were going to make up for some of those points in both cornering performance and fuel economy, (and maybe a few more for cost report and “manufacturability” if we argued the point well right). We were able to quantify this in terms of points, not just argue clumsily in terms of kilos and kW. To be honest, the calcs indicated that in terms of outright potential the 450 single would be around 10-15 points short of a good 600 4cyl, if both were presented perfectly (under the old 50 point fuel economy rules). However given our own team circumstances we knew we would come much closer to fully race prepping the simpler single design than a 600 four, and hedged our bets there.

That first 450 single car was built rather heavy (around 195-200kg), and wasn't that powerful (around 50hp). But it was finished in time, well tested, and as such was our first car to win an event outright.

I'll make sure my next post doesn't seem so self obsessed, but I hope the above might at least help a few of the newer teams

Cheers,

Geoff

[exFSAE]

Very good stuff, Geoff. Thanks for sharing.

One of the biggest takeaways IMO is the value of starting SIMPLE in simulations and predictions and working up in complexity - rather than jumping into a package like ADAMS.

It's amazing how much can be cobbled together in a few days or a week's time, and how much value it gives for up front design.

[ed_pratt]

thanks again Geoff, again, a wealth of information in one easily accessible place.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE mods get this stickied!!!!

Ed

[Matthew Bell]

Cheers,

Geoff


Geoff Pearson
RMIT FSAE 03-06

>>>Design it. Build it. Break it. <<<

My computer's gone stupid and won't let me post with anything other than the quick reply, so the quote and bold doesn't work. But the point I want to make is that this tag-line is pretty much my entire engineering upbringing. I got lucky and worked in a machine shop with a bunch of old guys that knew more about engineering than most of the engineers I had met up to that point. I think there's a lot of that physical know-how that's gotten lost somewhere between generations.
Geoff, I will most certainly keep you posted on our progress. I made a presentation with another team member on behalf of our team to the university director the other day, and we're waiting for approval for our proposal. I can't thank you enough for the prompt response with the case study, it definitely clears up the few questions I had about specifics. I'm working on putting together a legitimate document with all of this thread's information, but unfortunately I won't be able to post it here.
What I can tell you is that we're stuck in the level 1 to 2 design loop just like many of the FSAE teams. Where we're lucky, though, is that we have 14 people in one room all day long dedicated to the exact same project with little outside distraction. So it's kinda like every FSAE team's wet-dream. On top of the people designing though, we're in an extremely unique situation to be in the endurance racing capital of the world. Therefore, through university contacts, we get to see and do a lot of really really really neat stuff. Again, I can't give you specifics, but let's just say I've been here six weeks and have had my face melted at least twice already just from things that I thought would be "impossible" for me to experience.
So, we're trying to break out of the level 1 design trap, and the main force driving this is the fact that we have more than one adviser. It's more like a committee. We have an academic director, a industrial automotive guy, a fabrication specialist, and a person experienced in customer service and quick action.
Now we just have to all get along...

I will keep you updated as much as I can. We got to attend the French OptimumG seminar a couple of weeks ago, and my brain still hurts from that one. Any questions you might have, I am glad to answer, but probably only through PM.

[EHog]

This really needs to be stickied.

[js10coastr]

Originally posted by Big Bird:
I've always thought endurance racing to be the ultimate goal for a motorsports engineer, it seems to have a lot more scope for ingenuity than the more controlled forms of motorsport.


I grew up watching indy cars, but am now working in the ALMS and I wouldn't have it any other way. The challenges are so much more diverse... you have to take into account much more in terms of the team and how everyone functions. Also, the pit stops and strategy are much more important... so as a whole the engineer is a lot more involved and has more control.

[js10coastr]

Originally posted by Matthew Bell:

Does anybody have any "success stories" they can share? Or even better, "failure stories"?

Background, circa Fall 2007... I had just started the MBA program at Cal Poly SLO; and had been involved in SAE/FSAE during my undergrad(2000-2005)... enough to get an internship at OptimumG (2005-2006). The current formula team didn't interest me (they were quite the counter example actually), and there was a large amount of money available for a formula hybrid team through plug in america.

I started up the Formula Hybrid team in January of 2008 with the intent of making it to the competition in May of 2008 and winning overall in 2009. However this proved to be too ambitious (even when using a donor chassis from FSAE)... the people of the team had yet to be developed, too short of a timeline, and way too many compromises/shortcuts would have to have been undertaken to make it to competition. At the same time though, I started working on a simulation program in MATLAB.

Looking at the team, we had one EE… the rules also stipulated that a first year team can enter a “hybrid in progress”, which is essentially an electric car. We intended to and did take full advantage of that rule. While it wasn’t as easy as “red to red, black to black” we did our best to make a simple electric system with an off the shelf controller and a really good motor that would pass the rules… having one EE on a hybrid team is a limiting factor.

However, having a large number of mechanical engineers would be our forte. Looking at the photos from the previous competitions, a lot of cars were not mechanically sound and we felt that we could build a better car as a whole, because with one EE there was no way we could beat them with electrons.

Early on, the Formula Hybrid team chose to make a steel tube frame chassis, while the Formula team chose to continue with a carbon chassis. The reasoning behind the steel chassis was that we were a new team with limited experience in composites, if you need to build the frame quicker you can just add more people or more shifts, and if you need to make a change in the frame you can just hack off something or weld a bracket on. To do a carbon chassis properly, you really do need to have EVERYTHING designed and in place before you start cutting foam, and if you get behind schedule, you can't really speed up the process because things have to happen in certain order. Had the Formula Hybrid team been more experienced, with a car layout that had been fairly stable over a few years and a fully populated solidmodel, the choice would have been different.

The simulation was used early on to figure out what was the most important…when looking at the competition and simulating their cars we figured that by bringing a significantly lighter car we could get away with a much smaller motor and still be competitive. Our quest for a lightweight car took a minimalist approach. Regen braking? Too heavy and too complex… transmission? Well, can we get away with just one gear ratio? Yes, but let’s use a split sprocket so that we can change gears easily during testing. Torsen diff? We have one left over… what about a spool? It would be lighter… proably easier to integrate with the axles we got from the baja team… is the compromise in handling worth it? It sounds like if we set the car up right/design the car with a spool in the first place we’ll be just fine. And then on to the most obvious part of the car… our wheels. We also made the decision to buy our pedal assembly… would we gain anything from making our own? Maybe a little weight… what would we lose? Cost wasn’t too big of a difference, there really wasn’t much to learn in the manufacturing of the part, maybe a little bit in the integration… but we’d gain man hours that could be spent elsewhere.

Having spent the summer researching other cars, we came across the idea of using bicycle wheels and tires to reduce the amount of unsprung and rotating weight… after some experimenting we decided that those would not provide enough lateral force/cornering stiffness/the wheels couldn’t hold the forces. However… somehow we came across “racing scooters”. The fact that people race them and the fact that there is enough of a market to make racing scooter tires is beyond me, but… here we are. Having spent a year working for Claude I felt that I had a pretty good understanding of suspension kinematics and its importance (cue Claude’s “I will never forget….”). After a few emails with Doug Milliken and while referencing his dad’s biography, I was able to reverse engineer the suspension on the MX-1, the original camber car. The reasoning and justification for the camber car made a lot of sense for our application… a huge reduction in unsprung and rotating weight, which saves us a lot in terms of energy use, while increasing our acceleration potential… secondarily (and of larger importance for the MX-1), the frontal area drops.

Cal Poly SLO has the best machine facilities available for its students in the state (if not the nation), including numerous CNC machines… however, use of CNC was restricted to the spline on our spindles and bearing cups (or “wafers” if you will) on the suspension components. While the end part may end up being slightly heavier, I felt that the learning curve and time required for CNC setup wasn’t justifiable for the majority of our parts.

We set out to have our frame manufactured before we all left for Christmas break… this gave us enough of a start/platform to work with to get up and running to have a few weekends of testing/finding the bugs. Building the car went smoothly with one or two exceptions… we kept track of our competition through their websites, and set our targets on McGill (returning champions), and Texas A&M (newcomers to hybrid but super successful at FSAE West). Amazingly we only had two or three nights where any of us worked past midnight… “Truth in 24” had just come out and we rallied behind that movie, following the Audi philosophy of executing as a whole team, and engineering outside of just the parts on the car. We put the movie up on the projector during one of our late nights, its really amazing what a little inspiration can do.

Speaking of inspiration… I’ve had chats with the great Kevin Hayward along with Matt Giraffa about the car construction. One of the points that had been made was that the outlook along with the performance of the team goes up when you have a rolling chassis. And so, even if its quicker on paper or from a pure engineering managerial point of view to bring the components together later… the human aspect of seeing a rolling chassis does wonders for the team and from this point of view it makes sense to get the car rolling as soon as possible.

With a simple and cheap data acquisition system (about $1000 from AIM) we were able to optimize our gear ratio while monitoring the motor’s health. I felt that having a simple data system was important and because of my experience at OptimumG, I would be able to extract more information than other teams would while combining that with the simulation software. This feedback loop would be one of our strengths.

Competition was tough for us… shipping the car across the continent was not an easy task, neither was getting everyone over there. The move cost us as we weren’t able to compete in the first dynamic events (accelerations and autocross)… and I was pissed because we would have won the electric only acceleration, shocking the “good luck next year” and other nay sayers.

Even with missing the first dynamic events, we ran all of endurance, finishing second to Texas… which eventually put us atop of the “hybrid in progress” category.

If you'd like to see the car in action just search on youtube for Cal Poly SLO Formula Hybrid.

[Big Bird]

Hi all,

Thanks for the above contributions, unfortunately I haven't had much time to contribute to these boards of late. I'll get onto that later, but in the meantime a few more words while I've got a few minutes over the festive season. And season's greetings to all, I trust you're all enjoying the break.

Selection vs collection of objectives
or "OR" vs "AND"
or Understanding priorities

I’ll start with a common scenario I’ve observed as an incoming team approaches the early stages of the design process. The question is asked “What are we going to do this year?”, and some conversation ensues about design objectives. Maybe some team members have been scouring the forums, some have been speaking to alumni, or some have been involved in previous teams or attended last years comp. Maybe the faculty advisor has chimed in about the university’s expectations, or projected budget and resources, or last year’s team effort.

So after maybe a minute’s / day’s / week’s / month’s discussion, the team learns that the following attributes are important in FSAE:

The car should be:
• Cheap
• Light
• Powerful
• Economical
• Simple
• Strong / reliable
• Stiff
• Adjustable
• Comfortable (reasonably…)
• Compact
• Easy to drive
• Predictable
• Easily manufacturable
• Built to tight tolerances
• Well tested and developed
The project needs to be delivered:
• On time
• Within budget
• Within the capabilities and skill set of the team
The drivers need to be well trained
The presenters need to be well prepared and rehearsed for static events
Etc
Etc
Etc
……..
…….
You can probably add in any number of detail requirements passed on by alumni, design judges etc about roll centres, plenum volumes, tyre selection, weight distributions, injector locations, load paths, types of bearings to use, upright materials, etc etc etc.

The new team is now well informed, has “learnt” some of the key FSAE lessons - and is utterly swimming in information.

The crucial next step is what to do with all this info, and this is the point where I have observed a far too common, critical error in the team’s planning.

The new team “ANDs” all the information together

Rather than select which objectives are most important, the team decides that they are just going to do it all. The team’s mission thus becomes this mish-mash of self-contradicting objectives:
“This year, our car is going to be lighter, AND more powerful, AND more economical, AND cheaper, AND simpler, AND stiffer, AND easier to drive, AND easier to build, AND built to tighter tolerances, AND we are going to get the car done earlier, AND we will do more testing…”

This is the “everything is a priority” school of FSAE thought, and I believe the key reason we continue to see falling finish rates at FSAE events. The new team believes they are somehow the competition’s new “golden children”, and that they have some new insight or level of commitment that was so obviously lacking in those who came before them. They will be the ones who are going to do it all. So the first 1-2 months are spent dreaming up the design solution that is all things to all people, and the next 3-6 months overdesigning it. Another 3-6 months is spent trying to manufacture something way beyond the limits of their budget / material resources / people skills.

Around 1-2 months before comp it might be recognized that time is running out and the team is not going to do it all – so critical objectives start becoming casualties almost by default. Human nature dictates we would rather find consolation that admit to fault - so the failed objectives are declared irrelevant:
Timeline? “It is ridiculous to think you can finish these cars three months before comp, and besides, last year’s team were only two weeks ahead of us at this time of year…”
Testing time? “We won’t need testing time because our design/build quality is so good that we can afford to finish the car the week before comp…”.

So comp arrives, team shows up with a car is some state of disassembly and incompleteness, three of the drivers have never sat in the car before, team doesn't make it through endurance / skid pad / brake test / team sign-in. The team goes home with assorted DNF's or poor results, but some great new ideas of how next year’s car can be lighter, stiffer, more powerful...

This isn’t your team? Your team is better than this and would never just pile up all those objectives, especially given the inherent contradictions? Then turn things around and do a simple test. See what happens when you tell your team that you are consciously trading off one of the sacred objectives. “This year’s uprights are going to be stiffer, and easier to manufacture, but a bit heavier”. I reckon in nine teams out of ten, you’d be crucified. At best you will be allowed to hold your mass target to last year’s value, and guaranteed next year’s upright designer will announce your design to be an embarrassment to the team and that his design is so much lighter, and it is also stiffer, easier to manufacture…..

An even deeper malaise, and we see this one at a much wider level in our society, is that of spin. To achieve one objective, we have to trade-off off on another – but we refuse to admit it. “Our upright is so much better because it is stiffer, cheaper and easier to manufacture”. What about weight? “Thank you for asking that question, it is a very good one. Your ignorance is rather endearing, so let me address this issue by explaining to you again how our upright is significantly stiffer, cheaper and easier to manufacture…” Society is obsessed with the “win-win”, but the world doesn’t work like that. So we resort to word games, and designs that increase incrementally in performance and exponentially in cost, as our design process is pretty well limited to expensive detail optimization of existing designs.

FSAE design is full of contradictions, compromises and trade-offs. If you want a perfectly flat contact patch under braking, you have lousy camber angle in roll (and vice versa). The attribute of engine power usually comes at the expense of fuel usage. Light often plays against stiff. Tight tolerances come at the expense of manufacturing time. Etc etc.

Good management requires the ability to use the “OR” function. You need the confidence, knowledge and team support to make decisions as to which objectives are your priorities, and which you are willing to trade off and by how much. These are linked in to my above words about lap sims, understanding your design structure, and some objective analysis of previous results. But that will be the subject of a later post when I get the time. As for now, back to thesis writing…

Cheers all,

[PatClarke]

Geoff, You are a breath of fresh air!

Best wishes to you and yours

Pat

[Big Bird]

Thanks Pat, and I trust you are having a nice break and all as well. I've just spent an hour or so revisiting some of your Pats Corner musings - some interesting stuff there. I'll be recommending that our guys have a good look through those.

Also a quick disclaimer in case any is reading any of my writings and thinks I'm publically bagging out on my own team. I'm not. My opinions are based on just under ten years of observing, competing and then advising in the FSAE / FStudent arena. Certainly I've been involved in the RMIT team, and I also competed for Monash one year. But I also base my opinions on personal communications with a wide variety of FSAE community members: team members, alumni and/or faculty advisors (probably every team in Oz at some time, plus a variety of European, American and Japanese teams), organizing staff (both here and OS), design judges, sponsors and industry observers, spectators and general public. I've also observed nine Australian comps and three OS comps, and been an active member on these boards for just over seven years. And from my observations and discussions I honestly believe what I've written in this thread is applicable to a significant number of teams. These are common issues, and I feel are worthy of bringing to the board's attention. And I repeat and stress these observations are not focussed internally on my own team.

I just thought I'd better clarify that, as I know our guys have had a tough year this year, and might be feeling that I'm pointing criticism at them. I'm not, and sincerely apologize if that was thought to be the case.

Cheers all,

[Big Bird]

Before I start my random rant, a reading recommendation. I've just started on "The Multi-body Systems Approach to Vehicle Dynamics" by Blundell and Harty. The first chapter has some nice stuff about the merits of simple models, and also their own "V" process for simulation design. It is well worth a look.

Isolation vs Integration
This is one of my pet grievances about the way engineering is taught, and apologies if I’ve already made a meal of it in previous posts.

Engineering is primarily taught at university as a science. The principle of the scientific method is that you hold the world constant, isolate one parameter, change it, measure the results, pick most favourable result, repeat. I have no problem with the scientific method as it has done wonderful things for human progress. Just look at health sciences, nanotechnology, material sciences, imaging technologies, etc etc. But it is one tool, and just like a spanner you don’t try to adapt it to all jobs. It can also be a rather slow and expensive tool – how much money do F1 teams spend on wind tunnels (which are after all, big and fancy rooms designed to hold a small part of the world, the immediate surroundings of a vehicle, constant).

Engineering is primarily taught at university by scientists. To get into a lecturing position you need a PhD, which is effectively a 3-10 year apprenticeship in isolationist science. So the majority of our lecturers are brilliant people, but with specific expertise in maybe one or two fields. They will be able to tell you how to get the best downforce through a diffuser, or how to reduce the void count in your composite layup – but will be most likely flummoxed when you discuss how the diffuser is compromising your suspension geometry, or that you are happy to accept some slight imperfections as layup time is a greater priority.

It is worth noting here there is no surer way to get an expert singing his song at full volume than showing him a design where his pet specialty is not “optimized”.

Engineering is not a science. We use science, but it is just one of the tools we use. Engineering is practical problem solving, and in the real world it is often the norm when multiple things are interconnected and changing at once. We deal with it, scientists get all frustrated and apply for grants for even bigger experiments

The problem with studying specific attributes in isolation is that you lose awareness of the relationships between those attributes. Think about the following attributes (significant ones for an FSAE project), and whether they may be complimentary or contradictory:
Engine Power
Braking Power
Tyre friction coefficient
Component stiffness
Weight
Size
Fuel usage
Reliability
Manufacturability
Cost
Project completion time
Vehicle Acceleration capability
- Cornering
- Forward
- Braking

If you have been taking notice you’ll realize I’ve mixed level 1, 2 and 4 objectives there – no problem at this stage. I’ve probably missed a few attributes too, but just note that there is not one attribute in the list that has a complimentary relationship with every other attribute. Nor one that has a contradictory relationship with every other.

Isolation in FSAE
The classic conflict in Formula SAE is the power vs weight argument. Separately and in isolation of each other we may look at these two attributes and agree on two independent guiding principles.
1. Less weight is better
2. More power is better
So the team sets off to make the car lighter and the engine more powerful. Simple…

The trouble is, we have neglected the important relationship between power and mass. More power usually means more mass, as the greater forces require more material to resist those forces. So now we have a conflict – we want both, but they are working against each other. How do we choose?

So someone up the back of the room puts his hand up and says “we design for the best power to weight ratio”. We now have a more sophisticated argument, everyone cheers, and problem solved. In isolation, we decide on “best power:weight ratio” as our objective.

The team comes up with two designs. One is a 400kg car with 210hp, the other is a 100kg car with 50hp. Our “best power:weight ratio” criteria tells us the 400kg car must be best, right? Of course, the first time you try to turn this thing around a corner you’ll be thinking otherwise. If the course is mainly straights, the 400kg car might triumph – but in many cases the smaller car will be better overall.

So the guiding principles start becoming convoluted:
“We want a good power:weight ratio, but we don’t want weight going too high dependant on the percentage of corners to straights on the track”

Enter Fuel Economy, where fuel usage has a contradictory relationship with power, a complimentary relationship with low weight, and is also linked to track layout depending on the top speed and number of acceleration instances:
“We want a good power:weight ratio, but we don’t want weight going too high dependant on the percentage of corners to straights on the track, and we don’t want too much power as we start losing fuel points, which is sort of dependant on track layout too. Losing weight seems to have the most positives”

Enter durability / robustness:
“We want a good power:weight ratio, but we don’t want weight going too high dependant on the percentage of corners to straights on the track, and we don’t want too much power as we start losing fuel points, which is sort of dependant on track layout too. Losing weight seems to have the most positives,, but that puts us at risk of losing reliability”

Enter cost, driveability, driver comfort, vehicle size etc, and it all starts looking like a nightmare. So it starts looking all too hard and isolationism starts looking easier to deal with. “This is all bullship. We just need more power”.

Technical Leaders
Think of two Chief Engineers making their election speeches. CE1 is an isolationist. CE2 an integrationist.

CE1 stands in front of the team and says:
“We want most power. We want less weight. We will have the stiffest chassis and the most tyre grip. We will have the smallest and most agile car at the track. We will win fuel economy.
CE2:
“We sort of want good power, but not too much as it will drive up weight and probably fuel usage as well. Weight reduction is important, but we don’t want to go too far because it can effect reliability. I reckon weight reduction is around 3-4 times more important that power increase. Also too much focus on high power and low weight will absorb too much project time, and we need to cut back on that to get more testing time before comp. Sticky tyres are mostly a good thing, as long as they don’t absorb too much energy and therefore fuel. Small cars are great, but they need to be big enough for the driver to be comfortable. We’ll have to put limits on all our goals as we need to meet budget and timeline”….

CE1’s are good at winning confidence and support of the team. Their messages are simple, concise, easy to understand. They sound like they are under control. They rarely deliver a functional car.

CE2’s look like hand-wringing neurotic indecisive crackpots. Often, their discussions seem messy and poorly formed. People smile at them politely and try to ignore them at barbeques. A well studied CE2 can deliver a cracker of a car, with a nice balance of power, weight, reliability, driveability, etc etc.

I’ve said it elsewhere here but the trouble with balance is that when you finally find it, some expert will complain how you could have had more of something. The isolationists love this sort of argument. They see their pet attribute lacking in some way and take great pride in announcing how they would have done it better. Unfortunately such arguments win a lot of support because they sound so simple and convincing, especially to the ongoing stream of novice engineers coming into this project.

To be honest, I’ve been struggling with this for a number of years. Our original design was reasonably well balanced – the cars had enough power, enough “lightness”, enough stiffness etc, and enough simplicity that we could complete the car on time and on budget. We deliberately set a low engine power target, knowing that the points lost in straight line speed were linked to gains in fuel economy and cornering speed. By building a quite simple car we finished early, tested well and cashed in on the “incompleteness” of most of our competitors. We found a nice balance point where the relationships between quite a large number of parameters (e.g power, weight, fuel use, cost, completion time, reliability etc etc) were working well together.

Of course, with each new project the incoming isolationists would have a field day. “If we can win with that fat / oversize / slow / insert-isolated-attribute-here car, imagine what we’ll do when I give it more power / less weight / insert-isolated-attribute-improvement-here……..” Trying to convince a newbie to settle for a simple low power engine as it offers better fuel usage combined with lower mass and size leading to better cornering, combined with simpler manufacturing linking to more testing time, combined with improved parts availability due to high volume sales of the donor bike etc, will nine times out of ten invite a blank stare and the same response – “but more power will make us faster”

The critical attributes with large points impacts for this project – completion time, reliability, testing time etc – are rarely linked to the vehicle based attributes, which are often the less points-effective attributes. The argument goes along the lines of:
“We can lose weight by making the ***** out of carbon fibre”.
“How many points is it worth?”
“Every little bit counts mate, Stuttgart is 500grams lighter than us.”
“Reliability?”
“Nah, we’ll make sure we design it right.”
“Completion time?”
“Don’t worry about it, we’ll work harder if we have to.”
“Robustness?”
“That’s nonsense, this is a race car – it is meant to fall apart when you cross the finish line.”

The trick is knowing your design problem. What are the attributes that will bring your team the greatest improvement? Is it really more power? Or is it getting the car finished earlier? Can you trade one to buy the other? Are there other attributes that are more significant again? Only you can answer that, but you need to be honest with yourself.

You need to do two things to lead your design process:
1. Pick out the attributes most important to you
2. Rank and weight them in order of importance.

This can only be achieved by analysing the competition itself (level 3) and your own team resources and history (level 4). I've already spruiked the value of a simple lapsim for the competition analysis side of things.

A bottom up, level 1 driven design process invites oversimplified generalizations like “more power is better” and “we need this to be as stiff and light as possible”. It will deliver blown out budgets and timelines and an unbalanced vehicle. You will never fully understand why you are doing what you are doing.

A top down level 4 driven process will help you understand how to rank and prioritize competing objectives, as it will give you a detailed understanding of the design problem itself.

Enough for now, I’ve got a few more words coming about opportunities for lateral thinking but that can wait. Happy designing.

[ed_pratt]

Thanks again for these insights Geoff, I think a few of us here are hoping you'll collect your thoughts together into a book at some point!

I have been thinking about this for a little while now.


Originally posted by Big Bird:

The trouble is, we have neglected the important relationship between power and mass. More power usually means more mass, as the greater forces require more material to resist those forces. So now we have a conflict – we want both, but they are working against each other. How do we choose?


I suppose it's not directly related and I don't want to hijack this thread but I can not figure out how to go about including this as an argument in a LapSim.
At the earliest stage of design - level 4 I suppose - how can we work out the consequences of choosing a 4 cylinder over anything else i.e. how can you quantify the extra weight gained in the chassis/drivetrain/anywhere else by making that choice? Is that even possible without halfway designing both scenarios to see what you come up with?!

Sorry for the total brain dump - I'll try to collect my thoughts a little more next time but it's a friday morning : )

Ed

[Big Bird]

Hi Ed,

Thanks for the ongoing encouragement - and yes I have been thinking about a book. Or maybe a PhD thesis if someone out there thinks this could be extended into one (please contact me if you think so). Anyway it is Friday night here, so I'm hoping I can gather my thoughts given my brain has signed off for the week.

Good question, and the answer does require a bit of pre-assumed knowledge.

Firstly though, the question of power vs mass isn't really a level 4 question. L4 is all about establishing the overall framework in which you are working - how much money do we have, how much time, who is on the team, what skills do they have, what resources do we have for completing the project, who are our supporters, what are the overall team goals.

Level 3 is about understanding the competition, and a lapsim starts becoming useful here. A simple constant acceleration lapsim will give some good information about how sensitive the lap time is to changes in forward accel, braking decel, cornering accel. Change forward accel by 1%, see lap time change. Return forward accel to original value, change lateral by 1%, see lap time change, compare to change from forward accel. Repeat for braking. You should be able to establish relative sensitivities to different accels - "forward accel change gives 1.8 times the points return of braking", or whatever numbers you come up with.

If you are clever, you know velocities at every point, could make guesstimates of drag and frontal area, convert all this into energy required - then calculate fuel used via a thermo efficiency.

Now this level 3 stuff helps you understand the competition idiosyncracies. You should have a rough idea of acceleration goals (level 2 goals), and which accelerations you might like to focus upon. "Optimize", eh Pat? http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

The mass vs power argument sort of comes in just below the level 2 goals. You are wanting to set overall mass and power targets to get near the benchmark accelerations you have set.

I think it is rather easy to get a rough idea of what a good car weighs. Generally a good 600/4 is somewhere around the 200kg mark, and might be putting oout somewhere around 80hp. A 450 single motor weighs around 30kg less than a 600/4, puts out around 50hp, and you can make a rough guesstimate of what mass variance there is in driveshafts, tripod joints, engine mounts and structure, exhaust and intake etc.

Now take your earlier lapsim and try calculating your forward accel as a function of mass and power, (Sigma P = mav). You might also like to calculate your estimated lateral and longitudinal tyre grip (and therefore lateral and braking accels) as a function of vertical load, to capture how the mass might influence cornering speed, (you need TTC data for this, get a rough value for % change in friction coefficient for each Newton of vertical load).

Now, put your 600/4 values of mass and power into the sim - see lap times. Then punch in the mass and power of the 450 single, or whatever other option you are looking at, check times. Compare, observe interesting results. Just be honest with yourself about your input values - don't go just changing power values without modifying mass to suit.

I'd say that at this early stage your sim can be pretty low fidelity. The point of the exercise is that you are just wanting to get an idea whether one design is close or not to the other. 5-10 points difference? Negligible, either can win, decide on which is easier for you to build. 20-50 points difference? Becoming significant, but decision still dependant on what you can deliver easiest. Over 50 points? Getting uncompetitive. Over 200 points? Something very wrong with either your sim or your understanding of motor vehicle design, take up origami.

I hope all that makes sense. I'm getting weary, so if I haven't answered the question properly just say so and I'll have another go tomorrow.

Cheers,

[PatClarke]

"Optimize", eh Pat?
http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_wink.gif

Pat

[ed_pratt]

Hi Geoff,

That's great thanks, I suppose I've been headed down the classic "scientist" route of focussing far too much on one thing, trying to keep the sim accurate without thinking about whether decisions I've made are ultimately realistic.

I'll try to have a bash at this over the weekend and see how it goes, but unfortunately my "actual work" is really playing havoc with my FSAE time http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

Ed

Ps. haha I'd love to do some research on something like this but carbon nanotube composites are ruling my life currently!

[Bemo]

Hey Geoff,

Great thoughts you are publishing here. I'd say that everybody who's new in FSAE should read this.

If I just think back to the 08 season. Most people were wondering why we were winning competitions with margins of more than 100 points in series.
On the first look it was a very simple car. Space frame, 600/4 without turbo or supercharger, 210 kg of weight.
It wasn't the lightest car, it didn't have the highest power output, it wasn't the most efficient car...
But it did well in every important aspect. We were able to get it running months before the first competition, did hundreds of testing kilometers. The real key back than was that team members had a very good understanding about the fields they were working on and a very good insight of the complete car.
That's what makes you competitive. Decisions were based on clear criteria which were defined in the beginning. So everybody was able to understand them and decisions made by our team captains were accepted by everyone. Of course there were arguments about a lot of things, as people always see things from different sights. But in the end there was always a reasonable decision which everyone accepted.

Just my two cents given on this Sunday afternoon.

[Big Bird]

Hi Bemo,

Thanks for the input mate. Speculating about “What Stuttgart is doing” became a bit of an obsession around here, nice to hear a few words to set things straight.

Interesting story about motorsport psychology:
A few years ago I was trying to convince our guys to wean themselves off carbon fibre a little. They were spending too much time trying to think up what would be the next component to make out of carbon, spending ages making it, and subsequently not getting around to doing any decent testing. I tried to convince them that we could save a heap of time by building a spaceframe car, and more than make up for any perceived disadvantage with testing. The answer was usually along the lines of:
“No way – we NEED a carbon tub to win. All the fast cars are carbon, spaceframes just don’t cut it any more. Look at UWA, they are so much faster than us and they have a carbon tub”
So sure enough, you guys come along and blow everyone away in 2008 with your spaceframe car. QED, I would have thought.
The next year starts, we are sitting through conceptual design review, the team is obsessing over carbon again. I dropped a line about “Why not a spaceframe? Cheaper, quicker to build etc, and Stuttgart blew you away with a spaceframe at last years comp”.
“No way, now we REALLY NEED a carbon tub – imagine how fast Stuttgart will be if they go to carbon!!”
Insert double face palm here….

I think it is called “marrying your favourite design”.

It is interesting to note that the last three Oz comps have been won by spaceframe cars, too.

Cheers all,

[exFSAE]

I think it is called “marrying your favourite design”.

Ahh yes, lack of objectivity. Plague of FSAE students and young engineers worldwide...

[ben]

Originally posted by Big Bird:
Hi Bemo,

Thanks for the input mate. Speculating about “What Stuttgart is doing” became a bit of an obsession around here, nice to hear a few words to set things straight.

Interesting story about motorsport psychology:
A few years ago I was trying to convince our guys to wean themselves off carbon fibre a little. They were spending too much time trying to think up what would be the next component to make out of carbon, spending ages making it, and subsequently not getting around to doing any decent testing. I tried to convince them that we could save a heap of time by building a spaceframe car, and more than make up for any perceived disadvantage with testing. The answer was usually along the lines of:
“No way – we NEED a carbon tub to win. All the fast cars are carbon, spaceframes just don’t cut it any more. Look at UWA, they are so much faster than us and they have a carbon tub”
So sure enough, you guys come along and blow everyone away in 2008 with your spaceframe car. QED, I would have thought.
The next year starts, we are sitting through conceptual design review, the team is obsessing over carbon again. I dropped a line about “Why not a spaceframe? Cheaper, quicker to build etc, and Stuttgart blew you away with a spaceframe at last years comp”.
“No way, now we REALLY NEED a carbon tub – imagine how fast Stuttgart will be if they go to carbon!!”
Insert double face palm here….

I think it is called “marrying your favourite design”.

It is interesting to note that the last three Oz comps have been won by spaceframe cars, too.

Cheers all,

Excellent post. My version of that story is witnessing the LMP car that was set-up by the company that designed it. The car was not performing too well and a heated confrontation between a race engineer and the car's designer results in the race engineers setup going on the car against designer's wishes. Car proceeds to go faster with race engineers setup and wins championship...

We call it "designer's disease".

Putting all this discussion aside, I'd love to come back and do a space frame single cylinder car with aircraft fabric covering and rear suspension like a 1960s F1 car - i.e. reversed lower wishbone single upper link and two radius rods.

Ben

[Bemo]

Originally posted by Big Bird:
Speculating about “What Stuttgart is doing” became a bit of an obsession around here, nice to hear a few words to set things straight.

You wouldn't believe how much people in our team speculate what others are doing, how much money others have etc. And to believe every dumb rumor about every team.
I always tell them, they shouldn't believe everything they here, as I already heard that we have a million euros per year, have our own wind tunnel, former F1 drivers and so on.

The important thing is to focus on yourself. Which resources do I have and how can I use them? You have to make the best out of it and in the end at comp you'll see what it's worth.


Originally posted by Big Bird:
“No way, now we REALLY NEED a carbon tub – imagine how fast Stuttgart will be if they go to carbon!!”

You can tell them that we didn't really get faster when we switched to carbon ;-)

[murpia]

Originally posted by Big Bird:
Before I start my random rant, a reading recommendation. I've just started on "The Multi-body Systems Approach to Vehicle Dynamics" by Blundell and Harty. The first chapter has some nice stuff about the merits of simple models, and also their own "V" process for simulation design. It is well worth a look.
I second the recommendation for this book.

Don't be put off by the title. There is a lot of 'classical' analysis presented as correlation for the multibody results. That plus page 140, paragraph 3 alone make a worthwhile purchase:


...To many casual observers it appears that the vehicle runs on little 'rails' provided by the tyres... This is simply not so, and examination of the behaviour of rally cars in the hands of skilled drivers reveals behaviour which visibly resembles that of a hovercraft. All vehicles on pneumatic tyres behave as the rally cars behave... not always apparent to the untrained observer.

Regards, Ian

[Kirk Feldkamp]

Excellent posts as always, Geoff!

At the risk of repeating myself from previous posts, I wanted to bring up one notably absent variable in your analysis: the driver. I suppose that on one hand it could be argued that simply focusing on "the driver" could be an isolationist approach. My take, however, is that a team's drivers are probably the single most integrated factor in doing well at comp.

We've all seen it before: you go to an "arrive and drive" type karting place with a bunch of friends, and one or two guys just flat smoke everyone. Swap karts, handicap them by putting them at the back... no matter what you throw at these guys, they keep finding a way to go fast and get out front. As much as all of us engineers like to think we're pretty good at driving and know what we're doing with cars because we design/work on them all the time, when it gets right down to it, there are very few people that are naturally capable of extracting the 10th, 9th, or even 8th "tenth" from a vehicle.

FSAE amplifies this by forcing drivers to reach that potential within the first lap or two of jumping in the car (for all events except for endurance, of course). In my experience, only *excellent* drivers can get "up to speed" within a lap or two. And they generally only do it with some serious practice time in the car.

The basic lapsims you have developed help give a better understanding of the performance envelope that you design the car to, but they don't necessarily highlight the role of the driver in the equation. Sure, most drivers can hit peak -1.5g braking... once. Sure, most drivers can hit 1.5g cornering, sometimes. But it's the drivers that can consistently perform at or near the limits of the vehicle's capability (even under varying conditions) that make a car fast. I'd even go as far as to make the claim that you could take the top 5 fastest endurance drivers at any given comp and put them in any one of the top 20 cars at any given comp, and they would find a way to make the car go faster than their lower placing counterparts. Conversely, if you put the slowest drivers in the fastest cars, they aren't going to be able to drive much faster consistently.

For a better idea of what's reasonable to expect from a relatively untrained driver, think of what would happen if you applied a probability distribution over the inputs to your lapsim. Say the car could reach a maximum of 1.5g cornering, but the driver only averaged 1.2g. Depending how you constructed your distribution, they would sometimes hit higher levels, sometimes lower, but less often would they be at the limit. Significantly more difficult to model is what happens when they go beyond the limits of the vehicle. If you're thinking that this would be a pain in the butt to model with any sort of fidelity, you're right. I'm not suggesting you have to go to that extent in the model. Rather, what I'm trying to point out is that we as engineers like to think that designing more extreme vehicle performance limits is the way to faster cars. My suggestion, however, is that the consistency and confidence of the "nut behind the wheel" is more likely the single biggest factor in the on-track performance of the vehicle.

With some "driver de-rated average" limits for vehicle performance in the lapsim, I bet that the difference in a "sub-par", "average", and "exceptional" driver makes more difference in points at comp than almost any other single factor. Even more importantly, secondary design factors that effect the driver's inputs and confidence may have more of an effect than most teams may give them credit for. These sorts of factors would include driver ergonomics (steering, pedals, seating position, shifter, etc.), as well as control resolution (steering rates, throttle cams, brake feel, etc.). It's sexy to say you make 90hp, but it's not always the case that your driver really feels confident enough to use that power. It's less sexy to focus on making sure the shifter gives good feedback and is consistent, and the driver feels comfortable in the seat, and the brakes and throttle are predictable. Have you ever noticed that when drivers complain about FSAE cars, they tend to mention various oddities with regard to driver packaging or vehicle handling? In the end, I argue that it's details like these that make average drivers good, and good drivers excellent.

In closing, I agree lapsims provide a great way to quickly and rationally assess different design methodologies. I'd suggest that they can also strongly support the argument that driver integration into the vehicle, and abundant, focused driver training are perhaps more important to a team's performance at comp. Oddly enough, the means to this end also suggests that a team would bias designs more toward early and simple manufacturing... and would inherently end up with more durable and tested designs come comp. Go figure, right?

-Kirk

[exFSAE]

Certainly agree that a decent driver will make heaps more difference in lap time than any sort of flexure joint or "optimized kinematics" BS.

This would be an interesting study... say you have a number (10? 20? 100?) of pre-packaged vehicle setups. Some differences in tires.. kinematics.. differential.. whatever. Run them all through a lap time sim, with 3 different driver models for each - a great driver with a nice full round G/G plot, a medicore driver with maybe a rhombus or diamond shaped G/G plot, and a crap driver with the ol' "+" shaped G/G plot.

Of the setups or design philosophies you could play with... would they rank order the same among all three drivers?

[Gruntguru]

Originally posted by exFSAE:
Certainly agree that a decent driver will make heaps more difference in lap time than any sort of flexure joint or "optimized kinematics" BS.

This would be an interesting study... say you have a number (10? 20? 100?) of pre-packaged vehicle setups. Some differences in tires.. kinematics.. differential.. whatever. Run them all through a lap time sim, with 3 different driver models for each - a great driver with a nice full round G/G plot, a medicore driver with maybe a rhombus or diamond shaped G/G plot, and a crap driver with the ol' "+" shaped G/G plot.

Of the setups or design philosophies you could play with... would they rank order the same among all three drivers? Probably not. Even among elite drivers, there can be large differences in setup preference (and pace).

[Bemo]

The old driver discussion...

In my opinion it's just one more aspect of the challenge in FSAE. If you want to be competitive at comp you will definitely need a good driver. So at some point during the year you have to decide who that should be. And the decision should be based on good reasons. The chosen drivers have to bring the necessary talent of course, but they also must be available for testing.
If you finish your car early your drivers can practice a lot before comp. So finishing it early must have a high priority. It helps you to develop a good setup, make the car reliable, perhabs even change some designs. And it helps you to have well trained drivers at comp.
A good example took place at FSG in 08. Before the Autocross there was a special event. Bernd Schneider and Mike Rockenfeller (both DTM drivers) were doing a couple of laps on the Autocross course with our 07 car and the 07 car from TU Munich. Although they are professional drivers with a lot of experience, they weren't able to come near the times, the winning teams did later in the Autocross. Even they would have needed a certain practice time to get used to the cars.
Driveability is definitely underrated by a lot of teams. No matter how good your drivers are you will be faster with a car which behaves predictable and which isn't too exhausting to drive.

[DMuusers]

Originally posted by Bemo:
The old driver discussion...

In my opinion it's just one more aspect of the challenge in FSAE. If you want to be competitive at comp you will definitely need a good driver. So at some point during the year you have to decide who that should be. And the decision should be based on good reasons. The chosen drivers have to bring the necessary talent of course, but they also must be available for testing.
If you finish your car early your drivers can practice a lot before comp. So finishing it early must have a high priority. It helps you to develop a good setup, make the car reliable, perhabs even change some designs. And it helps you to have well trained drivers at comp.
A good example took place at FSG in 08. Before the Autocross there was a special event. Bernd Schneider and Mike Rockenfeller (both DTM drivers) were doing a couple of laps on the Autocross course with our 07 car and the 07 car from TU Munich. Although they are professional drivers with a lot of experience, they weren't able to come near the times, the winning teams did later in the Autocross. Even they would have needed a certain practice time to get used to the cars.
Driveability is definitely underrated by a lot of teams. No matter how good your drivers are you will be faster with a car which behaves predictable and which isn't too exhausting to drive.

Quoted for truth. Driveability is one of our highest priority. You don't win competitions if only one person can drive the car well and everybody else can't. Yes you need talented drivers and yes experience in racing helps a lot, but nothing else compares to FSAE. The tracks are much different to anything else, even between competitions. An easy to drive car isn't only less exhausting for you drivers, but is also easy to be driven fast by everyone. Your drivers can act on instinct even if they don't know the track (and maybe the car) very well.

And a +1 to this thread aswell. Everybody should listen carefully to what Bemo and Geoff says. Even the best teams can learn from this thread.

[Charlie]

Great stuff Geoff and others.

On the driver front I want to clarify one thing, especially for newer teams. Many teams think the driver element is out of their control, but it isn't. A car can be built that is much more drivable than another, and testing improves driver's abilities dramatically.

Just wanted to point that out, as it is in Kirk's response if you read deep enough but I'm afraid many won't.

I don't think I see drivers themselves as important as Kirk or exFSAE do. I certainly don't see them as 'the single most integrated factor in doing well at comp.' Our team worked on a car that was easy to drive for most people and the result was we usually had plenty of capable drivers. For that reason I don't necessarily agree that a top 10 driver could bring a 20th place car to the top 10. Many cars are fundamentally flawed and won't give good driver feedback and a good driver would be just as unable to cope.

[RobbyObby]

Can one of the Mods please sticky this thread? This is some of the best reading by far on this forum! Kudos to Big Bird.

With regard to drivers, we are currently having heated discussions about exactly what Gruntguru pointed out. All of our driver training this year has been in last year's car, and some think that we should decide our drivers once the new car is built because the fast drivers are going to be fast no matter what car you put them in. However, others think that we should let everyone get their fair "tryout" in the new car, since it might suit some drivers better than others, especially compared to last year's car as two major car goals this year are driver ergonomics and driveabililty.
Have any of you guys had an experience where one of your faster drivers from the previous year just could not cope with the new car. Or vice versa, one of your "okay" drivers got in your new car and blew everyone away?

[flavorPacket]

Originally posted by RobbyObby:
Have any of you guys had an experience where one of your faster drivers from the previous year just could not cope with the new car. Or vice versa, one of your "okay" drivers got in your new car and blew everyone away?

Nope. The more FSAE experience they have, the better they are. Maybe if you made a really big change in your car (4 banger to single or 13s to 10s), this might matter more. In my experience it was best to put someone in the car who knows how to execute at competition.

[Big Mo]

Originally posted by flavorPacket:
Maybe if you made a really big change in your car ...13s to 10s, this might matter more.

This is why we were wondering about this question. I know what the data and the tables say about the change in handling, but for a driver, how big is the step down to 10s?

EDIT: The other big driving conflict we are facing is the tradeoff between training drivers and getting the car done. The more we drive the old car, the more money and effort goes into it and away from the in-progress mobile.


Also, agree on the sticky proposition. If this is good enough to be emailed out at Swift, its good enough to deserve a sticky.

[JoshH]

RobbyObby and Big Mo,

I don't have specific experience with FSAE but as an experienced racer (FF,DSR) and SJSU ME Alum I figured I could offer some of my experience. I general the fast guys are fast in just about anything, there’s just something about how certain people interface with the vehicle and can sense the limit. But I would urge you to expand your thinking from just fast to fast and smart. The best drivers are great at balancing risk and reward, but can also wring the car out when need be. These people should stand out.

Josh

[bob.paasch]

Originally posted by flavorPacket:
Maybe if you made a really big change in your car (4 banger to single or 13s to 10s), this might matter more.

Between 2007 and 2009 we went from 4 cylinder to single and 13s to 10s. For autocross and endurance, our fastest drivers were still our fastest drivers.

For acceleration, with the drop in power a low mass driver became more of a premium. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

[flavorPacket]

Originally posted by bob.paasch:
For acceleration, with the drop in power a low mass driver became more of a premium. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

After being beaten consistently by a girl 40 lb lighter than me, I couldn't agree more!

[Mbirt]

Originally posted by flavorPacket:
After being beaten consistently by a girl 40 lb lighter than me, I couldn't agree more!
She's also Chrysler's plan to get those pentastar Challengers down on mass, right?

[Big Bird]

Thanks everyone for the input. I never intended for this thread to be a series of my monologues, so I certainly welcome any critique or comment you may have.

Kirk, very good point about drivers, and I tried to pre-empt a little back on page 1 in my "Potential vs Execution" piece.

To quote:

" Anyway, the argument I wish to make with all the above is that “Track Speed points” can be broken down even further into three interrelated factors:
• Design Potential: How the car will perform according to the calculations / lapsims that we’ve discussed earlier
• Vehicle Completeness: How effectively we deliver the designed vehicle to achieve its full potential.
• Driver Skill: How effectively the driver delivers the full performance of the vehicle
I’d combine the latter two factors under the term “execution”.

Now I’ve seen plenty of examples where all the focus was on the “design potential” side of things, but the final execution didn’t deliver on that potential. Examples include cars that don’t run properly on competition day, or drivers who obviously lack experience in the car. In our own team s I’ve seen examples where months were spent labouring over a couple of kgs (effectively a couple of points), but on competition day a swag of points gets lost because the acceleration event driver hasn’t driven the car before.

For most teams, the design potential of the vehicle may be worth around 0-20 points relative to your competition (and in many cases the decisions we are labouring over are maybe worth single points if that). Failure to complete the vehicle properly is a penalty of up to hundreds of points relative to your competition, and well trained drivers could be worth up towards 100 points. (I’m being a little vague as it depends on the team and where they are at – but certainly the penalties for poor execution are much more serious than the gains most of us are aiming for in our design stages). "

End quote.

Recently I've been focussing on the first aspect - understanding the design potential of the vehicle, because I see far too much emphasis placed on low points value measures (usually mass and power). My argument is that if we take our focus away from these little distractions we can dedicate more time / money / resources to the real priorities. And Kirk, you hit on a number of these, especially driver "comfort" with the controls.

I've got a piece coming about "designing for your driver", but that is taking some time while I compose my thoughts. I tend to take a bit of a contrary approach to a lot of the common motorsport axioms, especially when we apply them to FSAE. So I want to make sure I get the words right so I don't look more of a crackpot than I need to!

Cheers all,

[Bemo]

Originally posted by Big Bird:
For most teams, the design potential of the vehicle may be worth around 0-20 points relative to your competition (and in many cases the decisions we are labouring over are maybe worth single points if that). Failure to complete the vehicle properly is a penalty of up to hundreds of points relative to your competition, and well trained drivers could be worth up towards 100 points.

100% agreed. This is were you must find the right compromise. Of course you have to try to improve your design from year to year (at least that is the intent of the whole competition).
But to do well at comp you mustn't forget to build a car. We always have three goals for a season: Finish the car in time, finish endurance, win the competition.
This sounds simple. But you have to be aware that you can't achieve the third goal without having achieved the other two first.
You have to make your schedule for the year. You must define a design freeze. And after this day design changes must be rare exceptions (it's nearly impossible to have absolutely no changes anymore). From then on, you build the car. If one have of the team starts building the car and the other half goes on and on changing their designs you will get into serious trouble.
Like this everyone can take care that his parts get done and be sure they will fit into the car. It isn't acceptable that one manufactures a part and then it doesn't fit anymore because someone else changed his design.
Almost every year some team members aren't willing to really accept that, usually newbies ;-). They always argue that if they get some more tim to work on their design, they will be able to reach "the optimum". So you have to tell them that "the optimum" is something that doesn't exist. These last details you argue about at this time will help you to collect some points at best (as Geoff explained). But because of the loss of time the risk of losing reeeaaaally a lot of points is rising.

So the bottomline is that you need a schedule and that you have to stick to it (that must sound so German...). Only this makes it possible to get your car done early enough before comp. And the points you can gain during these weeks by setup work, driver training etc. will bring you way more points than using this time for optimizing some design details.

And by the way. Here in Stuttgart drivers are always chosen before the new car is done. Driving time with the new car is incredible valuable and you shouldn't waste it for some stupid sort of competition within the team. Of course everybody wants to drive, but if your goal is max. success you must be able to accept that only few people can drive the car before comp. Of course after the last competition for a car we make some team events and then everybody is allowed to drive.

[bob.paasch]

Originally posted by Bemo:
And by the way. Here in Stuttgart drivers are always chosen before the new car is done. Driving time with the new car is incredible valuable and you shouldn't waste it for some stupid sort of competition within the team. Of course everybody wants to drive, but if your goal is max. success you must be able to accept that only few people can drive the car before comp. Of course after the last competition for a car we make some team events and then everybody is allowed to drive.

We do exactly the same thing, at least in the beginning of the season. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

[flavorPacket]

Originally posted by Mbirt:

She's also Chrysler's plan to get those pentastar Challengers down on mass, right?

She actually works for Chrysler now, so maybe that's true...

[Freddie]

Thanks Geoff! I'm the president of a new FS team and I will compile all your posts (like I've done with the thread start) and force everyone to read it.

I'm just wondering about your thoughts on concurrent engineering in FSAE design work? It's sort of bordering integrating design, I guess, but it would be great to hear what you think about it

[Big Bird]

Thanks Freddie. I certainly hope you are not going to compile all of my posts - your poor team members will be reading until August.

Interesting question on the concurrent engineering thing. I know that is a bit of a catchphrase at the moment, so I hope there isn't some hidden meaning that I miss. I don't have any formal training in concurrent engineering process, and simply understand it as an iterative, concurrent (obviously) design process.

My random thoughts, no particular order:
* FSAE is a classic concurrent engineering task - huge task to complete, not enough time to do it sequentially
* My page 1 design process (Levels 1-4, or what I'm now thinking of as "Project - Problem - Product - Parts") seems to indicate that we should follow each step sequentially. It will help organize your design process - but won't completely linearize it. There will always be some iterative stuff going on
* No design management structure will work if you don't have buy-in from your team members

I would say that if your overall design ethos is "hey, lets concurrently engineer!" you are in for a confused and painful project - and probably a non-delivery of the final car. I strongly advocate a solid, rational enquiry into your project (Level 4) followed by your problem (Level 3), to set the base direction of the team and to get everyone onto the same page. Once everyone (the majority?) agrees on a direction, let the concurrent engineering begin. Iterative design works well to solve packaging issues and solving inherent design compromises, but if you let it drive your whole project you'll not get anything done.

Note: going back to that buy-in thing - I believe concurrent design can only work when you have good communication between team members. And that means everyone gets together once a week (or more often?) to touch base and re-align. In our year we had a CAD review every Wednesday night from 6-9pm, pizzas and drinks brought in, and the whole team worked through packaging and design issues. It worked really well, and made sure everyone understood the overall design direction. If you have team members who think they already know it all and just want to be left to do their own thing - then you are probably better off doing the linear design thing.

In summary it all depends on your team. If you are all friends, then give the concurrent thing a go. If you have a fractious team, then linear is the only way you can control it.

Time to go to work....

Cheers

[Mbirt]

Originally posted by flavorPacket:
She actually works for Chrysler now, so maybe that's true...

Haha. Yeah. We've got two KUFSAE alums in the calibration group working with her to get more "Imported from Detroit" vehicles on the road.

[Bemo]

Originally posted by Big Bird:
And that means everyone gets together once a week (or more often?) to touch base and re-align. In our year we had a CAD review every Wednesday night from 6-9pm, pizzas and drinks brought in, and the whole team worked through packaging and design issues.
If you have the possibility design as much time as possible together in one room. Here at Stuttgart we have the great opportunity to use a CAD-Pool with enough computers to allow everyone design at the same time.
Like this smaller packaging issues etc. can be solved the short way without bothering your chief engineer.
The regular meetings at which the whole team discusses all aspects together to make sure nothing gets missed and to give everybody an understanding of what is going on are of course absolutely necessary.
Communication makes your team efficient. Lack of communication leads to sensless work and that leads to frustrated team members. It doesn't help anyone if everybody is designing into a different direction and in the end you try to match the pieces.
Sometimes you get a feeling that all the meetings just cost you valuable designing time but later you will recognize that they help to make your desinging time much more efficient.

[Freddie]

My mistake, I was referring to your posts in this thread. While reading all your posts on this forum may be useful, I have a slight guess that my team members will go berzerk somewhere around june ...

I'm no expert in concurrent engineering, or the "easy to explain, hard to perform" waterfall model either, so I was referring to the iterative parts of the process. The weekly meetings are already a routine to get everybody in the knowing about what's going on, and judging from your advice we will continue doing that.

Thanks again for your thoughts on this.

Bemo: great advice, I will try to incorporate it as soon as we get on to design of our car. Thanks!

[JasperC]

Freddie, I think you will also be very interested in reading the topic named "Team Management Styles" which can be found easily using the Find function. There is a lot of good stuff there on team structures and on systems engineering.

Good luck with your team!

Jasper Coosemans

DUT Racing Team 2008-2010
Delft University of Technology

[Bemo]

Another thread here about newbies with stupid ideas brought the idea to me to bring the topic of team management into this post.

People tend to claim that other teams are more succesfull then them because of budget and other resources. In my opinion team management is the way more important factor. What you initially need is a sufficient number of highly motivated team members. The real question is how to do that.

One special problem every FSAE teams suffers from is that every year a high number of team members leave the team because they graduate/don't have enough time anymore. This means you have to transfer as much knowledge and experience of the leaving team members to the newbies. And to teach the new guis how the team works. There is nothing wrong and it is pretty normal that new team members come up with a lot of unrealistic ideas and don't know what's it all about in general.

So the first important thing is to set up the new team early enough. Everybody has to decide wether he wants to be a team member for a season or not. That means you have to inform students about your project. After general advertisement at campus you have to give interested people detailed information about what you are doing, how your team is working and what it is like to be a part of it. There is only full or nothing. People who just show up now and then don't help you! That has to be said. While someone is a member of the team, the team must have absolute priority. There is nothing wrong if someone doesn't like this, but he has to accept that he can't join the team.

Typically there won't be too many people left then, but you don't need a team of 100 people to build a car. If you have such a big team in the end there will be only a few who really keep the project going. So why not start with only these few people?

Form the new team early enough that the new team members can visit a competition before they start their work. That's difficult to impossible of course for teams who have to travel very far to comps. But if it is possible it is worth it. The other advantage of having the new team together before the competition of the old team is that the quitting people are still around. The newbies can talk to them and let themselves explain what it is all about.

Once the season has started the question comes up how to motivate people and how to make sure they get their work done. In my opinion very important is to show them that you believe in them. Give everybody a task. And really important is that everybody has his own task. If you just define a suspension team consisting of a couple of guys and they have to organise themselves, in the best case one third of them manages to design and build a suspension and the other two thirds of them will just be there to wear a team shirt at comp.
Everyone must have his own task. One is responsible for the wishbones, one for the uprights, one for the wheels, one for springs and dampers etc.
This will give people the feeling that they are full team members from the beginning and motivate them to do the best they can to fullfil their task.
Of course you have to guide and control the newbies. But guiding them doesn't mean just to tell them what to do. Try to explain them what is important.
Make a tight schedule with a lot of small deadlines. This will help people to organise their work and team leaders can recognize very early if someone is falling behind the schedule. Especially while developing concepts and designing everybody should have to present his work to the entire team. For example at the end of concept phase and at the end of the design phase. Like this everybody gets a deeper insight to other fields of the car and everybody is forced to have something ready to present at a certain time.
It won't hurt to invite your alumni to these presentations and give them the possibility to tell what they think about certain ideas. People who were members for two or more years usually have seen so much shit which can happen during a season and at comps that they propably can judge about some things better. Several times you will have the case that someone just sais "we've tried that back in xx - was a pain in the ass because..."

At a certain point people must stop designing and start building a car. This sounds simple, but there are alway a couple of people who are not willing to really accept this. People always want to work longer on their design because their parts can get lighter, better shinier...
But in getting the car running early you can get a lot more points at comp than in having a car which is 0,452g lighter.

While building the car everybody stays responsible for his part but that doesn't mean that he doesn't have to do only this. Work load in manufacturing can be very different depending on the part. At this point it should be clear that everybody has to help each other.

And when competition comes near it gets time to search new members again and it starts all over again.

I tried to keep this short, but although I didn't explain all my thoughts in every detail it got a bit long. Sorry for that.

Looking forward to your comments.

[Stef de Jong]

What I would advice to any team is to start the season by going with your management and chiefs to some remote location away from your workshop and start drawing up your year.

Think about every person's role in the team. Think about the design process. Think about sponsorship, your season goals, whether you want to burn up your team members or put a lesser burden on them so they can put their experience to use in the next year. Think about responsibilities and decision power of your chiefs and team members, especially for when shit hits the fan (because it will).

Think about how you will get a winning team, how you want to stand out at the events. Think about your IT structure and how you involve your alumni. Think about which managerial roles you need to have, and which you actually do have, and how you will fill the gap. Think about how you will sell your project to sponsors. Think about what you want to improve incrementally, and what you want to redevelop from scratch.

And only then start designing. I know this preparation takes some time, but this time will be paid back for easily during the year.

There are a lot of ways that can be successful to run a team, depending on whether you have a previous car that works, how large and experienced your team is and what you want to achieve. This we can see on the many different ways of approaching FSAE. Try to tailor your approach to your specific team setting.

Perhaps it's an idea to bundle best-practices into some sort of Body of Knowledge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Guide_to_the_Project_Management_Body_of_Knowledg e) ?

Stef de Jong
DUT Racing
Team Manager 08-09

[carbon_black]

Originally posted by Bemo:
But to do well at comp you mustn't forget to build a car. We always have three goals for a season: Finish the car in time, finish endurance, win the competition.
...
So the bottomline is that you need a schedule and that you have to stick to it (that must sound so German...). Only this makes it possible to get your car done early enough before comp. And the points you can gain during these weeks by setup work, driver training etc. will bring you way more points than using this time for optimizing some design details.


For a visualisation of this, see http://pgr.github.com/2011/02/...-visualisations.html (http://pgr.github.com/2011/02/21/fsae-2010-result-visualisations.html) - Each horizontal line represents a team, each vertical axis is an event. Click an axis to rank teams by colour for that event. Click and drag along an axis to filter over a range. Filtering over multiple events is cool.

There are a few trends there, but looking at the endurance event, it does seem that there are points on offer for those who finish builds on time.

Pete Ringwood
UTS Motorsports

[RollingCamel]

After talking to some of the teams here....management is to simplify and standardize, not to complex things up.

[Matthew Bell]

RollingCamel,

Not necessarily. The purpose of well defining your management structure and strategy is to avoid the destructive potential of the inevitable moment where someone says "It would be really great if we did this..." without following any of the design philosophies upon which the team agrees.

Case in point: Noob walks in to a FSAE team and says: "Turbos make cars fast, we should have a turbo. Also, wings work great on Formula One cars, let's do that too. Ooo, and carbon fiber monocoque, allllll the teams that win have that too." If your team has 30+ people, that's fine. If you have 5, that's a big problem. The purpose of the management structure is to have a way to immediately eliminate ideas for which your team cannot or does not have the resources.
No aerospace department? Probably means no wings.
No testing track nearby? Probably means no wings and no fancy engine mods.
Having a problem finishing a reliable car on time? Probably means your team is over-complicating their designs or over-estimating their skills.

So, the management can complicate things initially, but in the end you'll thank yourself for doing it, or wish that you had done it years and years ago.

[flavorPacket]

Originally posted by Pete R:
For a visualisation of this, see http://pgr.github.com/2011/02/...-visualisations.html (http://pgr.github.com/2011/02/21/fsae-2010-result-visualisations.html) - Each horizontal line represents a team, each vertical axis is an event. Click an axis to rank teams by colour for that event. Click and drag along an axis to filter over a range. Filtering over multiple events is cool.

The accel and skidpad data is switched. The team that won accel finished 2nd overall.

[RollingCamel]

I understand, but some just over complex it and make it inefficient just for showing off their managerial prowess while not realistically assessing their number, structure and team's abilities is. A complex efficient system is one that is complex create but simple to maintain and apply.

The same bureaucracy can help but also may disconnect and inhibit the purpose.

[Bemo]

To my experience FSAE teams usually are very far from over organising their teams.

That's exactly the point about which people tend to argue. Everybody just wants to design and build a car. That whole organising stuff isn't why we are here.
But all the work can get so much more efficient if you take the time to organise meetings and presentations. This is the only way to make sure that everybody is heading into the same directions. And very often during these meetings problems are recognized. And it is an old rule that the earlier you recognize a problem the less you suffer from it.

Don't listen to your feeling when it tells you that all these meetings are wasted time. They aren't - communication is never lost time in such a project.
Especially the team leaders' main task should be to organise the team. To know what everybody is doing. And that should be more or less their only task.
It mite look like a waste of manpower to have two or three talented and dedicated mates who just organise the team (and that is only necessary/possible if you have 25+ team members). But they can make the work of all the others so much more efficient that the benefit of that is much bigger than if they would design and build parts of the car themselves.

As said above these things are possible if you have enough team members. There are teams with only 5-10 mates pulling the whole thing. Of course in such a small team it doesn't make much sense to have 3 members just organising the work.

[moose]

Sure, dedicating 3 people to org is impossible on a small team, but even on a small team of 5 the "leader(s)" need to have a plan. If you just attack a design one part at a time it never works very well.

Spending a few days up front planning the design goals out, and then a couple of hours each week can be a big help to keeping a team on track and assessing where to cut losses and move on, etc.

At work, one thing I often try to do is put together a list of short term to-do's/goals, med-term & long term; If you put those together every month (~1-2 hrs?) go ahead and see how you move towards that. If you know what the big goals are for every month, at the end of Month 3 or 4 you'll know how adept the team is at meeting those goals. At that point you'll decide how & when the need exists to start trimming projects that won't bring back enough return for the time investment.

[Pradeep]

bump.

I hate it when this topic falls off the first page. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

[Hub]

Hello,

Our team, the DMS Racing team from Versailles (France) was created in 2009 and participated for the first time with a car in 2010. As a news team, I think it could be a good idea to write how we set-up the team. I think it could help other teams, especially new one like us.

First I'll explain the organization in theory we try to use, it's a general organization applicable for every team. In second how we adapt this organization to our team and in third how it works in real. With theses explanations you will understand how we continuously adapt the organization to overcome a lot of problems. This reflect how we build OUR team and for you it'll be probably different. Each team is different, each team have different problems and solutions so don't try to follow our steps but instead learn about them and adapt them.



Chapter I: General organization

- Read fsae.com to discover what is formula student.

- Collect infos to have a global view of what is formula student. All the data need to be classified and easily accessible by team members (DVD, FTP).
Also you need to classify by area. Ex: Chassis, suspension, engine...
- Images, articles, books, rules, 3D files, reports, links, videos...
- Read the rules to understand what your team need to do in a formula student event for static and dynamic event. It give also a better view of what is a FS car. Write a presentation for team members, professors, external people.

- Create the structure of the team
- Search on other teams’ website for organization chart
- Read articles on how to set-up a team (Pat article, fsae.com...)
- Create different work groups for the design of the car but also functioning of the team (website, search of sponsors, media...)
- Set-up team communication with weekly team meeting and create a way to centralize data accessible by everybody, everywhere. For example CAD shared with a vpn or discussion through a private forum. For attract people at the weekly meeting a good way is to organize a meal. Non FS activity is also good for team spirit and to relax.
- Make meetings with actual and potential team members. Discuss on what they want to do in the team and the team need to do.
- Choose which event the team will participate and create the planning for the whole year with key dates (design step, registration, documents deadlines...).

- Understanding of the project and clear objective.
- Every team member need to learn how to have a car at comp. Design member need to see photos, schema, data of other cars, read books, articles, fsae.com, RULES discuss... Members of other areas like marketing, finance need also to learn how to bring money, communicate about the project... Generally people tend to directly start the design of the car without a fully understanding of the objectives, an analysis of the concurrency or even READ THE RULES. Yes, it takes a lot of time to make this boring works and the design don't seem to progress but it's capital to fully understand the competition to set clear goals and work correctly.
- Set reasonable objectives according to your previous observation. According to your expected human resource, funding, manufacturing capacity...
you need to set the characteristic of the car.
- construction : tubular space frame, 4 cylinder engine, 13 inch wheel... (example)
- dimension : wheelbase, weight...

- Design of the car
- Precise planning with priority. Example: The engine need to be acquired quickly to take measure and designed parts attached to it, chassis, intakes...
- After the conceptual phase each work group will focus on the optimization and integration of their parts in the car and respecting the planning. A delay of one group is not an excuse for other group.

- Purchase of standard parts and manufacturing. It could take a long time for parts come over the sea and other are donate by sponsors. Make a planning for purchase, building and assembly of parts with priorities.

- Design of Technical drawings and jig for the construction of parts take time. For example the design of guides for mitering tube is long but it will save you a lot of time during manufacturing. If possible try to have alternative. A sponsor or a member could leave you at the worst moment

- Start of the construction according to your planning. You will probably have problem so be ready to reorganize you construction planning.

- Drivers’ selection. It's a problem for new teams as we don't have an old car to test drivers. But generally, a fast driver in a kart will be also fast in a FS. Make clear rules before the selection. As everybody want to be a driver, a non selection could be a frustration if the start rules are not clear. A selection in a local kart circuit is fine. And as FS seat time is precious, only selected drivers can drive the car before races. Plan a test WE for team members and sponsors after the season, it'll motivate everybody.

- Race preparation
- Preparation of static events. Static events like the cost report are considered as boring but 1/3 of points are from static events so don't underestimate the preparation, it takes time. Make events simulations to be comfortable and listen comments from team members, professors, family...
- Competition organization. Van, camping, food... it's what is needed to be prepared for the comfort of the team as you will not have a lot of time to sleep. Don't forget to carry a lot of spare parts. Read the event schedule!
- Testing. To score points in dynamic event you need to finish first. In the first European event only 1/3 of the cars finish endurance. Two month of testing before a comp is not useless as you need to repair parts, tune the car, and train drivers.

- Race it and enjoy!

[Hub]

Chapter II: Below I explain only the adaptation of the previous organization to our team.

- Project presentation to students and university. January 2009
I discover Formula Student in December 2008 and as a 2 month placement was needed we proposed to replace the placement by the FS project. I prepare the university presentation and data collect with a friend and this video was an excellent motivation ;-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8ti5G4jFSo

- Structure team creation. January 2009
Both we create 5 technical groups: Suspension, frame, engine, brake transmission and one group for marketing, sponsoring, organization constituted by motivated members from technical groups.

- Understanding of the project and clear objective. January - April 2009

- Design of the car. May - august 2009

- Participation to FS Italy in class 3 (only design) September 2010
We decide to participate at the Italian event because it was the latest European competition. We know from the start that there will not be enough time to complete the car design, but feedback from judges and other teams will be a great help. It will permit us to understand how an event run.

- Improvement of the design according to FS feedback. September - December 2010

- Construction phase and drivers’ selection. January - May 2010

- Testing, tuning, training and races simulations. May - July 2010

- Participation to Formula Student in England, Germany, Italy. July - September 2010
We prefer to put money on events instead of car, as results analysis show that reliability is a problem and by maximizing events we improve our probability to complete a competition. Italy was our first choice because it's the latest official European event, so it gives us more time. Also we will meet teams seen last year.
England came in second because it's the first event, forcing us to finish the car earlier. We finally added Germany as other teams said, "It’s the event you can't miss".

- Test Session. September 2010
To motivate and thank team members and sponsors, we decide to make a test day. Each member will have the opportunity to drive the car. Same for top sponsors and friends who helped us.

[Bemo]

Originally posted by Hub:
I prepare the university presentation and data collect with a friend and this video was an excellent motivation ;-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8ti5G4jFSo
Yeah, our first year car in action!!!

In general I'd say, you understood how a team has to be organised. A lot of the principles you mentioned are the basis of our team organisation too.

The important thing is to stick to it. Always. No exceptions. Every time we made exceptions from these principles it caused major problems.

But as I said, in general what you stated is absolutely correct.

[Hub]

Yes Bemo,
As you said we tried to stick to it, but it's not easy and like you it cause problems when we made exception.
Below the last part with all the problems we had during the project. I write this because we generally learned more from problems and it's always better to learn from other team. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif



Chapter III: How it works in practice to our team.

- Project presentation to students and university. January 2009
Students appreciated the project as it permits them to secure a "placement". On the other hand, from the professors’ side, it was the inverse as only two professors supported the project and the other were against. Hopefully, one of the two was the director of our section. One month later, he left the university, but as the project was started, the new director let us do the project instead of a placement.
This could be a little strange to have professor against a project but our formation has nothing to do with FS. It's a theoretical study with classes focused on how apply math in mechanics. And the last year’s training was about civil construction. We never used a lathe, or learned to tolerance a drawing. Also we didn't have machine shop at university.
So, the reaction is logical and I understand the reason. One of the advantage is to be free for our decisions.

- Understanding of the project and clear objective. January - April 2009
Some students make FS as the project permit them to secure a "placement" and they were clearly less productive than motivated members. During this period there were no hour allocated on our education so only few members learned on the project... The motivated members worked also on website, administration, marketing, sponsors search and it was difficult to find sponsors with no car and image to show as the project started.
After a long analysis of results, we spot the priority : finish all events from a comp. From last season (2008) Stuttgart was the best team and the car was relatively simple with a space frame chassis and a conventional suspension. We understand that, what make a car fast, is not the visible, like a carbon monocoque, titanium upright, etc. It's what is invisible, like simulation, calculation, ergonomics, etc.. and of course, "to finish first, first you have to finish", so reliability need to be on top.
In April 2009 we haven't a machine shop, and we have a low budget, limited human resources, we never have designed a car...well, we are a new team. So, we decide to design a conventional car, a simple car. A simple car will be lighter, cheaper, more reliable, faster to design and build. We focus more on practical side than performance.
- Spaceframe chassis: Easier to build, modify and repair.
- 4 cylinder engine: 4 cylinder are available, cheap, and strong. Also, as our first car will be heavy, we need an engine with enough power.
- 13 inch rims: available, easier package inside the wheel, more tire choice.
- 250 Kg and 80 HP as objective: We wanted a simple car and 250Kg was a conventional value.
- Initial budget of 20 000€ for the total team budget including donated parts and travel to the UK event.

- Design of the car. May - august 2009
From May to June all students worked together in the same room. Working in the same room make design easier as we could exchange points of view and help each other. We also decide to make a meeting every week as it permits to members of each group to have feedbacks and an understanding of the whole car.
The university project finish in June and the design was far from finished. It's the result of students doing a project just to complete course, professors not supervising attendance and a project far from our course. From the 15 students who started the project, only 5 continue, and with the summer holiday, it was pretty slow.

- Participation to FS Italy in class 3 (only design) September 2010
Two (one?) week before the competition, people started to be more assiduous but our preparation was far from finished. We finish our design poster the night before the design event and print them in A4 paper. Our preparation was not good and the design far from finished but every member has a relatively good understanding of the car, a good presentation to judges and our objective to make a simple car was very appreciated. Finally, we surprisingly achieve a second place out of 5 teams. A great help to add credibility, attract sponsors and motivate members.

- Improvement of the design according to FS feedback. September 2010 - January 2011
From September 2010 to December 2010 the design ran slowly due to many facts: lack of allocated courses, room to work, sponsors, partners to build the car. We had to work each on our side and meet once per week. It was not the ideal as it motivates less to work. And to attract people at meetings, we tried to have a meal from time to time. Fortunately, a technical faculty of our university 50 Km away let us use their machine shop and helped us to manufacture and buy parts. Also, 3 students from this faculty integrated the team with FS being part of their school project. Unfortunately, they were not motivated. So we loss a lot of time, and 2 month later, when the project was finished, they disappeared. 3 other students joined the project at the end of the year, but with sandwich courses they were only present 50% at faculty. Fortunately, they were motivated and continue to work after the project’s end.

- Construction phase and driver selection. February - July 2010
One month after our initial schedule, we start the car construction. One month is a lot and the design was not finished but construction had to start if we wanted to have time to build parts. Also, we didn't have access to the machine shop after the day and during weekend, so each Friday and Monday, we had to transport parts to my cellar to be able to work during weekend. This constraint required to adapt our method and planning. Days of the week, we worked on parts that required complex tools like TIG equipment, lathe, etc. In the evening we worked on design, purchase, report... The weekend, as my cellar is small and not well equipped, we worked on "light" tasks, grinding tubes, electrical harness, assembly. This was not easy, but the hardest point was human resource. During the construction’s period, we were nearly only two guys working on the car and three at part-time as they were in sandwich courses. Also manufacturing took more time than expected so we had to save time and we changed a few things in the car. We go for a conventional gear selector instead of a pneumatic, we use aluminium plates for bodywork, we don't install ARB and a lot more. Finally the car was ready the day before first dynamic event of Formula Student. Initially, it was planed to finish it two months before...

- Testing, tuning, training and race simulation. May - July 2010
We had the luck to have in our team a motivated, talented and experienced driver. He started driving race cars at fifteen on various categories, as kart, rally, circuit, GT and single seater. Also, his student job was driving instructor on circuit and that's why he became responsible for drivers’ selection and training. Early in the project, he wrote the drivers selection’s rules, as we know a lot of people want to drive, but seats are rare and non selected drivers could be frustrated. Drivers’ selection was made on a unique rental kart with two test, lap and slalom time after training. The two best drivers will make the endurance and autocross. Third and fourth, skidpad and acceleration. Two other will be reserve drivers. After the selection and car completed, drivers will be trained on the car, but the car was on it wheels three days before the departure...
For the first planed test, two days before the departure, smoke get away from the ECU and inspection shows a burned component. So, we go to England without testing, but with a new ECU and a corrected harness (faulty fan routing). The choice to buy an easy available ECU in France paid, as we quickly replaced it.

- Participation to Formula Student in England, Germany, Italy. July - September 2010

- FS UK -
Our car was in rolling conditions, but not ready for scrutineering, so the first two days, we finished the car and resolved another problem. Our new calculator, installed just before the departure, was also out of order. We worked the night to find the problem and fortunately, only the fan control was out of order in our old ECU, permitting us to use it again with a few modifications, to allow manual fan control.
Static events didn't go well, as we didn't have time to correctly prepared them, so a lot of points were lost. We passed a first scrutineering the day before first dynamic events and corrected a few things.
For the first dynamic day we had to pass, in the morning, a second scrutineering, tilt test, noise test, brake test, skid-pad, acceleration and we made it! Brake test was the very first drive of the car and we were surprised to have a rolling car. As we never tested the car, our driver quickly tested vital functions of the car and braked progressively to assure it won’t break at higher speed.
Skidpad didn't go well, due to untrained drivers and above all, a brutal engine at low rev and old tires (we didn’t receive our tires before departure, so we used tires given by another team, but there were narrow tires, and old so very hard tires). Acceleration was better but we lacked grip. For Autocross, we didn't walk on the track as we were busy with the car. In my case, I never drove a race car so it was a nightmare, touching a lot of cones and doing off courses. Our best driver managed it well, but with our tires, we only reached 7.5 points.
One more time, the night was short as we corrected a few problems. We were very tired for endurance but the car was ready.
Unfortunately, a penalty for being one car late at starting put us off the points, but at least we finished the endurance and all events!

Between FS UK and FS DE
Between the two races, we disassembled the car to paint it, then reassemble it, put new tires and tested it one day.

- FS DE -
For Germany we were on the waiting list until the 30th July but we prepared the event before the registration. The static events were a little more prepared in general, except cost, so we stayed with a poor result. Scrutineering was well and we had less things to correct. With only one day of testing and new tires, performance improved a lot on dynamic events. At Silverstone autocross we were at 15 sec behind leader, but in Hockenheim we reduced the gap to 4.3 sec with a gear selector problem. Due to a broken steering wheel on the third lap of endurance, our lap time increased by 5 sec per lap but we finished endurance (at 17th place in spite of this lost of time).

Between FS DE and FS IT
We had one month between the two races and it was planned to train drivers and setup the car. Unfortunately, it was difficult to find a test track and we made only one day of testing. Also, a lot of members were in holiday or started to work.

- FS IT -
Our static results improved slightly and dynamic a bit more (11th place in autocross), except for endurance. Due to damaged heater fins, our temperature raised too much and during driver change, water leaked from the venting hose, disqualifying us for endurance.

- Test Session. September 2010
As planned, we made a test session for sponsors and team members during 2 days. It rained the two days but it permitted to thank people and companies who helped us.
They first drove a kart to get familiarised with the track and after they switched to the FS. In total, 27 sessions were made with our car and a bit more with the kart.

Conclusion:
As you can see, FS is a complex project and you always get some difficulties at some moment. For me, a good team will keep reasonable objective, respect deadlines, build a car in accordance to its capacities and be flexible to overcome problems.
As said before by a lot of teams, testing is important and our result between England and Germany shows it, by improving from 157 to 418 points.
Finishing is also important when presenting the car to judges. In England, our pedal box had no paint and was slightly rust covered, so judges’ comments were not good. "Brake pedal support too soft, stiffness of pedal box inadequate, pedal ratio too high, pedals maybe too hard. Safety concern regarding pedal box." In Germany, with just only a good paint, it was different and judges were impressed by the lightness and simplicity.

For FS and not only, money make people dream, but personally I think it's not an important parameter. For me, the most important is to have motivated members, as they will bring you money from sponsors, make the job in time and much more...

Thanks to have take the time to read this long post and I hope it'll help you.

[Big Bird]

Thanks everyone for your contributions, there is some really useful stuff being posted (thanks Hub, Bemo, etc.) Sorry to interrupt, but I've had a few spare minutes here and there and have been collecting the odd thoughts. Time to unleash my cooking analogy...

Formula Masterchef

There is a proliferation of cooking shows on Australian television, and it has got me thinking about the similarities between being a good chef and being a good engineer. It is a subject close to my heart as I spent 10 years working in a kitchen, and much of what I have learnt about good project management comes from that experience.

In Masterchef (or Iron Chef, or pick your own local variation), the contestants try to prove to the judges that they are the best chef. They do this by presenting the best dish that they can with the resources available to them.
In Formula SAE (or Formula Student, or pick your own local variation), the contestants try to prove to the judges that they are the best engineers. They do this by presenting the best car that they can with the resources available to them

When we came into FSAE, Cornell was doing a brilliant roast beef as their signature dish. The meat was cooked perfectly each year, they made a great gravy, the veggies were spot on. Cornell knew that as long as they kept pumping out their own signature dish, and as long as everyone else thought this was a competition about the best roast beef, then they could pretty well keep the big trophy back at the shop on permanent display. When I visited FSAE Detroit in 2006, I was gobsmacked at how many plates of roast beef were being served up.

Cornell’s competitive advantage was that they had perfected their signature dish. As long as the opposition’s strategy was to “copy the winners”, then at best they could match Cornell but it would be damn hard to overtake them.

This competition became interesting when a critical mass of teams started looking into the competition itself and realizing it was not about the best roast beef, it was about who was the best chef.

So Cornell continued with their roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, red wine gravy and roasted vegetables. They continued doing a damn good job.
Wollongong did a similar roast beef, and did a damn good job of that too.
Monash did roast too, but it had wings. Let’s call it roast turkey http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif
UWA went rather gourmet, aiming for the top end of town. So lets call their dish seared scallops & vegetable fettuccine with saffron beurre blanc (thanks Mr Google).
We looked at our resources, and our history of failed main courses, and realizing we are just simple folk we decided “stuff it, let’s make a chocolate cake”. We served it with fresh berries, home made ice- cream and raspberry coulis.

Believe me, when we showed up with our first cake, there were any number of “experts” who, smugly or out of a deep feeling of concern for us, felt obliged to tell us that our cake looked nothing like roast beef. Wow, really???

Anyway, now to start beating this analogy to death….

I’ll start with a couple of sayings I’ve heard that I’ll throw in for good measure:
A master chef is one who can serve up a 5-star meal from the cheapest of ingredients.
An engineer can do for $10 what any idiot can do for $100.
Take those and run with them if you wish.

It is not just about the ingredients
I’ve had common old lamb shanks that were brilliant, and top line eye fillets that were appalling. The former indicates culinary expertise, the latter a misguided waste of good resources.
Don’t think you’ll impress anyone just because you’ve got an eye fillet. It is what you do with it that counts

Don’t worry about your neighbour’s pantry
Linked to the above, don’t sweat it if your neighbour has access to eye fillets. So what? You can be a great chef without them. Play your own game

It ain’t Christmas dinner if you serve it in February.
A Christmas dinner is served on December 25th, maybe 6pm. Everyone knows that. When the guests sit down at the table, they are expecting to see food, and you had better serve it to them. A hungry customer ain’t going to be impressed by an empty plate and a story about how good the meal might be if he came back next month.
Put something on the plate. It might not be what you initially wanted, but any meal is better than none. 70% of FSAE chefs each year fail to present a complete plate.

Don’t cherry-pick others’ designs
Cornell might be complimented on their red wine gravy
UWA might be complimented on their seared scallops
RMIT might be complimented on their home made ice- cream
It doesn’t mean that the best meal of all would be seared scallops with home made ice- cream and red wine gravy
I’ve seen some awful Frankenstein’s monsters of cars, (I’m thinking of one I saw that had our engine, Cornell’s turbo, RIT’s rolling chassis and geometry. Overweight, underpowered, underbraked, unreliable and drank copious amounts of fuel). Think of how the ingredients work with each other.

Your design is never going to be all things to all people
Some people like big hearty meals. Some like light meals. Some like savoury food, some like desserts. Some people just want to get drunk. Design something that fits all the above and you have lost the plot. No-one wants a roast beef with seared scallop chocolate cake and beer smoothie.
The judges will look at your design on its own merits. They know you cannot build a car that will win acceleration, and fuel economy, and endurance, and cost event, and skid pad…
Explain which are your priorities, and how your design integrates with these priorities.

Be flexible
Sometimes food goes out of season, suppliers can’t supply, etc. Don’t stubbornly stick to your path if it you are not possibly going to deliver. Accept it, deal with it, change plans, move on.

Design Event / Design Review
Yes, Pat Clarke can see you have made roast beef. Yes, he is happy you know how long you cooked it for (and would be happier if you knew that a roast should be cooked until it is 65-70 degrees in the middle – that shows a greater understanding). Yes he can see you have served it with gravy, potatoes and peas. But he also wants to know WHY DID YOU SERVE ROAST BEEF? Why not a cake? Why not seafood? Why not an apple?

We made some good chocolate cakes in our time. We answered the “what” and the “how” reasonably well, but we rarely did a good job of explaining “why”.

The answer is in the rules, and in your resources…


The limitations of science
The scientific method of developing a product is as follows:
? Take existing product
? Make one change, test modified product
? If modified product is better, adopt change. If worse, reject change.
? Repeat process

Science is great for refining your gravy recipe or your cooking times. It is lousy for high level, big picture concept change.

Try scientifically “optimizing” your way from:
Roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, red wine gravy and roasted vegetables
To:
Chocolate mud cake served with fresh berries, home made ice- cream and raspberry coulis

All the intermediate steps are awful.
Roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, home made ice- cream and roasted vegetables
Roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, red wine gravy and raspberry coulis
Roast beef with fresh berries, red wine gravy and roasted vegetables
Chocolate mud cake with Yorkshire pudding, red wine gravy and roasted vegetables
Etc etc.

If you only had scientific enquiry as your development tool, you would never get from roast to cake or vice versa. Scientific process is a useful tool, but you have got to know its limitations too…

And that is the fun of engineering. It is a little bit science, but it is also art and imagination and creativity too.


That is all for now, I'm going for a walk. I'll return to this later.

Cheers!

Geoff

[Mbirt]

Originally posted by Big Bird:
Some people just want to get drunk.
"This year, we had all members of our team read Geoff Pearson's highly-lauded 'Reasoning your way through the FSAE design process' write-up. We decided that our top-level design philosophy was to build a car that would consume obscene amounts of E85, demonstrate increasingly lethargic transient response, not start before 1pm, and gain weight in its midsection over time."

[Will M]

Geoff,

The first part of your write up was excellent, this metaphor section is genius.

"[The] cake looked nothing like roast beef"

Will

[StevenWebb]

has anyone ever had albatross flavoured icecream?

[PatClarke]

Geoff!!!!

A fantastic analogy! I love it!

Congratulations

Pat

[carbon_black]

Geoff, a great analogy but I'm left with the mental image of George and Gary shouting out during the design event: '10 minutes left - design like you've never designed before!'.

[Big Bird]

Maybe Ron Tauranac and Pat Clarke could design a car, we drive it and have to name the ingredients.
"It is definitely a 600/4, sounds a bit raspy - is it a Kawasaki?"
"When you brake into a corner it seems to want to turn out - that would be a diff mounted rear brake".
"I jumped on the brakes and the whole front corner sheared off and steered me into a tree. I'm now on life support. That's rod ends in bending, isn't it Pat?"

[Big Bird]

This might seem a gratuitous "bump", but I've been thinking of ways to make the below less verbose:

Level 4 - PROJECT-LEVEL MANAGEMENT
Level 3 - COMPETITION LEVEL INTEGRATION
Level 2 - VEHICLE LEVEL INTEGRATION
Level 1 - DETAIL AND COMPONENT DESIGN

Try this:

Level 4 - PROJECT
Level 3 - PROBLEM
Level 2 - PRODUCT
Level 1 - PARTS

It might make it easier to explain to newbies and the like.

Cheers,

Geoff

[bob.paasch]

Originally posted by Big Bird:
This might seem a gratuitous "bump", but I've been thinking of ways to make the below less verbose:

Level 4 - PROJECT-LEVEL MANAGEMENT
Level 3 - COMPETITION LEVEL INTEGRATION
Level 2 - VEHICLE LEVEL INTEGRATION
Level 1 - DETAIL AND COMPONENT DESIGN

Try this:

Level 4 - PROJECT
Level 3 - PROBLEM
Level 2 - PRODUCT
Level 1 - PARTS

It might make it easier to explain to newbies and the like.

Cheers,

Geoff

To me, level 4 is about organizational design. How about:

Level 4 - PROCESS
Level 3 - PROJECT
Level 2 - PRODUCT
Level 1 - PARTS

[Big Bird]

Yeah, I'm comfortable with that.

My obsession with the "problem" phase though is that many seem to assume they know what the "problem" is, and jump straight from project (we're gunna do FSAE...) into product and part design. And a solid analysis of FSAE rules and pointscoring can reveal some surprising results, (and some surprisingly achievable competitive solutions).

I assume Bob that you include detailed problem analysis as part of Process?

Monash seem to be the only team here in Oz (that I know of anyway) that are following a truly points-driven design process. Check results in Oz over recent years...

Thanks Bob, and sorry to hear about Endurance in Cali.

[bob.paasch]

Originally posted by Big Bird:
Yeah, I'm comfortable with that.

My obsession with the "problem" phase though is that many seem to assume they know what the "problem" is, and jump straight from project (we're gunna do FSAE...) into product and part design. And a solid analysis of FSAE rules and pointscoring can reveal some surprising results, (and some surprisingly achievable competitive solutions).

I assume Bob that you include detailed problem analysis as part of Process?


When I wrote the above, I was thinking that my "Project" above includes your Problem, ranging from "we're gonna do FSAE" on the low end to "we're gonna score more points at comp than anyone else" on the high end. Mostly just a semantic difference from what you had, but by calling level 4 "Process" I wanted to emphasis the point that the top level is more than just design project management.

But as I've had time to think about this since posting, I realize that point driven problem analysis comes in at every level of our design process. I can't separate out a Problem level. As part of our senior capstone writing requirements, our part designers construct houses of quality relating their subsystem attributes to overall vehicle performance to competition points. Technical leads are doing the same at the product level for the overall vehicle (invest additional design time in aero or engine or...).

At this point, the difference between Project and Process is unclear to me. Both describe the design of an organization capable of designing, manufacturing and testing a vehicle, and the design of a separate organization (using mostly the same people) that, several thousand kilometers from home, can execute in the static and dynamic events at competition.

So to answer your question, we are doing detailed problem analysis as part of Process, but also as part of Product and Part. With the rules and points breakdown, it's an absolutely wonderful thing FSAE has given us: a completely unambiguous way to measure product design, process design and organizational design success. Competition points.

I believe GFR's success these last two years has come in spite of rather than because of the collaboration between DHBW-R and OSU. To explain, although the advantages of combining the intelectual, physical, financial and human resources of the two universities are numerous, the additional overhead of managing and operating the combined team, in my opinion, outweighs the advantages. I believe our management is an order of magnitude more complex than that of any other team, and for that reason I don't foresee many other teams following in our footsteps. What the collaboration has done is force us to continuously evaluate and improve our organization and management processes. Plus we make design decisions based on points. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

At both Michigan and California this year I spent a lot of time talking to other teams about organization and management processes. I tell struggling teams to build the simplest vehicle they possibly can, and focus on building good management processes, good project data archival systems, and an organization that promotes leadership training and technical continuity. And make design decisions based on points. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif


Monash seem to be the only team here in Oz (that I know of anyway) that are following a truly points-driven design process. Check results in Oz over recent years...

Thanks Bob, and sorry to hear about Endurance in Cali.

Disappointing for GFR, but nice to see ETS finally win one after getting close many times. Plus, there are more competitions yet to come...

[BrendonD]

Originally posted by bob.paasch:
At both Michigan and California this year I spent a lot of time talking to other teams about organization and management processes. I tell struggling teams to build the simplest vehicle they possibly can, and focus on building good management processes, good project data archival systems, and an organization that promotes leadership training and technical continuity. And make design decisions based on points. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif


In 2010 MIS I was on the receiving end of this exact advice from a different Bob(Woods). I had inherited what was then a struggling team that hadn't been to competition in 2 years and was losing members and momentum fast. We did most of these things (the point sims are being developed this year). End result: we grew the team 300%, made it to competition with a working car, left with a mostly working car (fuel starve, d'oh...) and scored middle of the pack. I graduated, and the 2012 car is full steam ahead under the direction of the new guys who learned a lot this year. There's a lot of things I would have done differently if I could have done it again, but I can't, so I'll just store the lessons learned for my time as an alumni advisor.

[Big Bird]

What's your problem?

Greetings all,

I haven't posted on here for some time (mainly due to work commitments), but unfortunately for you good people it doesn't mean I've run out of things to say. Recent conversations, along with some posts I've read here, have got me thinking about how teams view the FSAE design problem, and how the team philosophy can make or break their FSAE project.

We often think of engineering practice as being applied problem solving, but in engineering design we are also actually choosing the problems we are going to solve. (And therefore when reviewing designs we should not only review what worked and what didn't, but we should also be taking responsibity for why we chose to focus on that design problem in the first place).

So my question:

What is your FSAE design problem?

What is your team's overarching design philosophy? What is the team's motivation? What are you trying to achieve this year? What do you think you need to do to be competitive? I'm going to work through a few of what I think are common misconceptions, but firstly I would propose the FSAE design problem can be summarized as follows:

"We need to score the greatest number of points we can with the resources we have available to us"

There are two key points here:

We need to remember that this is about pointscoring, and all our design decisions should be founded on what delivers the greatest points return. This may not necessarily match our ideas of the perfect racecar. Be comfortable with this.

We need to fully understand that a key factor in understanding the FSAE problem is knowing what we are bringing to the project, in terms of our skills, budget, facilities & support, available manhours etc. This isn't fantasy land, this is a real world problem which needs to be solved in real time. And we need to recognize that a design solution that is deliverable by another team may not be the right one for us.

I think it is important for the team to have an over-arching problem statement, for some guidance when you are faced with the inevitable detail problems and conflicts we all have to deal with. So with the above in mind I'll look at some common examples of FSAE "problem statements", and identify a few shortcomings.

"We want the fastest car" / "We need to build the fastest car".

Admirable as a partial goal, but a little flawed. Firstly, why do we assume that the fastest car will score the most points? How does speed relate to cost, economy, design understanding etc? For example, we might argue that a more powerful car might get us a quicker laptime. But if the laptime gain is 10 points , and in the process we lose 20 points in fuel economy and cost, was the design direction the right one? There is some perception that points scored for outright vehicle speed are more meritable or "cool" than points scored in for example the static events. But in reality points are points, and it doesn't matter where you get them.

And where in this statement are we considering our own capabilities to deliver? That is as much a part of planning a successful project as any ideas about vehicle speed. It is very easy to dream up a world-beating design if you don't worry yourself with how you'll build it. There is at least some implied reference to being able to build the car in the latter statement.

" We need to build the lightest car" / "We need to build the most powerful car" / "We need to build the stiffest car".

These goals are even more fraught than the previous - very narrow focus, and aiming for an end goal that has at best only an implied link to the FSAE rules. The argument is along the lines of "lightest car => fastest car => most points", and both of these assumed relationships can be argued to the contrary. The latter is covered above, and the "lightest car => fastest car" argument doesn't address stiffness, reliability, drivability, driver skill, etc etc etc.

There is no prize for lightest car. Bragging rights maybe? Should anyone care?

Once again, in the above statement no consideration is mentioned about the team's ability to deliver such a car. And in fact, having the most or the least of anything usually pushes resources to and beyond their limits - how many times has the lightest car at the comp not finished (or sometimes not even started) the competition weekend.

"We must build a lighter / more powerful / stiffer car than we did last year"

The constant improvement model, with the implication that for a project to improve on the previous year's effort the car must rate better on most or all of the key design measurables - weight, power, stiffness, etc. There is some paranoia that a car that is heavier, or less stiff, is absolutely inferior and must be avoided at all costs. I've seen this philosophy work, but I've also seen it drive successful teams over the edge. Be very wary.

For some years, our team had success with such a model. Each year from 2002-2006 we built a lighter car, and we had a number of wins and podiums in this time. The progression was roughly 250kg > 200kg > 180kg > 160kg > 150kg, and each year the team was motivated by the desire to outdo the previous team. Warning bells began ringing in 2006 when we started breaking silly things like steering wheel mount bosses, etc. In 2007, the incoming team gave themselves the daunting (impossible?) task of building a lighter, stiffer car whilst trying to solve the serious ergonomic issues of the previous cars, which were hopelessly cramped for the drivers. But the team refused to spend a couple of kgs buying some much needed driver space.

Then in 2008 the new cockpit template rules sent the team into a tailspin. The extra driver space was going to cost 1-2 kgs in chassis weight. This was just unfathomable, and much sweating and handwringing went into efforts to compensate for this extra mass - even though the 1-2 kgs might be worth 2-3 points at most. Design time blew out, more high-end materials and techniques meant greater pressure on human resources and facilities, stress levels increased, tensions between team members escalated, etc etc. The result - a half completed car, and event results started heading southwards. This trend of needing to "out-spec" the preceding teams continued, and the results have continued to suffer.

Sometimes your design problem requires backing away from "lighter / stiffer / more powerful". If you are finishing hundreds of points behind the winners, your major design problem / priority might very well be to build the car sooner, or stronger, or more cheaply, or with less resources. Often this will require some trade-off in mass, power etc to buy the required time, or to align with the team's skills and resources for this year's project. The designer's art is in knowing how far "backwards" you can safely go.

"We need to beat Stuttgart / UWA / Cornell /(insert-current-"IT"-team-here)..."

Personally, I hate using such philosophies as the core team driving force. It draws the team into comparing themselves to the target team, often leading to perceived resource shortcomings, and railroading the team's mindset towards specific design solutions, (i.e."Team X has spark-eroded unobtainium uprights, therefore we need them too if we are going to be competitive"). It is difficult to develop your own unique and holistic viewpoint on FSAE when you are obsessing over someone elses project. And anyway, what part of "we need to score the greatest number of points we can with the resources we have available to us" doesn't encompass the above? To beat them, you need to "score the greatest number of points you can...". And if your best isn't good enough, you are still better of scoring "the greatest number of points you can..." than otherwise.

That is enough for one night - I'll continue soon

[PatClarke]

Thanks Geoff http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

Pat

[Bemo]

Once more thank you Geoff for your thoughts. I couldn't agree more.

[shark.ashwa]

The most enlightening and holistic approach for an FSAE car design process. A big thank you to Geoff http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif
Hope all current members of my team have gone through it. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif
@Bemo. How's your 2012 car coming along? http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif

Regards,
Sharath

[Bemo]

Well to answer your question Sharath: I'm not an active team member anymore, but the the team already gave two concept presentations to us alumni. Something very useful.
Major concepts are chosen and the guys are designing the 2012 car at the moment. Manufacturing usually starts immidiately at the beginning of the new year.

[Scott Wordley]

Great post Geoff.

I think a lot of teams find it tough to set goals which are clearly below the individual key performance indicators achieved by previous cars, in the interests of building the car sooner/stiffer/cheaper.

Part of the problem may be the Design Event. I get the impressions that teams think they need "Bling" and impressive numbers (10% more than last year... every year!), and that this perception might encourage people to over extend their limited resources.

It would be nice to be able discuss the resource side of the project with design judges a bit more, but from my experiences they don't seem very interested in this stuff and would rather focus on the detail of the car in front of them. A reliable and well tested and developed car often appears a bit rough next to one finished the day before and never been driven, and design judges are only human. Stating that you designed the car to be built quickly, cheaply and strong doesn't generally go down so well either, and again maybe this is exacerbating the problem.

Also as you point out, correctly gauging your resources each year and working within them is half of the problem. Obviously the level of resources available to each team is vastly different. I like to think of these resources (cash, facilities, team members, sponsors etc) as the denominator (unquantifiable though it may be), and your point score in comp as the numerator. You want to be happy with what you were able to do with what you had at your disposal that year. Each year you work to increase your resources and improve your efficiency in converting those resources into points.

I always have a huge amount of respect for small teams with very limited resources who are able to punch well above their weight. That is the sign of really good engineering and project management, for a small investment they have managed to return a huge amount of value (points).

The opposite goes for teams who clearly have a lot of funding and resources at their disposal, but consistently fail to deliver a return on that investment in terms of points scored. Its disappointing, perhaps more so considering the obviously high level of engineering talent that such teams have at their disposal.

In the case of these teams, you really have to wonder if they are in fact "trying to score as many points as possible with the resources they have available". I think in some cases they actually have very different aims and expectations of what constitutes success, or what they want to get out of Formula SAE.

[Big Bird]

Thanks Scott. We've had this conversation many times ourselves, (last Monday most recently!), but it is good to put it out there for all to see.

You've pre-empted my next "thesis chapter" in a way - it is being written about points per resource factor (dollar, man hour etc.). I'll still go ahead with it, but apologies if it paraphrases you a bit. Many of my written thoughts are a mash of ideas from yourself, myself, Pat and Kev Haywood, from our many meandering hours spent kicking tyres around workshops and solving the world's problems. Cheers for the inspiration.

I agree with your comments about Design, I think it is misunderstood by the vast majority. It seems that many teams are desperately trying to "out-bling" the leaders in order to prove themselves, and in doing so are working well beyond their skills and resources (as you have correctly pointed out). Whilst some will say failure is a great way to learn, I'm seeing many cases of failure harming the reputation of this competition as a whole. Not many unis are willing to wear repeated failures (in event failures, OH&S failures, student conflicts, etc) when they are broadcast wide and large as FSAE does.

I hope to address this (to some extent) through my assistance in organizing this year's event. We'll see how it all goes...

Oh, and that is a nice point about the raggedness of a well-tested car. Thanks for that.

Cheers,

Geoff

[ben]

Originally posted by Big Bird:
Thanks Scott. We've had this conversation many times ourselves, (last Monday most recently!), but it is good to put it out there for all to see.

You've pre-empted my next "thesis chapter" in a way - it is being written about points per resource factor (dollar, man hour etc.). I'll still go ahead with it, but apologies if it paraphrases you a bit. Many of my written thoughts are a mash of ideas from yourself, myself, Pat and Kev Haywood, from our many meandering hours spent kicking tyres around workshops and solving the world's problems. Cheers for the inspiration.

I agree with your comments about Design, I think it is misunderstood by the vast majority. It seems that many teams are desperately trying to "out-bling" the leaders in order to prove themselves, and in doing so are working well beyond their skills and resources (as you have correctly pointed out). Whilst some will say failure is a great way to learn, I'm seeing many cases of failure harming the reputation of this competition as a whole. Not many unis are willing to wear repeated failures (in event failures, OH&S failures, student conflicts, etc) when they are broadcast wide and large as FSAE does.

I hope to address this (to some extent) through my assistance in organizing this year's event. We'll see how it all goes...

Oh, and that is a nice point about the raggedness of a well-tested car. Thanks for that.

Cheers,

Geoff

Great posts as always Geoff.

On the subject of bling in the design event - I'm almost more concerned that certain judges (I genuinely don't have any specific names in mind so don't try and guess) want to see "innovation" and fancy materials, technologies, etc. I judged at FS this year for the first time in a while (didn't have a race that weekend for a change) and felt that there's a big variation amongst the judges as to what they feel the design goals are or should be.

The biggest problem here is that everyone from design judges to teams basically doesn't care about the hypothetical weekend autocrosser. It's a parochial requirement for Formula SAE, but I don't think it works for the UK, Germany, etc where there's no Solo II culture. I think we maybe need to look at redefining the problem as it's worded in the regs. I don't mean changing the tech regs just setting the scene slightly differently to steer the teams where we think they should go.

Ben

[Big Bird]

Thanks Ben,

I sometimes think that the phrase about "weekend autocross racer" should be dropped completely. It is an intangible that helps little and leads to lots of hand-wavy arguments about what an autocross car should be. With due respect, if this comp was about autocross vehicle design it would have never taken off anywhere outside the US.

This is an engineering competition, and we should simply be prescribing engineering criteria. We already do this - style and dimensions of tracks, engine capacity and restriction, vehicle minimum or maximum dimensions, cost limits, economy criteria, etc. It should then be up to the team to specify their design strategy, and be judged according to consistency with that strategy and quality of work.

So if Team A is out to build the lightest-stiffest-fastest car with cost no concern, then they say so and are judged with that as the main priority. If the team sets a cost per point target, then they are judged by that criteria. If a team sets out a rational argument that in their case a carbureted car was going to score them more points than an EFI car given their resources and priorities, then they should be judged on the quality of the argument and consistency of implementation, rather than whether the judge likes carbs or not.

Finding judges who are happy to judge this way might be a problem. I think FSAE alumni might be a better starting point than rusted-on industry types.

There are a number of unis voicing their concerns about cost of participation in FSAE, and questioning their ongoing involvement. Such unis are usually pointing towards the carbon wondercars etc. and crying "we can't compete". Certainly my goal when competing was to show that, in fact, you could compete with a cheap and simple car if built well enough. I am proud that we competed as well as we did, although the lesson seems to have been lost.

So my two key points:
* We need judges who can judge flexibly in accordance with the team's stated objectives - which means education of judges.
* We need to educate the teams that it is OK to formulate their own strategy and it doesn't have to be "lightest fastest blingest"

We'll see how we go and how we might achieve this...

[PatClarke]

We need judges who can judge flexibly in accordance with the team's stated objectives - which means education of judges.

Geoff,

Each year in Germany we run a Design Judges training seminar. I believe this leads to a better understanding of what the competition is all about and judges who are less blinded by the bling!

In 2009, Steve Fox and I thought the judging was probably mature enough to not need the seminar, but we were wrong! That was the messiest year of judging at FSG and so in 2010 and 2011 we reintroduced the training seminar with positive results.

Steve has tried to implement the same type of briefing in Michigan, but that competition has its own conventions ;-)

What we have to keep reinforcing to the judges is to ask 'WHY'? We can all see what has been done, but the task for the team is to defend their design decisions. There are 1000 valid ways to do that and 10,000 ways to stuff it up!

Having said that, the teams 'stated objectives' should not be the sole judging criteria. We must remember what task has been set for the team, to build a prototype for production! So a huge judging criterium must be 'Fitness for purpose'! Remember.., well at least in my case.., we are trying to provide a bloody good finishing school for young engineers. That is a broad task and one easy to lose sight of!

Keep up the good work mate http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

Pat

[Big Bird]

We need judges who can judge flexibly in accordance with the team's stated objectives - which means education of judges.

Yeah, I got a bit lost in my own argument there Pat. I wouldn't propose that teams just dream up any old objectives and the judges have to accept them. Rather, given my whole hobby-horse at the moment is points per resource, I think it would be good if the students might have some flexibility in in nominating how they are approaching that aim. Fitness for purpose is a necessary part of that decision.

For example, if a team decided through an appropriate analysis that a carbureted spaceframe car with a spool would give them maximum points return for their resources, then their design score be based on the quality of that decision, and how well their car was integrated and presented as carbureted spaceframe car with a spool.

Pat, I know you already do this so it is probably an unnecessary point to make. But maybe our stating of it might help the teams understand the point.

Cheers,

[Big Bird]

Hey thanks for the sticky, ladies/gents. It's an honour.

Cheers,

Geoff

[Kirk Feldkamp]

Now can we get the rest of your threads made sticky too? I particularly like the "Engines and Other Semi-Necessary Lumps of Junk" thread. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

[Z]

Geoff,

Excellent job that you are doing here! And it is really good to see so much positive support.

As you know, my usual policy is that if I have nothing critical to say, then I say nothing at all http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif . However, this subject is too important to ignore. So, hoping I don't ruin all your good work...

The difficult part of this subject is "How to get the message INTO their heads?". During my brief career coaching junior footy (Rugby League) I decided that the best way is via a short list of easy to remember sayings or "Rules". These are relentlessly drummed into the kids' heads during training, along with the million little details of how to execute them. Then on game day it is just a matter of shouting "RULE N ...!" from the sideline, at the right time.

So, without further ado, Supervisors and Team Leaders are invited to select a short list from the following, or add their own.

~~~~~o0o~~~~~


Adages, Aphorisms, Maxims, Mottos, Principles, Proverbs, or just Good Old Sayings...
================================================== ==================================


From Z's "Seven Rules for winning Footy Games".
-----------------------------------------------

Rule 1. Football is a simple game, keep it simple!
The most shouted rule! Even when playing games, kids want to complicate things!!!

Rule 2. Good teams beat great individuals. Support, Support, support!
Everyone pull in the same direction.

(Rules 3, 4 & 5 are footy related.)

Rule 6. Never, ever, ever, let the opposition pull your pants down.
Stay awake. Corollary: If the opposition are asleep (and in FSAE, most are http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_wink.gif ), then pants them!

Rule 7. Winning begins on Monday. Practise, practise, practise!
Applies all year, but don't turn up raceday with a never driven car.



Geoff's Level 4 Stuff.
----------------------

* War ... is the ground of death and life ... so it is imperative to examine it carefully.
Sun Tzu, "The Art of War". Fortunately FSAE is a game. If it was war the cars would be much faster.

* To make a small fortune in FSAE, start with a large one.
Be nice to your sponsors.

* If you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting what you've always got.
Don't polish a turd.

* You can't cross a chasm by taking small steps.
Yep, sometimes you have to take that big leap.

* To make an omelette, you have to break eggs.
Someone is going to be unhappy.

* Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
You took the big leap last year but it didn't work. Don't go back to polishing turds...

On the other hand...

* If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

But don't forget,

* Tempus fugit.
"Time flies". And the closer to comp, the faster it flies!

And above all,

* KNOW THYSELF.
This chiselled into the wall of the Temple at Delphi. Also from Benjamin Franklin "There are three things extremely hard - steel, diamond, and to know one's self". Or Clint Eastwood, "Magnum Force" - "A man's got to know his limitations". Or Anon "Don't bite off more than you can chew". So don't start what you can't finish.



Level 3.
--------

* Things are numbers.
Pythagoras. FSAE cars are just a list of numbers. Choose wisely.

* Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.
Above the entrance to Plato's Academy.

* There is no royal road to geometry.
Euclid to the Pharaoh Ptolemy. So practise, practise, practise!

* More is in vain when less will serve.
Isaac Newton, "Principia". Followed by "For Nature is pleased with simplicity, and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes."

* There are lies, damn lies, and STATISTICS!
Just kidding Kev http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif (err..., not).

* Don't argue with a fool. First they drag you down to their level, then they beat you with experience.
Ah, those first "concept" meetings...



Level 2.
--------

* To finish first, first you must finish.
That means NOTHING can break in Endurance!!!

To build a fast car, through the ages;

* 1900 - Put a big engine in a small chassis.

* 1950 - Simplificate, and add more lightness.

* 2000 - Aero above all!
Hmmm, engine size restricted, so think about the other two...

* A wheel at each corner.
Maximum yaw control, minimum yaw resistance.



Level 1.
--------

* Measure twice, cut once.
Huh??? ... Oh!!!

* Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.
Murphy!!!

* The devil is in the details.
And he's a cruel, sadistic bastard, who'll rip your hearts out one lap from the end of Endurance!

~~~~~o0o~~~~~


And then, when it's all over, ... maybe???

* Vini, vidi, vici!
Julius Caesar - British tour (FSUK yr?), "I came, I saw, I conquered!"

And finally (for now...)

* My words are very easy to understand ... yet no one understands them.
Lao Tzu, "Tao Te Ching". Well, hopefully some do...

Z

[DougMilliken]

* A wheel at each corner.
Maximum yaw control, minimum yaw resistance.

What is your definition of yaw resistance? In our terminology, a wheel at each corner (ie, longer wheelbase) increases yaw damping, relative to the same car with shorter wheelbase. Simple case discussed in RCVD p202-4.

[Z]

Doug,

I was referring to "yaw inertia". That is, the car's mass distribution that resists yaw acceleration. So minimum "Iz" in Tz = d(Iz.Wz)/dt.

"Maximum yaw control" is a case of maximising yaw couple "Tz". This is done by maximising "R" in Tz=Sum(FhxR), where the Fh's are the horizontal ground-to-wheelprint forces, and the R's are the distances from CG to wheelprints. Note that the Fh's can be lateral (eg. from the steering wheel), or longitudinal (eg. from "fiddle brakes").

"Yaw damping", IMO, is a form of yaw control, since it resists yaw motion. The usual arrangement is to use the steering (hand) wheel and the front wheels to destabilise the car in order to change its yaw motion (turn in to a corner). The rear wheels are kept in the straight-ahead position to maintain some stability, via a "yaw damping" type mechanism. If we want lightning quick turn in, then we slightly steer the rear wheels out of the turn. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_eek.gif

So in simple terms: Wheelprints as far from the CG as possible. All major masses as near to the CG as possible (but the wheels have mass, so make them small). Apply destabilising control to the front wheels (lat. and long.), and use the rear wheels as a stabilising rudder.

Z

[Buckingham]

Wheelprints as far from the CG as possible

Doesn't that put the wheels closer to the bright orange cones? http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

[Z]

Buckingham, how about "Wheelprints as far from the CG as is practical."

(Putting mental images into words is hard... http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_frown.gif )

This issue more fully covered under "Objectively Choosing an Engine".

Z

[Kevin Hayward]

Been wanting to post a reply to one of Geoff's much earlier posts for quite a while now. It is really regarding designing for the long run, and it will basically tell the story of the first 4 cars of UWA.

Geoff had made the claim that you couldn't optimise from Roast Beef to something completely different, the intermediate steps would taste horrible. I disagree. The first 4 cars for UWA went the following direction (I will try to keep to the Masterchef analogy which I loved):

2001: Roast Beef. We realised our biggest problem was not whether Scallops or Chocolate cake would have been better. Rather the problem was we didn't even know how to use an oven. We spent the year trying to figure out all of the complicated steps and instruments required to cook, as well as figuring out who was going to pay for the ingredients. When it came time to make a meal we figured that it was unlikely that anyone would eat at our restaurant so we just practiced by following the recipe for roast beef.

2002: Surf and Turf. This is where Geoff's post assumed all intermediate steps would be horrible, he had forgotten the Australian pub meal of Surf and Turf (Steak and Prawns). We were much more confident cooking now and still liked the flavour of beef. However we were becoming fairly sure that we preferred seafood, we were convinced that after years of eating roast beef the customers would too. Not having tried making it before we decided to just try to cook a few prawns, if they didn't work out we still had the steak.

2003: Prawn Linguini. Short story really. We found out that it was easier for us to make the prawns than the steak. They cooked faster and we had better access to the stovetop. Dish looked great, prawns were a little stringy.

2004: Scallops. After 4 years of being a trainee chef we decided to serve up some scallops. We now had plenty of cooking experience all headed towards this end goal. They tasted fantastic.

It was a great four years of cooking with a few familiar faces, got to learn a lot in the process. I heard sometime after I left that they hired a french chef. Went on to win a few cooking awards with his updated scallops recipes. Some critics have complained that the dish sometimes has too many complex flavours, others are worried that the customers are almost as sick of scallops as they were of roast beef.


For the FSAE version:

2001: Attempt at a Cornell spaceframe clone
2002: Updated spaceframe with all the design tidier and a few structural composite parts
2003: First composite car, much more rear weight bias, shorter car. Started serious damper testing
2004: First Kinetics car.


The plan was to win the US comp within 4 years (we ended up coming second). We were sure that we had to do something different. This was the time when no one could build a better 'standard' car than Cornell. We spent a long time developing manufacturing and design techniques and operated under the banner of reliability first, lightweight second. We also spent a lot of time getting and maintaining sponsors.

I think that for any sustained success in this competition teams need to develop a long view of the competition, and begin developing the skills in house. Successful cars magically seem to appear at the end of long development plans, rather than from isolated flashes of brilliance.

Kev

[Big Bird]

Kev - bloody brilliant. I stand fully corrected. Or at least I will stand corrected, at the moment I'm still doubled over laughing.

How could I forget Surf and Turf? Shame on me, I feel as though I should hand in my Aus citizenship.

Ok Kev, now for your next big challenge. Lets see ECU optimize their way from Surf and Turf to chocolate cake http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_wink.gif

Cheers!

[Kevin Hayward]

Geoff,

I love the cooking analogy. Cooking is very much like engineering, there is a lot of science to it, but it takes wisdom to mix the right ingredients in the right way.

Recently my wife and I were treated (no way we could afford it ourselves) to a french degustation menu by the best french chef in Perth. It was 8 courses with 6 accompanied glasses of wine. The analogy to the year by year nature of the team was striking. Each course was different but borrowed ingredients from the previous course. The set wine menu also complemented the meal like a team complements its car and vice versa. And just like FSAE we were left feeling full and not ready to see another meal for a while.

I feel that it is important to carry as much over from one car to the next that does not detract from your developing concept. This may be a case of carrying over well developed processes rather than actual parts. Also just like a restaurant the worst thing you can do is serve an inedible meal. The consequences of one year in which you fail to run can be felt for quite a while afterwards.

ECU at the moment is more of a prawn linguine than a surf and turf. So to go from prawn linguine to chocolate cake:

Prawn Linguine: Car as is, Honda CBR Composite chassis

Prawn Souffle: Keep all the parts similar and do an engine swap to a simple reliable single cylinder car. Spend the year adjusting to the new drivetrain. The honda would still be a last minute backup.

Chocolate Souffle: Keep the same processes, but now all parts on the car are designed to account for the lower loads associated with the lighter car.

Chocolate cake: Simplify systems drastically. This may be heading down the road of Z's brown go kart.


At each step you can have a well tested and developed car that is not a rapid departure from the last, but end up with something very different. I would expect that 2-3 years would be the time allocated to move from what ECU has to the successful RMIT model from the past. I am aware that some may see that sort of timescale as conservative.

The way I see the planning process is that you are always heading in a direction of change, sometimes planned, sometimes not. I prefer to go there at a pace that allows you to fully develop and test the ideas. I have seen far too many teams with really very good ideas fall over due to poor implementation. Looking at the points differences between the top teams comps they are too large to be attributed to the differences in concepts.

Kev

[Big Bird]

I'm hesitant to respond too quickly as it brings my name back to the thread header and it looks like nothing is happening here. Kev, if you are still online maybe you could just throw down one word as a response to this and restore your name to the top.

All I want to say is that even though a 2-3 year development plan might sound conservative to some, given the high failure rates even a conservative first car can score well - outright podium even. As long as the car is reliable, it is a contender. Getting into the top 10% is just so damn easy - if you let yourself believe it.

[PatClarke]

Bump

[Max Trenkle]

I just finished reading this entire thread. I started two days ago. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

I just made it through my first year of college, and first year of FSAE. This is what we accomplished at Tennessee Tech this year:
<UL TYPE=SQUARE> Completed Suspension design based on tire data we got from another school.
<LI> Sorta kinda finished the chassis design.
<LI> Figured out how to make a dry sump oil system for our Yamaha R6 motors.
<LI> Got 100 emails of interested students. I was the only one retained.
<LI> I reorganized the shop and cleaned everything meticulously to give us the best workspace possible because we were working in a disaster zone.
<LI> We acquired Optimum K, Solidworks, and a shop specific computer to use them.
[/list]

Now, I believe we have everything we need to move forward. We have three old cars to play with and take parts from, and the tools we need to design and build a car. The only trouble is, the team has no Level 4 focus, if I may say pull from Geoff's wording. Now, I didn't call it anything special, but all year I tried to talk to my teammates about the "big picture". Yet still, we focused on composite design, suspension rocker design, NADA airfoils, this, that, and the other thing. So here I am scouring the internet looking for ways to turn our capable 4 man team into an engineering tour de force, and I have stumbled on this golden thread by the articulate Geoff.

My question to you all is, if we have the capability, how do I get my team to focus on Level 4, when only the "newbie" is pushing these objectives?

It's worth mentioning that 2 of them are 30+ year old airforce vets who are incredibly well versed in teamwork, communication,and technical know-how, and the other guy is a 4th year Junior M.E. student with terrible grades and a huge ego, but dripping with talent. Meanwhile, I'm just really good at math and origami (I've actually been practicing origami for 10 years now!).

Thanks everyone for spending such a tremendous amount of time on this thread and putting all of your knowledge out there for younglings like me who didn't know what a Heimz joint was just a year ago. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

Max Trenkle

[Mbirt]

Thanks for bumping this, Max. I'm printing copies of Geoff's Gospel to distribute to my team tonight. We need to regroup from a rough showing at competition and start paying attention to levels 2-4, in the 4-1 top-down order.

[Big Bird]

"I just finished reading this entire thread. I started two days ago." http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif
I haven't finished writing this nonsense. I started two years ago... http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

Hi Max, welcome to the forums. Very good question, and if I had the answer I might have finished writing by now. I don't know how to instil "big picture", sometimes people just don't want to think that way.

Prioritizing big picture requires compromising little picture. We break down complex problems into little chunks, and they become understandable to us. When the big picture guy comes along and tells the little picture detail optimizer that his objectives are counter to what is required, the little picture guy's whole worldview is thrown into turmoil. "I'm trying to make the lightest upright I can, but this fool is telling me we have to make it out of steel. We're making a racecar, FFS". Get a few of these little picture guys offside, a clique forms, big picture guy is on the outer...

Some reasons your team might start thinking "big picture":
1. Age: The older you get, the more comfortable you are with problem solving and moving up and down the scale of abstraction. More correctly, you might categorize this as "experience". I would hope your 30-something team members might be a an asset on this front, although some people's experience just makes them more narrowly focussed
2. Constraints: When your level 4 resources get slashed, you have to think big picture - because you need to ascertain how you can use your limited resources to best effect. Priorities. We were very fortunate to have our funding slashed to 1/4 of its previous value in our year. It had the effect that everyone kept one eye on the big picture, and extreme ideas were unanimously canned. We finished, and finished well, for the first time in a few years
3. Humour: Humour is a non-obvious answer. What is brown and sticky? A stick. The question focusses the mind on the detail, the punchline is a step back up the scale of abstraction and one step across. A culture of good humour (NOT ridicule) encourages creative thought and exploratory thinking. And acceptance of odd-ball answers
4. Beer: See Humour, above.
5. Failure: When you experience true failure, you don't want to feel it again. If you are smart enough to realize that it was your doing (taking ownership of the failure), then you might feel exploratory enough to make a few compromises as you prioritize the big picture. Of course, if you refuse to accept it was your doing ("Aww, it was a bloody splitpin that fell out. Stupid bloody splitpin"), then your results will continue to be random.
6. Education: Explain WHY you are making these compromises. Give data. Show your lapsims. Show your risk analyses. Get everyone on the same page. Make them feel like the team is doing something a bit odd-ball and unique. Unite the team.

That's all for now. I wrote more than I intended.

Cheers all,

[Charlie]

Max, I have been in your shoes. I tried brute force and stomping my feet but that had mixed results.

I would recommend focus and tenacity, along with friendship. As Geoff said, beers and humor help with the latter.

Leading by example, having a consistent message, and working hard help with the former. Big Picture work is not usually as fun or glamorous as the details. If you have a good relationship with your peers and consistently work hard at the 'boring' stuff while proclaiming its benefits, you will earn people's respect and with that comes a lot of leverage over team direction and priority.

Practice what you preach I guess. It won't happen overnight, but the team will start to see it working and appreciate it and adopt it accordingly.

[Z]

Max,

Congratulations on being in the 1% of the population (or less?) that can see the "big picture". The downside is that you spend a lot of time talking to walls. Or that's what it seems like, as you noted.

" how do I get my team to focus on Level 4...
... 2 of them are 30+ year old airforce vets..."

The funny thing is that your ex-airforce team members are the types that SHOULD see the big picture. To put it bluntly, people see the big picture when their necks are on the chopping block. You might remind your airforce vets of the period 1939-45. Military aeroplanes went from rag-and-stick biplanes to jet-powered (and some rocket-powered) all-metal monoplanes that were knocking on the door of the sound barrier. What caused this huge technical leap in such a short period of time? Necks on chopping blocks.

Over the next few decades the bullets stopped flying, but there was still the Cold War. So in 1947 the sound barrier fell, and by 1964 the American Lockheed SR-71 "Blackbird" and Russian MiG-25 "Foxbat" were both operational. At Mach 3+ these were, and STILL ARE, the fastest airbreathing production planes ever! Why the jump from M1 to M3+ in such a short time? The threat of lots of necks on very hot (thermonuclear) chopping blocks.

BTW, both SR-71 and MiG-25 were back-of-envelope designs in 1958, so a six year development period. And, of course, less than a decade later Americans were walking on the moon, and the Ruskies were driving their radio-controlled SUVs up there.

Now you might compare the above with the development of the current Lockheed F-35 "Joint Strike Fighter". This started in the mid 1990s (15+ years ago), and is, err..., still ongoing. Well, sure, it is only M2 (max!), but it does have a shed-load of electronic trickery in it... Australia has been promised its JSFs "by the beginning of the next decade...", which by my reckoning is never. Why so slow? NO necks on chopping blocks.

I look at FSAE over the last 20 odd years and see the F-35 JSF. Just the same-old, same-old, rather slow cars, with silly amounts of mostly useless electronic gadgetry. No serious effort at building really fast cars. Why? IMO it is too easy, and more than enough fun, to just mindlessly "polish a turd", and then finish somewhere in the middle of the pack. NO necks on chopping blocks.

Too harsh? I figure if FSAE was at all serious, then the cars would have been pulling 3G lateral by 1995, and maybe 5G by 2000, followed by rule restrictions. Instead the rules have become even more generous towards lateral Gs!

Come on FSAEers, try harder! (Hint: think "big picture", and picture "chopping blocks" if you lose!) http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

Z

[Der Krug]

Originally posted by Z:
Max,

Congratulations on being in the 1% of the population (or less?) that can see the "big picture". The downside is that you spend a lot of time talking to walls. Or that's what it seems like, as you noted.

" how do I get my team to focus on Level 4...
... 2 of them are 30+ year old airforce vets..."

The funny thing is that your ex-airforce team members are the types that SHOULD see the big picture. To put it bluntly, people see the big picture when their necks are on the chopping block. You might remind your airforce vets of the period 1939-45. Military aeroplanes went from rag-and-stick biplanes to jet-powered (and some rocket-powered) all-metal monoplanes that were knocking on the door of the sound barrier. What caused this huge technical leap in such a short period of time? Necks on chopping blocks.

Over the next few decades the bullets stopped flying, but there was still the Cold War. So in 1947 the sound barrier fell, and by 1964 the American Lockheed SR-71 "Blackbird" and Russian MiG-25 "Foxbat" were both operational. At Mach 3+ these were, and STILL ARE, the fastest airbreathing production planes ever! Why the jump from M1 to M3+ in such a short time? The threat of lots of necks on very hot (thermonuclear) chopping blocks.

BTW, both SR-71 and MiG-25 were back-of-envelope designs in 1958, so a six year development period. And, of course, less than a decade later Americans were walking on the moon, and the Ruskies were driving their radio-controlled SUVs up there.

Now you might compare the above with the development of the current Lockheed F-35 "Joint Strike Fighter". This started in the mid 1990s (15+ years ago), and is, err..., still ongoing. Well, sure, it is only M2 (max!), but it does have a shed-load of electronic trickery in it... Australia has been promised its JSFs "by the beginning of the next decade...", which by my reckoning is never. Why so slow? NO necks on chopping blocks.

I look at FSAE over the last 20 odd years and see the F-35 JSF. Just the same-old, same-old, rather slow cars, with silly amounts of mostly useless electronic gadgetry. No serious effort at building really fast cars. Why? IMO it is too easy, and more than enough fun, to just mindlessly "polish a turd", and then finish somewhere in the middle of the pack. NO necks on chopping blocks.

Too harsh? I figure if FSAE was at all serious, then the cars would have been pulling 3G lateral by 1995, and maybe 5G by 2000, followed by rule restrictions. Instead the rules have become even more generous towards lateral Gs!

Come on FSAEers, try harder! (Hint: think "big picture", and picture "chopping blocks" if you lose!) http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

Z

Z,

I agree with most, if not all of your post.

But I think all of what you said can be watered down to one thing only:
Context.

[Max Trenkle]

Hmmm, perhaps I need to bring the hammer down. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

All in all I feel like my core teammates really do get the big picture, it's just extremely hard to stay focused on it when there are 1000 things to do in order to have a hope of competing dynamically at FSAE. One thing I think will help is a more formal approach to the team. Not that the team shouldn't be close personally, but we handle things very casually, and as a result, non-core members come and go as they please. Perhaps an increase in team formality will give the aura of 'heads on chopping blocks' and a sense of urgency and commitment will return to FSAE. We are desperate to have more core members, and that is what I am devoting my efforts to right now.

In addition to that strategy, I am considering implementing a plan that new teammates must follow in order to become full members. There would be objectives that were fun, like writing a list of favorite cars, then writing short reports of the design aspects of said cars (like drivetrain, suspension, aero, etc). Then come the necessary objectives like reading the current FSAE Rules. The reason behind the 'busy' work is my direct experience, and observations of others' experiences. When you join a team, if there's nothing to do, you leave. Or if you're like me, you stick around because you feel an immense need to build a damn racecar before you die. So, in developing these assignments for prospective members, my goals are to:

<LI>Promote the advancement of motorsport and automotive knowledge of the new members.
<LI>Encourage new members' to network amongst themselves to build a healthy team atmosphere.
<LI>Prepare new members for the real work they will have to complete in FSAE (turning in reports on due dates, heavy and thorough discussion on many topics, documentation of EVERYTHING, etc).
<LI>Keep the new members from getting bored and leaving.
<LI>Get them excited about FSAE!

I'm sure I could come up with some more bullet points, but I think you guys get it http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_wink.gif
As far as relation to the original topic of the FSAE design process, I feel like I might be straying to recruitment, but this if we consider this a discussion of FSAE Team Design, I think it will fall in nicely. I think we have all agreed that team dynamics are just as important, if not more, than the driving dynamics of your respective vehicle. Team dynamics can decide whether you ever get a car built, or if you pull 3 lateral G's at a dynamic event.

Max Trenkle

[Scott Wordley]

To address Max and also Z... and discuss some Level 4 stuff, techniques for team building, management etc..

I think it is the job of management to use whatever tools they have at their disposal to cultivate a perpetual feeling of "heads on chopping blocks" amongst the team.

This is the only way anything actually gets done.

I hear many reports (ie GFR's Relentless doco, and Matt's Racecar book) of how informally most American teams in particular seem to operate.

Come along to a meeting, hang out at the shop, sweep floors for a few years and gradually absorb the project via ozmosis. Once we know you we will give you small jobs and build from there.

The amount of investment and enthusiasm people would have to demonstrate over such a prolonged time to make it through such an initiation amazes me. I imagine for every good person you get through, you would lose 5 equally good people who couldn't stick it out or didnt feel they were getting enough in return.
And I wouldn't blame them.

As an organisation I think that you have to accept that you need to invest a reasonable amount of time and effort to attract, retain and cultivate new members for the long term health of the team. If you don;t do this you are at the mercy of whoever decides to work/contribute on a ay to day basis.

From our experience we get much greater retention if students are recruited as part of a formal yearly intake (of second year students). We only take the best 25 out of maybe 70-100 applicants. Once we take them on board we divide them into sections and invest a lot of effort in teaching them fundamental skills they will need, hand calcs, rules and familiarity with the car, and all our prior research and documentation, Tune to win, Claude's stuff, relevant SAE papers etc. We go through the team's manifesto (vision, values and behaviour stuff) and get them to sign off on it and agree to abide by our rules. They then do a group design project on a system from their section, and get credit for it in my Design subject. They also present the project to the seniors as part of a review. We have a 2 day camp so they can get to know the old team members and alumni. We also send these new guys to trade school for 5 hours training every week for their first year to develop their machining and welding skills.

That's a pretty major investment of effort, and even then we only really retain about half of those 25 each year. If we didn't do this it would be 5 or less and those people would be next to useless, skills wise.

Students like to learn things, get regular mentoring and help and ultimately feel like they are making a valuable and useful contribution towards the car and team. Give them those opportunities and they will be hooked.

I have no idea how teams can operate if you are never sure what people are going to provide, if they haven't formally committed to any thing, and they receive no formal training. Must be pretty haphazard and result in a lot of information/skills/lessons learned being lost each year, and consequently re-learnt. Not efficient.

Back to the "heads on chopping blocks" discussion...

As a FSAE team leader or manager you have very few tangible ways to motivate your team, and cultivate the required sense of urgency needed to keep the project ticking along at the required rate.

You have no real "carrot" to offer or "stick" to threaten with. You can't fire people, dock their pay or demote them like you could in a work place. You cant give them bonuses or promotions either in most senses.

For this reason leaders will need to become extremely skilled and creative psychological manipulators. I don't think that is over estimating what the very best team leaders do. Some people take to this naturally, for others it is a real struggle. Academic advisors would do to well to closely monitor and mentor new leaders in the beginning, to get them up to speed quickly. A clear and staged growth in management responsibility over severl years also helps prepare students for the important top jobs.

From personal experience and close observation of some very effective FSAE team leaders at Monash and other unis I would recommend the following tactics:


The Team Leader:

Your team leader needs to be capable of demanding the respect of the entire team. They do not require a thorough technical knowledge of the entire car, but it is helpful. If they dont have this knowledge personally they need to rely heavily on their Chief Engineer/Designer and the section leaders. This support must be stead fast and unwavering. The Team Leader needs to work hard to develop and maintain this support through out the year. Regular discussions must take place with this leadership team and any arguments or disagreements ironed out in private. This group must present a unified front to the rest of the team at all times. ENTJ personality types (Field marshalls) are what you want in a leader ideally, but some other types can also work well.

Detailed and realistic job descriptions:

The best way to get get work done is to ask for it, from specific people in a very specific time frame. The task to be completed and the deliverable at the end of it must be clearly described. The deliverable should be tangible to be able to assess if the task has actually been completed satisfactorily. You want to remove any potential wriggle room. If someone can say (ie lie) "yeah I've done that" or "yeah its nearly finished" then you haven't made it clear enough. We usually insist on a document/spreadsheet/CAD update that must be submitted to management or the team. Also it is essential to get a clear commitment to complete the job from the team member tasked. An "I will try" is not good enough, and usually code for "I probably won't". They agree to get it done, or not. Renegotiate the scope if needed till everyone is happy. Throw more people at the problem.

Caring about Deadlines:

The management and team must REALLY care about people meeting their deadlines for promised tasks. You need to make the team fear missing their promised deadlines. This is a very difficult thing to do, but essential if the process is going to work. We find the best way to do this is via the regular systematic application of peer pressure. Having the power to defining a person's perceived status amongst a group of peers that they respect and want to impress can be very powerful motivational tool. To do this you need a forum like a weekly team meeting. You need to review the allocated tasks and contribution of each member in front of the whole team, praising those that have completed their tasks (or many tasks) while publicly naming and shaming those that haven't. We use section meeting before the full team meeting to flesh out all this progress information which is then collated together and quickly reviewed in front of the whole team. Chief and Team Leader can then modify any tasks that section leaders have proposed for the coming week. We usually give small chocolates to those that get all their jobs done, as a nice gesture and something for people to aim for. A simple act like this really helps reinforces their valve within the team. We regularly comment when members get on a run and receive chocolates for several weeks in a row. The team members with the highest average scores can be given priority for drive days and other good stuff like that. All this information needs to be recorded and distributed to everyone (via email), even prnted and displayed in the office, of the desktop background of the team's computers. A similar system is applied at a management level (Section Leaders and Team Leader), but their "score" for the week is based on the average of the team members working under them. They are all given weekly targets that they try to meet. It is essential to acknowledge and reward all management activities and cultivate a very high perceived value for this work within the team. Otherwise it is easy for team members to dismiss it as inconsequential, or not real engineering. In this competition, good management is as valuable as good engineering, if not more so. You know the team is really cranking when people are doing all nighters to just to meet the team deadlines they have been given.

Task and Deadline Reminders:

People are lazy and forgetful and will often agree to do something then forget it straight away. No one writes anything down anymore. It is the job of the section leaders to provide a scheduled reminder to their teams of all tasks and their due dates. Make this formal (ie email to management updating on progress of all tasks), as section leaders can easily wriggle out of doing this properly. A face-to-face or verbal reminder is about 10 times more effective than an email reminder. Ideally this scheduled follow up should occur about half way between the task being set and it being due. Managers should assess what work has been done so far and what is left to do. Asking to see progress work or an early draft is also good at getting people moving. Problem team members with a bad track record of meeting deadlines always need additional prodding and cajoling closer to the due date. This is the job of management. Its not always fun, but it is really important to the productivity of the team. The team leader or chief engineer can also be called in to exert additional pressure if the message is not getting through.


Missing Deadlines:

Things don't always go to plan and sometimes work just can't get done. Such instances account for around 10% of all deadlines missed. If you are going to be super strict on your tasks and deadlines you need a mechanism to deal with this 10% of cases with a reasonable excuse. If you don't have such a process team members will quickly learn how to "frame" the other 90% of missed deadlines which were completely due to their lack of work as a "reasonable excuse". This usually occurs just when said work is due. We try to deal with this issue by having a "Request for Deadline Extension" form. Students must fill out this short online form and submit it 72 hours before the deadline they think they will miss, explaining the issue, what work has been completed, help already requested etc. This is then approved or not by the team leader and relevant section leader and the task deadline renegotiated or the job reallocated. This form gets used irregularly, but its main purpose is in removing students access to fabricated last minute excuses. In that sense it is very valuable. Again eliminate any wiggle room, and skew the field in favor of your management.

I am guessing many people reading this will recoil at the amount of "management" work involved with the processes and techniques that I have described above. Obviously each team needs to find a balance that works best for them. We have a very large team (about 60) which is a real challenge to keep pointed in the same direction, let alone the right direction. Because of this we are probably at the extreme end of documentation and formal procedure. We can't survive any other way.

All these procedures also help to imbed our expected values and behaviors in the everyday workings of the team. Stuff like Respect and Professionalism. A healthy team culture flows on from these repeated behaviors.

It is possible to develop a healthy team culture naturally without such formal procedures, but this is simply a product of the people in the team at the time. It may last for a while, but eventually those people will leave, and others less skilled/organised/disciplined/committed will replace them. Teams regularly experience boom-and-bust cycles over multiple year time frames, simply because of the prevailing attitudes of the current members and the new culture that creates. Bust years can take a long time to recover from, if the team is ever able to recover. Things can go bad very quickly, and sometimes come good just as quickly. The guys at UTS here in Aus are a great example of a team that came up very quickly with the right people (Jon and crew) at the helm.

The challenge in all of this is to build a strong and healthy team identity and culture which is self-sustaining over decades with minimal input or maintenance from the original instigators. I don't think you want to leave a team at the mercy of the potential whims or weaknesses of each new crop of team members. Some may disagree but I think this is the over riding responsibility for Academic Advisors and also Team Alumni. Consider the long term influence of Al George at Cornell, Bob at Oregon, Geoff when he was at at RMIT, Bob Woods at UTA, and perhaps the best example Kev Hayward at UWA and more recently ECU. Judged on this basis I am anticipating a return to form for UNSW, as soon as Tim White decides start to exerting his influence and experience on the team there http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_razz.gif Also will Jon be able to maintain the culture and back up the recent results of the UTS team from the advisor role?

With the right nurturing, advice and continuity provided at the very top, teams should be able maintain a good culture and performance over a long time frame, regardless of the personnel related bumps and troughs that can never be completely eliminated. I also think this is largely independent of the team's available resources and funding. Done well, perhaps a high level of performance can be maintained indefinitely? Personally, I know that this my key performance metric and on-going challenge as the Monash academic advisor.

It will be interesting to see...

End Rant. Back to a sea of marking...

[Jon Oneill]

Firstly, Thanks for the mentions Scott. I 100% agree with your comments as do I agree with the discussions put forward so far by Geoff, Z and Kev.

The points raised here and the ideas put forward have all been exceptional. After being part of a very small team from a small University for several years, I feel that my perspective on the entire discussion is slightly different.

In recent years, the results and cars produced by UTS have improved, but while the improvement seems to have happened quickly to those on the outside, its been a long 5 year process for all those involved.
Its also interesting to note that the UTS teams improvement was not caused by a point based analysis of the competition, nor was it based on the pursuit of pure vehicle performance. The goal which turned our team around was much simpler than that.


Not many people would remember, but in 2009 the UTS team produced our best result ever for the University. On paper the UTS car came dead last at the 2009 FSAE-A event, but the team achieved their only goal for the year which was competing in every event at the comp. Now that may seem a small goal to aim for, but its worth noting that historically the average finishing rate for the Australian event is around the 40% mark. To finish well, first you have to finish.


Prior to 2009, each year a team of 5-10 people would come together and build a car that may or may not run at the event. The teams goal was purely to build something and more often than not the section leaders focused on making their own sections the best they could. Subsequently, every year we would built a car capable of competing if everything happened to come together just right. It very rarely did. Our 2004 car showed considerable potential on the track, but it didn't run reliably, and we were back to our old tricks in 2005.

Following another poor result in 2007, our team began the long road to building itself up. We planned to build a simple car with the resources we had available and we succeeded. Sure it weighed over 300kg (she was affectionately known as "Burtha") but it competed in every event at FSAE-A which was all we wanted. As a team, we needed something to build from and as we had no previous knowledge or results, this achievement was exactly what we needed.

With a result behind us, our team continued to develop. Now the team could follow on from the previous years achievements and development took off. Sponsorship started gaining momentum, the technical knowledge learn't in 2009 could be built upon and everything started to get a little easier, but our team never got any bigger.


In 2010 our goals were all based on improving the 2009 car for the better through evolution, optimisation and no massive changes. We used the exact same concept (Spaceframe, 4cyl, standard tech) but focused on meeting particular design goals in each vehicle area while building a high quality car. It worked and the team achieved a 9th place finish at FSAE-A, once again largely due to the fact that we competed in every event (just a little better than before). The thing to note is that for a team of 8 people to achieve this, Team Management and any kind of lifestyle must be avoided at all costs as it can waste time. A working week of 100+hrs was the norm for key members and it caused some problems.

The 2011 UTS car was a further evolution on the same concept but we began to push boundaries in several vehicle areas. The car produced in the end was incredibly fast and largely reliable but it was difficult to drive fast, especially for inexperienced drivers.
The additional pressure of making the 2011 car better also caused significant team member conflicts which ultimately resulted in the team failing to achieve any of the goals set. The car was fast, but the team unit was not capable of properly supporting the car or the project through to the end. This is not a negative reflection on the team though, it just goes to prove the car and the objective was bigger than us. It wasn't the concept or the car that let us down, it was us, the team.


So what is my point...

As Engineers, we tend to focus on the design aspect of this competition way to much. If we look back through the years (the past 6-8 years especially) its worth noting that every different design concept under the sun has won this event at some point. Hell, there powerhouse teams of the current day have several different concepts yet they are all competitive.

We ran some numbers at the beginning of last year at UTS, and we discovered on paper that our concept (steel frame, 4cyl, limited aero) was the worst possible concept we could have for a points based Australian competition analysis. Thats right, the worst, but we still went ahead with it. Why on earth would we do that?

While our concept may have been the worst on paper for the comp, it also proved to be our best chance of success with the resources we had available (limited man power and manufacturing). We knew going into the year that the 4cyl couldn't compete in fuel, but changing to a single would push us back 2 years or maybe more on the development tree which was something we could not afford with our current level of understanding. We still had a lot to learn as a team about the other aspects of the car and competition before we could make that change work straight away so it wasn't worth the risk, yet...

In a few years when the natural development cycle for our concept has peaked and our teams understanding of the competition has improved, then it may be time to make a change.


So,
It seems that for a team starting out or looking to work their way up the global ladder, there is no definitively correct concept to choose. More often than not, the concept you have now has the potential to be an incredibly successful car design. If your consistently in the top 10% of teams and your car just doesn't cut it for comp scores, then it might be time to consider a change, but for smaller teams or teams just starting out, sticking to your guns may be the best option in the immediate future.

Hell, On this page alone we have 3 guys who have lead teams to be very successful using 3 very different car concepts (Geoff = single carbon tub, Kev = 4cyl carbon tub, Scott = Spaceframe 4cyl), so maybe its not the concept thats 100% important, maybe its your understanding of the concept that can make all the difference.

It seems that a great team has the capacity to make almost any concept work in the same way a weak team can make the best concept fail. Surely understanding your concept, whatever it may be makes all the difference at the end of the day.


So as a team, are you in it to win this year, or are you looking to develop over a few? That may make all the difference...

[Dunk Mckay]

I'm going to be taking up a management role in my University's team next year, possibly Team leader. I'm actually on an industrial placement this year, which has afforded me the time to do some research and preparation after competing last year (including reading this thread twice through). This seems like the best place for me to ask for some sound advice.

One of the main issues we have is time, after the end of the German event at the start of August, few, if any people are around until just before the start of term (end Sept/start Oct). On top of this our dissertation hand in deadlines and main exam period trump the build schedule, meaning we generally have to start most things on build a month or so later than desired. With exams finished, students get kicked out of halls, and many not staying in halls going home for summer anyway; a mass exodus occurs cutting team numbers down significantly.

As if this wasn't enough, recent developments in university beaurocracy mean that overtime hours in the shop will stop at 7pm (instead of the previous 2-3am and the odd all nighter).

I am hoping to be present throughout the entire summer to start work on the first stages of the design process. Hopefully some of the other future managers can be convinced to be around as well, this should give us a small leg up.

Information already posted about team motivation and meeting deadlines has been very...educational, and will be put to good use.

My main concern is getting people into the workshop as early as it opens. Last year, what with it being summer holidays, most people would turn up at 10-11am after a nice lie in, and then stick around until late. With the 'late' part not being an option next year, I worry that people will still enjoy summer lie-ins and we'll lose crucial hours of work.

My best idea (along with some rousing speaches) is to get a simple clocking in/out device, and to keep a record of everyone's time spent in the workshop. I'm hoping the fact alone that there is a record will increase the amount of hours people are putting in. I don't want to start putting in requirements for minimum hours each week or things like that, as some people that might have turned up for just 4 or 5 hours each day (still useful labour) might decide it's not worth it, and stop coming altogether.
With no carrot to put on the end of the proverbial stick it can be very hard to squeeze more out of people than they initially decide they are going to do.

Any thoughts you guys might have on the situation, (ideas, suggestions, etc) would be much appreciated.

[Big Bird]

Just a quick response Dunk, as I am at work... http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

We used to put on a barbeque breakfast to get members in early. It worked sometimes, depending on the crew.

Treat a 7pm curfew as a blessing. A poor manager whinges about imposed limits, a good manager sees them as an opportunity. You design a project to suit your limits, and imposed limits are a decision you don't have to make yourself.

We used to have a 5pm curfew on some of the projects I've worked on, and the limited time really forced people to work efficiently. You work hard to deadline, get a lot done, go to the pub afterwards (and everyone can let the hair down and celebrate a job well done). Give yourself until 10pm, or 12am, or 2am, and everyone just goofs off because, well, we don't have to be out of here until (10pm, 12am, 2am...).

And of course then there are all the calls for assignment extensions because "we were in the workshop until 2am last night"...

[ed_pratt]

I really like the idea of a time sheet/clocking in/out.
It could be a very useful tool in weekly meetings, comparing hours put in with Scott's ideas of targets met...
It might be a good point to start using some basic key performance indicators. A couple of charts showing things like team section hours vs. total team hours and %age of targets met for each group every week.
By doing this, it would force you to make small but hard and fast deadlines, splitting large (seemingly insurmountable?) project sections into nice small chunks.

Ed

[mdavis]

I have a comment of something to watch out for when using time in the shop as a measuring stick. We do that (our team is primarily senior based with the car being a senior design project, and the grades for the design project are based on time invested) and this year was especially bad in terms of people putting in "time in the shop" but not really doing anything. Most of the time that people were quoting this year was spent discussing what party they went to the previous weekend, or how much beer was consumed the night before, rather than getting any actual work done on the car. I think most of the problem came from our team leadership being very laid back this year, but with a more top-down approach, I think the "time invested" method isn't bad.

Now, if you're going to couple it with the gold stars/candybars that Scott was talking about in meetings, you could add extra emphasis on a subteam being efficient while they're in the shop. This could also tie back into the leaving the shop by 7pm benefit of having stuff done.

[Scott Wordley]

Yeah, as Geoff says a BBQ breakfast can be a good motivator, we do that a lot closer to comp and during comp.

The physically clocking in and out is dangerous for the reasons mentioned above. It shifts the team's performance indicator away from tangible metrics like actually building a car. Also you cannot criticize anyone who is punching the clock, no matter how little work they actually do.

Time in the shop does not equate to usefulness or effectiveness, and beyond a certain point the relationship becomes an inverse correlation of time spent-to-output. Talk to people who have worked in Japan about this phenomena which includes the culture of sleeping face down on your desk at your work station, just for the sake of not leaving before your boss. Its not effective.

I would much prefer to allocate people specific jobs, and reward those who get them done quickly. What we actually do is allow management/supervisors to estimate how long each job SHOULD take at the start. That gets listed next to the task. Once the task is done, that is the credit the team member gets, unless they argue in retrospect that it took much longer and have good reasons to support this.

Admittedly this is more management work than using the punch clock, but I think it is worth it.

[Dunk Mckay]

Yeah, those are the main reasons I wasn't really wanting to dish out rewards/penalties for time spent. But people can see how much they are actually putting in compared to others, that others are working a lot harder than them and feel pushed to contribute more. I think generally the people putting in the most work are already fully motivated (because racecar) so the opposite effect wouldn't be a problem.
The only reason I can think of that people would come in and not do anything is that they worry that it might be used against them in future if they've not put in as many hours. I'd make it clear at the start of the year that that is not the case, but then you can't control what team members discuss amongst themselves.

Having a board with specific jobs, deadlines, subteam and team member allocation, progress, etc. is a good idea. Not just for keeping tabs on team input, but also having a big display showing how build is progressing and what everyone is working on.

With something like that in place is it worth having the punch clock as well? Will that do more to highlight who is a more efficient worker? Would that be a bad thing? Does competition between subteams and individual members promote hard work and efficiency or can it split a team into factions?

We've never really had much competition within our team, but as I said we've seen, in the past, some people put in 60 hours a week and others put in 10. Generally most people are working. You do have the occasional moment were people are standing around chatting for an hour or so, but that's usually when there's not much needing doing because you're waiting on parts, etc.
Anybody have any success/horror stories on the subject?

[Bemo]

Hi Dunk,

I'm not sure if the clock in/out device is the ideal way to go for you (for the reasons you mentioned yourself).
Here we can use our shop 24/7 but the CAD pool where we design together closes at 11pm. During the design phase we also have to get people to show up early enough to get a reasonable amount of work done. I think Geoff's idea is a pretty good way to go. We also used to have breakfast together. Every morning someone else had to buy the food. Like this you can gain a lot of team spirit and good food is good to motivate people ;-)

Another problem for you seems to be people leaving during summer. Somehow you have to convince them that in fact this is the best time to build the car. If you don't have any courses and exams to pass you can really focus on the car. It is the only project you need to think about. Working this way for a couple of weeks brings unbelievable results (even if you have to leave the shop at 7pm every day).
In our team nobody would even think about leaving uni during holidays. Somehow you must make them understand that this is more than just some extra curricular activity. This is a one time opportunity for everyone who is willing get really dedicated.
Do you take newbies to comps before they enter the team? That's one thing we do. We search people for next year's team before the German event and take them there (we have the advantage that Hockenheim isn't too far from Stuttgart). Like this they get a first hand experience of what they are working for. They can see the best and the worst of the cars there and think about how they want their car to be compared to these.

Now I should start working on my thesis again...

[Dunk Mckay]

I really want to see prospective members attending the Silverstone event at least. This is the first year the team has really managed to recruit a few part time members from first and second years (with one or two small exceptions including myself), normally team members are 3rd and 4th year students. Financing such trips and convincing people to come back to uni half way through their summer vacation can be difficult.

There are a lot of complicated bureacracy and internal political issues between our team and the uni at the moment, which is also, I believe, the reason the workshop hours have been cut down. The irony is that if this years team are able to overcome this and produce a top ten car this year that all of these problems would probably go away. But I feel like I would be dragging the discussion even further of topic if I went it to all of that stuff here.

The feedback on "manhour management and motivtion" has been helpful, and I'll be sure to keep everyone posted on how it goes. I'm thinking of making regular video logs (a new hobby of mine) on the progress of our teams efforts next year. Whcih I hope can be used as a motivational/educational/recruitment tool for future iterations of Brunel Racing if not other teams as well.

[buggaero]

Originally posted by ed_pratt:
I really like the idea of a time sheet/clocking in/out.
It could be a very useful tool in weekly meetings, comparing hours put in with Scott's ideas of targets met...
It might be a good point to start using some basic key performance indicators. A couple of charts showing things like team section hours vs. total team hours and %age of targets met for each group every week.
By doing this, it would force you to make small but hard and fast deadlines, splitting large (seemingly insurmountable?) project sections into nice small chunks.

Ed

We are just into our second year for the Italy comp coming sept. We expanded our team from a 9 to an 18 this year and we started to feel we need something solid to manage the numbers wisely. Like when you know you're short on human resource, that too, skilled, (as most of the new 8 are freshman) so we came up with something figured out wisely on the spreadsheet, having some similarities with performance appraisal and we were actually going in with clocking in/out, keeping the cell phones away in the work hours, maintaining dept job timings and verified by moe than 2 dept heads for each day, we even had a weekly review on the behavioral aspects and we linked some of the data with admin panel on the team website for the college management and even the guardians to view individual and overall performance anytime they liked, we assigned credits to the jobs and it was biased based appropriately so that someone without prior experience finishing it within scheduled time gains more credits than a 4th year guy doing the same in the same time.
this performance appraisal was added with a weekly team progress review and the strike rate projection of the progress and the target deadline. Sadly...it couldn't be materialized due to various reasons and we just had to settle in with maintaining Dept. files only, where we still count the hours for every job and every member working.
And the reward we decided for the best score was a team funding the tickets of that person.

All this had an impact on the new guys and the old one's too... but still, it needs a separate division of senior members to implement it with full effect. We hope to make it work even better next time.

Suggestions are welcome.

[Bemo]

I'd like to add some new point to this document due to some impressions from FS Austria last week.

Something a team should seriously think about is how it wants to present itself during a competition. This is also something very important for anybodies future life. You always have to keep in mind who you are talking to and what these people expect from you.

Why am I writing this. During this competitions last week there were some incidents when teams started to complain in an absolute unacceptable manner if something didn't go as they wanted it to. I won't tell about which teams I am talking, that is something I already told them in person.

A participant should always keep in mind what the word VOLUNTEER means. At the Austrian competition nobody gets more then a hotel bed and food for the time the event is running. People come hundreds of kilometers and don't get their travelling costs to help to organise such an event - otherwise there just wouldn't be such an event.

You can't expect these people to respect you anymore if they announce the whole day that the dynamic events will close sharp at the time in the schedule (especially when it takes two hours until the first team shows up). It is the team's responsibility to make sure you get all your attempts. It is your right to gamble to get the best conditions but you can't blame anyone if you loose an attempt through that. And if this situation is in pouring rain it doesn't help either to yell at an official who is wet until his underpants because you're not allowed to make your last attempt when it is already two minutes after the end of the event.

Every team should try to get the officials on their side. There are situations when this might help you. If you start arguments because of your own faults won't make your life easier.

Also think of the impression your car makes. I was a scrutineer and one car was presented incredible dirty. It is one thing to have a used car because you did a lot of testing. But dirty is something different. Think of the first impression you get as a scrutineer if the rest of burned cables are lying in the cockpit of the car (yes, this happened). Do you think "Oh these guys really care, there propably any serious issues with this car"? - Well you guess not.

During my time in the Stuttgart team it has always been a very important goal to present ourselves as a professional and disciplined team. This doesn't mean, you can't have fun. But there is a time and a place and that's what we always tried to teach the new members. Also the attitude towards other teams is an important point. You never know, when you need their help. So you should respect everyone - you never know their background so there is no reason to judge what they are doing.

So much for today. Hope to see many of you next week at FS Germany. I will work there as a scrutineer, so make sure your cars are rules compliant ;-)

[Max Trenkle]

So we are 1.5 years into our two year car, and we only have the frame together.

Basically, if you miss a deadline on a new design, go back to the old one THAT DAY. Don't wait another two months. Worst thing I did to the team was NOT make that call. We are still going to be fine, but lesson learned.

The single most important thing about this competition for a team is finishing the events.

If you can sit down and really determine what matters, then this competition becomes much less complicated. In fact, the more you read the rules, the easier it gets. That's a huge struggle I have with my team right now. I am the only person with a comprehensive understanding of the rules. As much as I want to kick the people who haven't read the rules cover to cover, I can't get rid of people who get stuff done. Otherwise stuff won't get done.

Overall, what I've learned this year and a half, from 2 to 20 members, from freshman to PM, this competition isn't about going fast. It's about just going.

One of the best things you can do is download the official BOM from fsaeonline and put that list of parts on a white board and just go. Makes the car seem much less complicated in your mind. This isn't how you design the car, but before you can design, you really gotta understand what goes into this competition.

Z has covered this topic relentlessly. Read his stuff. You won't get most of it at first, but if you're like me, eventually you'll catch on because you find the 'truth' necessary. That being said, take EVERYTHING with a grain of salt. In the end, you're not making a racecar, you're solving a problem.

What's really surprising to me is the lack of desire to learn the 'truth'. A few minutes in Optimum Lap, or your own lapsim will tell you that pretty much everything you thought that mattered didn't. Many members on my team haven't made the slightest attempt to unravel their assumptions. Everyone wants to save weight, have massive horsepower, and have 'innovative' design. This is great, but none of these guys have taken the time to problem solve .

Ask yourself the question: What really makes FSAE cars fast?

Once you explore, you will find out what really matters.

Not really sure if I have a main point, but I just wanted to put my thoughts down on the most useful thread on this forum.

Another piece of advice for new guys: after you read the rules, hit this thread up and read the whole thing. It's kind of a big deal. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_wink.gif

[Big Bird]

What's really surprising to me is the lack of desire to learn the 'truth'. A few minutes in Optimum Lap, or your own lapsim will tell you that pretty much everything you thought that mattered didn't. Many members on my team haven't made the slightest attempt to unravel their assumptions. Everyone wants to save weight, have massive horsepower, and have 'innovative' design. This is great, but none of these guys have taken the time to problem solve .


Really nicely put Max. "Unravelling assumptions" - so critical to building your flexibility as a designer. Your quote deserves a spot on the workshop wall...

[Bemo]

I'd say this is a bit like the discussion in the "Teams from India" thread about setting goals.
I've often discussed this with teams. All the time you hear stuff like "We wanted to save weight" "Our main target was a stiffer chassis".

No one really cares about these figures. First of all you want the car go faster, therefore you want your car to react to suspension setup, therefore you want your chassis to be stiff, therefore.....

I've read a couple of design reports in the past from various teams and this was in my opinion the major mistake almost all of them made. They started their text with goals for single parts of the car. No word about the overall goals of the car (quicker, more efficient, whatever you want). Everything else has to come from there.

And as you said Max unfortunately people very seldom think really carefully what the major issues for achieving to overall targets are. In Germany we have a say they get lost in details.

If you had endless manpower and time you could optimize every single part to the end, but no team in the world does have that (and no company in the world). So you have to priorize (does that word exist in English? http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_confused.gif) what is most critical for you overall targets and focus on that stuff.

[Markus]

I've read a couple of design reports in the past from various teams and this was in my opinion the major mistake almost all of them made. They started their text with goals for single parts of the car. No word about the overall goals of the car (quicker, more efficient, whatever you want). Everything else has to come from there.
Bemo, it's worth noting that in some competitions (FSUK at least) it's always been implied that comparing to the old car (i.e. evolution) is a bad thing. I'd think the reason is that "quicker", "lighter" and similar comparative expressions are indefinite and proper problem solving begins by defining the problem. This might lead to teams avoiding such statements on the concept design level.

I agree that the top level goals should (must!) be mentioned as they're basically everything that's important and the rest of the design / decisions should be made to approach those goals. But the goals should still be definite.

PS. The word is prioritize.

[Bemo]

It's true that at most competitions design judges don't like comparisons between the old and the new car (at least in the design report).

But still it does not make sense start with specific goals for weight, chassis stiffnes etc. First of all you need to define, what kind of car you want to build. Anything else is just coming from this. It is not easy to do so (propably that's why most people don't), but this is the way the design process should follow.

In our team we defined the following goals which have never been a secret: Get the car done in time, finish Endurance, win the overall competition

These are the three goals all the subgoals have to be derived from. Of course you can argue how consequent this way was followed over the years, but in first place this is what we always tried to do. And we always told design judges exactly this.
From their you can start analysing what properties the car must have to score overall as high as possible.

You can set different goals. If your goal is to win acceleration or to win efficiency you will propably build a different car. But if you're honest, no one will ever start to build a car with the words "I want to have a car with an extremely stiff chassis".
But I've seen design reports, starting like this...

[Markus]

Originally posted by Bemo:
But still it does not make sense start with specific goals for weight, chassis stiffnes etc. First of all you need to define, what kind of car you want to build. Anything else is just coming from this. It is not easy to do so (propably that's why most people don't), but this is the way the design process should follow.
Exactly this. That one centence in bold is the important thing in reaching top positions in competitions. Yet it's still forgotten so often, even in top teams.


In our team we defined the following goals which have never been a secret: Get the car done in time, finish Endurance, win the overall competition

These are the three goals all the subgoals have to be derived from. Of course you can argue how consequent this way was followed over the years, but in first place this is what we always tried to do. And we always told design judges exactly this.
From their you can start analysing what properties the car must have to score overall as high as possible.
It is no secret either that we've always had very similar design goals.

Unfortunately our way of surviving generation-changes hasn't been the best which has kept us mostly off the podium despite the fast cars. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_frown.gif

[Big Bird]

I still have a few things to add to my “thesis” here – will try to make them reasonably concise. Some of this stuff I have written elsewhere, some probably appears above and I’m too lazy to search for it.

If you look in any design textbook they will give a design process that looks something like the following:
Define project purpose / objectives
Define project resources
- Fully understand human resources (skills, availability), budget available, materials and manufacturing processes available
- Fully ascertain and understand available time
Define the problem you are trying to solve, and the criteria by which your solution will be judged.
Propose conceptual design solutions
Pick the “best” solution (i.e. the one that will best deliver on the solution judging criteria WITHIN THE CONSTRAINTS OF YOUR AVAILABLE RESOURCES – no apologies for shouting there)
Detail design your solution
Build it
Test it
Deliver it
Document it
(Iterate back and forth through the above – hopefully not too many times…)

I’ve been deliberately brief about the final few steps – if you have read the preceding pages you will know I’m more about the early planning stages.

Now, I propose there are two distinct categories of simulation :
1. Simulations that you learn about at uni
2. Simulations that are useful
These are in most cases mutually exclusive, and in fact a useful litmus test for the value of a simulation is to show it to your university lecturer . The more excited he gets about it, the less likely it will be of any practical use to anyone.

OK, so maybe I’m being a little too cynical here. But in my time at uni I learnt a lot about multi-parameter optimizations and FEA theory – but nothing about using basic maths tools for big-picture, practical decision-making. And that is because there was virtually no-one on the academic staff at my uni, or nearly any other uni I’ve been to, who knew how to do it (or was even interested in it, for that matter)

The three points in the design process where simulations are useful are:
1. Understanding your design problem
2. Selecting your conceptual design
3. Refining your design (the detail design stage)

I’ll group the first two points together as they require similar treatment. I’ll call them the conceptual design phase, whilst the third point is detail design.
Some contrasts:
- Conceptual design is concerned with big picture, whilst detail design is about individual components and, well, detail
- Conceptual design is concerned with finding the best return for your available resources, and breaking down the project into sub-system and component targets - detail design is about meeting the individual and subsystem targets
- Conceptual design is about estimation, detail design more about accurate calculation and optimization
- During the conceptual design phase, shoot anyone who uses the word “optimization”. During the detail design phase, do the same
- Conceptual design is about sensitivities to the major variables of interest, detail design is more about meeting absolute values. (For example, at concept design phase, you might work out that one percent weight saving might give “x” times the return of one percent increase in power – whereas in detail design you might be set a component mass target of, say, 150 grams which is measured absolutely.
- There is less likely to be a commercially available software package to help you with conceptual design (as you are charting your way through a unique and complex problem). Detail design is usually about meeting targets for well-defined variables such as mass or stiffness – and therefore more likely to be serviced by commercially available packages
- You need to get your conceptual design phase out of the way quickly, and you are at a phase in the project where you will have large gaps in your knowledge. Therefore your treatment of this phase needs to be simple and quick.
- Conceptual design is about gathering information, understanding the problem and making a decision. Detail design is about delivering on that decision
I hope I am making it clear that the different phases require different approaches. A simulation with detail design objectives has limited usefulness in the conceptual design phase.

I shan’t repeat much of the stuff that I have written previously, but we were designing our car we started by picking out a few major variables of interest (tyre grip, mass, power, drag coefficient, engine efficiency), and writing the simplest excel simulation we could that could give us an estimation of which is the most important parameter. We wanted to know the major sensitivities – whether one factor was an order of magnitude more important than the others, not whether one might give us 8.34 points while another might be worth 8.45.

More importantly, we wanted to gauge how important the major parameters were in comparison to how many points we were trailing the leaders. I harp on this point but still the point gets missed – if you find that 1 kg weight saving is worth, say 2 points, and you finished 400 points behind the winners of your last event, then saving weight isn’t going to put you on the top of the podium.

I suggest the following for teams embarking on a new design project
- Read and understand the criteria by which you are being judged for this project – whether it be points scored or laptimes or dollars spent
- Pick out 5-6 variables at most that you consider most significantly influence the final judging criteria
- Using mathematical tools no more advanced than Excel, and theory no more advanced than what you learnt in first year, write the simplest comparative analysis you can IN NO MORE THAN ONE WEEKEND.
- If anyone mentions the words “transient”, “absolute” or “non-linear”, quietly walk them outside and show them the guy who mentioned the word “optimization”.
- At the end of the process, define a measure of how important each variable is relative to each other, and relative to the overall pointscore you need to achieve.

The secret to winning:
Convince your own team to simplify
Convince your opponents they have over-simplified

Cheers all,

[Francis Gagné]

And that should be mandatory reading for every member entering our team! At our school we are lucky to have a major design project of 2 years, in which we follow a similar product development process. And the project gives great results, won Supermileage and FSAE Hybrid, made the first student built acrobatic airplane to fly in canada, flown a pedal powered airplane, etc. Though most of them have no commercial value... Which is something we should learn in school IMO. But unfortunately, most guys (and gals) only "gets it" on the last month before graduation when they reflect on their prototype and see their past errors and why they should not had cut corners on conceptual design, and further more on the feasability studies!

For my old team, they need to find a way to integrate the process more rigourously and bash it in the head of the newcomers, for us it is the hard part since our advisor is non-existent. But I think it is making it's way slowly I think, and thanks to you I'm not the only saying how important it is, there is hope :)

[dynatune]

Great Post Jeff and if I may permit saying so, welcome in the world of true managerial thinking. We as engineers tend to focus many times on the things that we think are important. Many times they are, but many times they are less important to the final results as we would like to admit to. Often, also because the scheme that defines the quality of our designs is not always as fair as we wish it would be. The big lesson here to be learned, is to learn to design for pleasing the final customer. This customer might not be as we would like him/her to be, but our product better should be. If the customer request best laptime that should be achieved, if the customer requires lowest cost that should be achieved too whether we like it or not ... I have participated in meetings in various OEM's where actually the "points" to be gained in various customer reports/ press journals were a solid division key on where to spend development dollars ....

Cheers,
Dynatune

[Big Bird]

Hi all,

This isn't specifically about the original "Reasoning..." topic in the title, but I thought I'd throw this into my "thesis" here as some added material - given team politics play so much of a role in team success - or failure.

This morning I caught up with Steve Price, our Team Leader from 2003, and I would say the best team leader I saw during my time at RMIT. We happened to start chatting about team structures and teams. Now we were fortunate to have a very good team in ’03, comprised of a lot of people who were friends before we were on the FSAE team. But the key points that characterized the ’03 team were :
- It was INCLUSIVE – EVERYONE was welcomed to the team, and invited to team bbq’s and the like – whether they were first year, final year, whether they were experienced or complete novices
- It was SOCIAL – Steve made sure that there was down-time each week for everyone to recalibrate / calm down / download / vent / laugh. ESPECIALLY to laugh.
- It was VISIBLE – We made sure that the uni staff, the students, the visitors, anyone who came on campus, would see the team operating – e.g. holding meetings in the caf at 5pm when all the staff would be walking by to go home, or
- It was WELCOMING – When new students came in, or when other uni teams were in town visiting, or when the uni had guests to be entertained / impressed, the team would be ready to roll out the welcome mat
- It was COLLABORATIVE – The vehicle was designed with guided input from all. For example, each Wed night we would have a team CAD session where we would drag up the CAD model and visually explain design issues, shortcomings, automotive theory, etc etc. The senior students drove the development, but the junior students could sit in to listen / ask questions / learn.
- It was FOCUSSED – We knew our priorities, we knew what was a need and what were just wants – and we only attended to the needs
- It was CALM – Yep, sure there were stressful times - but the team did its best work when it remained calm under pressure – wherever possible!
- It was TEAM-ORIENTED – We were all there for the team’s growth and development – that no one person was bigger than the team, and that no one project year was more important than the others.
- It was FUTURE-ORIENTED – We were building the team for future success. Our year was the first of a three year plan, and we had the people who understood this and were happy to curb their own ambitious designs in order to just get a result for the team and the experience on which we could build better cars in future. (This is a big one – many teams I speak to now over-design and over-commit for THIS year, because, well, we’re graduating at the end of the year and we want to leave our mark on the project.)
- It was RESPECTFUL – Yep, we sure took the mickey out of each other, but the over-arching culture was one of respect – that the management were doing their best, that everyone was feeling out of their depth at times, we were all in this together, and that when a decision was made that was that – and that arguing further was detrimental to the project.

The result of all this was that students would come to the team and want to do something for it. Work would be done for the team’s benefit, and for the joy of being part of the process – not because there was some sort of obligation or threat.

The key points were the last three I guess. The team members took joy from the trajectory the team was on, and there was a distinct long term focus. Thus when we did win events, for example in 2006, the 2003 team members felt they were just as much a part of the celebrations as the competing team members. I see this in a select number of Australian teams at the moment, and will be very keen to see how their results go in the next few years.

Good things happen when the focus goes from one’s self to one’s team, and to its ongoing success.

On the other hand, when a team starts to go on a downward trajectory, a lot of the above goes out the window. A few bad results can see a good team set up its own self-fulfilling downward spiral, particularly when the above points are jettisoned because the team doesn’t have time for … (social events / hosting other teams / training first years / politeness and respect, etc etc)”

I've been watching a few teams over recent years, and have noticed some interesting (and consistent) trends. As performance/results in the FSAE event begin to drop away, pressure begins building and the “fun” factor begins to drop away too. A result of a bad finishing position is often a commitment to "try harder". In one specific example, as a previously successful team started getting some less spectacular results, the team culture changed from one of encouragement to one of criticism and ridicule. If you didn’t match team leaders for the number of hours you spent in the workshop, then you were crap. As the enjoyment fell away, team enthusiasm dropped off, team membership dropped off, and thus the team leaders were left with even more work – and so on.

The trouble with the “just try harder” culture is that it just wears everyone out. It is not sustainable.

If your yearly plan necessitates your team members to work on the project every day, and every spare minute, then you have prepared the wrong plan. If your culture is one of suspicion and ridicule whenever someone takes a day off or does something wrong, you have the wrong leaders.

The focus should be on working smarter, not harder. This of course comes back to knowing your priorities, which means understanding the design problem you are facing. There, I think I've now linked this back to the original topic....


I suspect a lot of the above is stating the obvious, but I’m seeing a few cultural issues within teams causing problems and thought the above might help some.


Geoff

[Z]

- It was TEAM-ORIENTED – We were all there for the team’s growth and development – that no one person was bigger than the team, and that no one project year was more important than the others.
- It was FUTURE-ORIENTED – We were building the team for future success. Our year was the first of a three year plan, and we had the people who understood this and were happy to curb their own ambitious designs in order to just get a result for the team and the experience on which we could build better cars in future. (This is a big one – many teams I speak to now over-design and over-commit for THIS year, because, well, we’re graduating at the end of the year and we want to leave our mark on the project.)

Geoff,

I am 1,000+++% in agreement with all of your post above. I consider the above-quoted section as especially important (as you also noted), so thought it worth repeating.
~~~o0o~~~

To all Teams who want to do well in FSAE, please consider the above post very deeply, before you even start thinking about that new gee-whiz feature you are going to add to this year's car.

And note, of course, that the above principles also apply on the football field, and in business, and in any sort of real-life competitive situations.
~~~o0o~~~

To re-restress the point...

...Thus when we did win events, for example in 2006, the 2003 team members felt they were just as much a part of the celebrations as the competing team members.

So that was a multi-year plan, based on TEAMWORK, PERSISTENCE, AND A LONG-TERM FOCUS on being the best team in the competition...

Z

[Bemo]

Thank you once more for the very interesting insights in your active time. For me it is quite interesting to see that most things you mention, I pretty much experienced the same way in my active time, especially during the '08 season when we had the most succesful year one could think of.
We also had this incredible team spirit. When I joined the team in September '07, I felt welcome from the beginning. For everybody in the team the goal was clear, it was about winning competitions. That's were we had a different approach. We never really had plans for multiple years, we only tried to make sure that we don't live on the cost of the next year. That means that the next team should have a heritage they can still properly work with (workshop, sponsors, relation to uni etc.), but in general our plan was made for only that year.
Where your text could be written about our team was the part about being focused and team oriented. It was clear for everyone that the succes of the team is more important than interests of single team members. We only followed concept approaches we were convinced they would help us to gain performance and if something didn't work as desired there were no hard feelings when the decision was made that we won't running at competition. Very often I have the impression that teams have gadgets on the car which aren't working properly (yet), but run it anyway because someone put so much effort in it.
We also did a lot of social events together, in summer we had bbq every evening at the shop, went kart racing etc. And in the end our participation at the Aus comp were propably the best two weeks in my life.

For me the most important thing to make workin in a team succesful and enjoyable is that in the very beginning you commit yourself to what your goals are and how the whole thing is supposed to work. If you decide that the project is about giving people the opportunity to build crazy gadgets and whatever, you won't ever win a competition. If everyone is ok with that - no problem, but this has to be clear from the beginning. If team members are following different approaches to achieve different goals, no one will reach his goal and the result will be frustration and anger within the team.

[Big Bird]

Greetings all,

Spent a few minutes chatting with Kev Hayward yesterday at ECU. And then a few hours more. As with all my conversations with Kev, his input offers me moments of great clarity, and a variety of other moments too.

I’ve been asked many times how to structure a Formula SAE project. I’ve seen teams which have worked well, and teams which have imploded. I get asked how to best structure teams, advice on organizational charts, how to manage conflicts, etc etc. I’ve seen teams which have excelled one year, and have crashed the next, and yet have run the same project management structure through both years.

I have decided that the best way to unite a team, and put yourself above and beyond the petty struggles and bickering, is to engage the team by proving a point.
- RMIT 2003-2007 – proving a point that you didn’t need a big motor to be fast
- UWA 2003-200?- proving a point that they knew vehicle dynamics better than anyone, especially with their kinetics suspension package
- Monash – proving a point with aero, and with understanding of human resources
- UQ 2004-?? – proving a point that you didn’t need a diff

I’d also look at individuals like Rob Woods and his team at Buffalo as an example of a team that seemed energized and passionate, and keen to do something different with their Briggs and Stratton car. ECU seem united with a novel approach to their project this year. I could go on, but I do.

In my travels around the country this year, I am seeing many teams as they kick off their 2014 projects, and I’d general categorize teams into two distinct types:
- Teams that are on a mission
- Teams that are optimizing parts
Now both types are energetic, enthusiastic and mostly charging into their new designs at this time of year. Some have good management structures, some are conscious of their people and are saying the right things about timelines and over-ambition and any number of things that are written on these boards.

The former though have a vision, a point they are trying to prove. It isn’t just a lame, “we are going to be the best in the world”, let’s-make-a-vision-statement-because-Krystal-the-team’s-management-coach-says-we-need-to-make-a-vision-statement type of vision statement. It is that this team is going to bust their guts to prove that …. is….., and what’s more, everyone else is …. because they are doing …. .

That sort of from-the-heart drive is what unites a team. You see it in whole countries at times of war. You don’t see it in teams that reckon they are going to win FSAE, and are going to do so by passionately optimizing the pedal tray and fixing last year’s understeer on turn-in and that problem we have got with the chain tensioner.

I couldn’t do FSAE again, as I see it in most teams. I mean, it is fun, and we learn, but unless there is some driving passion, some UNITED point we wish to prove, then there is nothing but individual wants that drive the team and team politics and bickering will eventually raise their ugly head. But when I saw the ECU project yesterday, and saw the passion and the unity and the point they were proving, I came home and dragged out the pencils and started sketching ideas again.

Some points to prove:
That suspension doesn’t require double wishbones and 10+ points of relative motion on each corner
That you can build a fast car with purely locally made components
That you can make a car out of wood
That you can design a car that you can manufacture from scratch in less than a month
That you can design a car that you can manufacture in less than a fortnight
That you can design a car that costs you less than $10,000
That you can design a car with less than half the number of parts than your last one
That you don’t need a gearbox
Etc
And that any of the above can finish top 10

Teams that have a point to prove inspire me. Unless of course that point is that they can spend more money, or use more resources, or make more parts out of carbon fibre than their competitors.

I won’t go on, because I usually do….

Cheers all,

Geoff

[Edward M. Kasprzak]

Spent a few minutes chatting with Kev Hayward yesterday at ECU. And then a few hours more. As with all my conversations with Kev, his input offers me moments of great clarity, and a variety of other moments too.

So a couple of guys got together and they had a few moments. Z, am I using the couple and moment terms correctly?

Geoff, you're basically saying that this is first and foremost a project management competition, *then* an engineering competition. I think this approach is a common element of the the more successful teams. Project management includes a clear definition of goals.

[Big Bird]

The couple of moments of clarity I had were a reaction to the force of kevs arguments. When he gets up a bit of momentum, he is hard to stop. We eventually ran out of energy, so we went down to the roll centre to get some lunch.

[Big Bird]

Yep, Edward - I'd say that a motivated team, with a common purpose and a point to prove, will find a way to overlook all the silly niggles and ego problems that can ruin a team's chances.

When a team just approaches this as engineering optimization, the whole thing falls apart as soon as the first compromises are encountered. Because with a "parts" based approach, the only thing a designer owns is their own part - and they are going to cling to that hard. With a team purpose, everyone owns a higher purpose, and the petty niggles are seen for the trivialities that they are.

[Big Bird]

Greetings all,

I have been travelling around the country a bit visiting FSAE teams, and have had some very interesting discussions about relative strengths and weaknesses of different teams. In the interests of sharing the knowledge, I thought I’d catalogue what I’d found.

The names have been changed to protect the fictional…
University: AAA University
Weakness: Lack of budget
This team used to receive quite a handy budget from the university, but funding cuts have meant that their recent budgets have been slashed to less than half what they used to be. The team members are quite despondent, as their previous successes were founded on liberal use of carbon, and they know in their hearts that without it they have no chance of winning. The drivetrain leader has resigned because he cannot implement the carbon fibre driveshafts that he had designed. Tensions high throughout the team, team members leaving. Team leader furious because no-one wants to work hard any more, the car is not running, his girlfriend is leaving him and he isn’t getting time to work on the drag reduction system he is designing.
Request from team: If anyone knows anyone who would like to sponsor the team, please let me know and I will pass on the message.
Team needs another $50,000 to be competitive.

University: BBB Institute of Technology
Strength: Low budget
This team used to receive quite a handy budget from the university, but funding cuts have meant that their recent budgets have been slashed to less than half what they used to be. The team’s previous successes were founded on liberal use of carbon, which was cool, but which absorbed a huge amount of time, energy and money. BBB are treating the low budget as an opportunity, as it is forcing them to reassess their priorities and look for cheap, simple solutions- in keeping with the intent of the competition. A few simple simulations and calculations and they are happy that they can compensate most if not all of the performance points with points in cost and fuel economy. Team is united and eager to prove that they can do this. As it stands, they are ahead of schedule and quite calm and happy, since their simple design is quite easy to put together
Request from team: That everyone watch out, BBB is on a mission…

University: University of CCC
Weakness: New team members, lack of experience
With the coming of the new year, CCC has seen their successful senior design team of recent years of Rob C, Graeme C, Simon C and Colin C finally graduate, and the team seems a bit confused and almost “scared” at the moment. The new team is very conscious of their lack of experience, and they look overwhelmed every time they need to make a decision. They know deep in their hearts that with such a young team they have no chance of winning. They are pretty angry about it. After all, how can they compete with when their nearest rival team is DDD Uni, who has Brian D for a faculty advisor who has been in the FSAE game for years. In fact, CCC has recently complained to the organizing committee as that they know that Brian D is actively helping design and build DDD’s car, and they even secretly showed me the “smoking gun” as they have in their possession a photo of Brian D with a spanner.
Request from team: That the Rules Committee make a rule to ban Faculty Advisors who own, or have owned spanners, or who have used spanners in a professional application.

University: University of DDD
Strength: New team members, lack of experience
With the coming of the new year, DDD has seen their successful senior design team of recent years of Rob D, Graeme D, Simon D and Colin D finally graduate, and the team is eager to prove itself as a contender in the new era post Rob/Graeme/Simon/Colin. The new team is very conscious of their lack of experience, and they see it as a challenge. They know deep in their hearts that with such a young team they have the chance to plot a new direction. They are pretty buoyant about it. They have been in contact with Rob/Graeme/Simon/Colin, who are thrilled to see the new team forging ahead and plotting their own course. Rob/Graeme/Simon/Colin have some arguments and disagreements with the new guys, but they confided in me that they are really pleased to see the new guys standing up to them and having a go. Faculty Advisor at DDD, Brian D, who recently won a spanner for his services to the local engineering community, was quite animated when he told me that the team had pulled together to go on a team camp to bond and to decide the colour of the new car as a teambuilding exercise. Brian asked me about CCC University, as he invited them along to the team camp but they didn’t return his calls.
Request from team: That Brian C, Faculty Advisor at CCC, give Brian D a call so that they might meet and chat about potential collaborations between the two teams. Brian D is interested in offering use of his new spanner to CCC, in exchange for occasional use of their 6mm Allen key

University: EEE University College of Advanced Technical Universities
Strength: Brilliant facilities
EEE has just had an all new purpose built FSAE workshop completed, which is the envy of FSAE teams around the country. They have 5-axis screwdrivers, CNC ‘ed double overhead cam laser etched window latches, and a new spanner. The team has 24 hour a day access, a reward for their proactive efforts at improving OH&S procedures and responsible behaviour. They welcome uni tour groups, high school tour groups, and recently had ABBA playing at their concept design review and hard-point freeze in their workshop facility foyer auditorium. They keep it spotless, and work on the principle that good facilities enable them to build their simple, elegant car more quickly, rather than enable them to cram more into the year.
Request from team: That we are all invited to a viewing of Eric Bana’s “Love the Beast” on Sunday the 30th February at 7:00pm. Foyer auditorium, bring pretzels

University: FFF Institute of Advanced Technical University Technically Advanced Institutions
Weakness: Brilliant facilities
FFF has just had an all new purpose built FSAE workshop completed, which is the envy of FSAE teams around the country. They have 5-axis screwdrivers, CNC ‘ed double overhead cam laser etched window latches, and a new spanner. The team had 24 hour a day access, but lost it because they refused to clean up the composites lab. They aren't happy, because they wanted 7 axis screwdrivers but the uni only gave them 5 axis. They work on the principle that good facilities enable them cram more into the year than to build a simple, elegant car more quickly. Their last car looked like R2D2 mated with a Transformer. They came last, finishing just behind a plastic Aerofix model of R2D2 mating with a Transformer
Request from team: Space to rent. High tech workshop available, brand new except for singe marks in middle of design office where previous tenants spontaneously self-combusted. Contact Brian F on F@FFF.fsae.fail.edu.com.org.au

I’ll update you with more Australian FSAE news as it comes to hand….
Cheers,
Geoff

[Z]

So a couple of guys got together and they had a few moments. Z, am I using the couple and moment terms correctly?

Edward,

Hmmm... Well, "couples" are free vectors, so they always have the same "moment" wherever they happen to be. So, I guess, strictly speaking, a couple of guys getting together could only have the same, single moment, over and over again...? :)
~~~o0o~~~


Originally posted by Geoff:
Some points to prove:
That suspension doesn’t require double wishbones and 10+ points of relative motion on each corner
That you can build a fast car with purely locally made components
That you can make a car out of wood
That you can design a car that you can manufacture from scratch in less than a month
That you can design a car that you can manufacture in less than a fortnight
That you can design a car that costs you less than $10,000
That you can design a car with less than half the number of parts than your last one
That you don’t need a gearbox
Etc
And that any of the above can finish top 10

Geoff,

Much as I would love to spend a month building a simple, sub-$10k, top-ten finishing wooden car (I have in mind a nice "rosewood" finish), my current thinking is that a cruder, sheet-steel tubbed, sub-$5k car, built in a fortnight, would be a better proof-of-the-point by being a podium finisher, overall. :) (Both cars, of course, with singles, no gearbox, minimalist suspensions, etc.)

Z

(PS. Just saw your last post. I'd be building said car on the top of "windy hill". Under the tree, for shade. I think there is still some room in the shipping-container, to keep the generator out of the rain, and for storage of stuff. Not sure if all that is a "strength" or "weakness"? :))

[Kevin Hayward]

I am concerned by these couple moment talks.

I fully agree with Geoff's post about strengths and weaknesses. One of the things he missed is in analysing your competitors strengths (and weaknesses). Where a competitor has a strength it is helpful to see where it could limit them and become a weakness. This in turn helps you to see your own shortcomings as opportunities. Of course dont just apply stereotypes to your competitors, they will be as nuanced as your own team. Don't assume that you are working harder and smarter than your competitors. The sign that you are is when you complain that X team only wins because of...

A few examples:

Competitor University: GGG Management institute
Strength: Great management structure with 100 students signed on

University GGG will likely have inertia. All 100 student members are unlikely to be contributing good ideas. It is also likely that they will find it much harder to bring the whole team towards a united goal. This means your smaller team can investigate a potentially riskier solution to the overall design problem with fewer people to convince to get them all on board.


Competitor University: HHH Excellence University
Strength: Has a long history of success in competition, 10 wins so far

HHH will begin to feel attached to their legacy. It is likely that new team members will accept winning as the way it always is. If they are a big team that will add to inertia, if they are small they run the risk of losing the "key group" of people. Being at the top means there is less to prove than those still climbing. Will this competitor work as hard and as long as you are prepared too?


Competitor University: III Sandstone University
Strength: Best University in the country, great quality intake

This university will likely have expectations from their university, afterall at III they get the best of the best. Will they worry about what your little team will accomplish? Maybe the students will feel that because they are intelligent and their lecturers are great that they already have great engineering knowledge. Will they be able to match your individual zeal for learning? Furthermore will the expectations of the university weigh them down?


Competitor University: JJJ University of Engineering Economics
Strength: Craploads of cash and great facilities

This university will use their resources. They will be able to achieve more fromt their resources, and at times will be bound by them. No point having the laser scanner, 3d titanium printer, suites of simulation software, private spa bath unless you are going to use them, and as much as possible. Where they will do a back to back test on 23 different types of tyres, you are stuck only choosing one and getting on with it. Most likely will be the same set of tyres they are using anyway. Will they build to their resources or to just what they need?


Competitor University: Global United front of LLL Insitute of Carbon, and MMM Institute of Awesome Driving Skills
Strength: 2 Fantastically resourced universities working together, well managed, big team, history of success, global sponsorship network, male model driving squad, Zombie Colin Chapman as Faculty Advisor

This fictonal team appears unbeatable. But could they compete with 10 focused years from your team all working towards a unique and superior concept? Could they be just as susceptible to failing against a well thought out and executed long term plan from a minnow?


You should learn from what your competitors are and the actions they take. Be prepared to form your team in a way that will turn their strength into a weakness, even if it will take you years to do so. Be united in your vision, work hard, learn, manage expectations, use resources efficiently, and plan effectively and any team can rise to the top.

The opposite picture is contentment (the enemy of winning). Not fighting for a united vision, working at an acceptable level, being content with your current knowledge and best practices, and letting things roll along as they always have.

Lastly do you realise that there are FSAE teams that have been at this game for 30 years? Has their design and management processes been effective? If you imagined that your team was going to be around for the next 20 years is there anything you would like to set up now to make sure that in 2034 your team is unbeatable?

Kev

[Big Bird]

"So, I guess, strictly speaking, a couple of guys getting together could only have the same, single moment, over and over again...? "

It seems you have heard our trackside commentary at recent events, Z? :)

[Big Bird]

Good morning all,

I figured this is the best place to put this. I just wanted to wish you all the best and bid farewell to the FSAE.com forums, and the FSAE community. I have done my best to pass on what I learnt from my time in FSAE, and hope it has been of some help to you.

It has certainly been a rocky ride. Unfortunately things are not so great on the health front, and my Parkinsons Disease is getting worse by the day. Elsewhere on these boards there are discussions about the merit of being an imaginative engineer, and I am probably living proof that having an imagination is not really all that appreciated or valued in the automotive world. I had my purple patch, and with the aid of some fellow imaginative engineers and a tribe of practical ones we had a run from 2004 until 2007 that I will remember with pride for the rest of my days. But I've also learnt the hard way how being creative and having ideas can alienate you from your peers.

As it stands at the moment, I'm presently engaged in a battle with the authorities to prove my sanity, after some less than kind people accused me of being paranoid. Anyone with a grounding in basic logic will see the trap that accusation really is. Once such a seed takes root, your life as a free man is effectively ruined. Pretty well anything can be said behind my back - and I either accept it, or prove my paranoia by questioning it. The trap this is has just seen me spend 9 days in a psychiatric ward, and only a loophole I found in the Mental Health Act rules saved me from being committed involuntarily. Will they come back to get me? Do you seriously believe I'd even try to answer that?

I've had a fun and rather interesting time here. I made my mark with a team that had so little money that we had to settle for a slower simpler car that won. I thought about how that happened and found the link between racecar design and reality TV cooking shows. I've argued with my foes, agreed with friends, argued with friends and agreed with foes. Often all at the same time. I've apologized to engineers and watched them poke and prod it and wonder what a strange thing that was. And I wrote about psychology and watched it quickly sink in a sea of "I need formula for race-car - plz URGENT now".

But it seems there are a few out there who have been taking the p-one-five-S out of me, and who would rather play word games than admit it. I can only ponder in the absence of proof and honesty. So time to move on.

Thanks all for a fun ride. Over and out!

[JulianH]

Geoff, it really makes me so sad and angry to read your words. I wish you all the best in the world that you can fight everything thrown at you. We, the FSAE community, stand behind you. Stay strong!

[Pat Clarke]

Reading your post brings a tear to my eye Geoff.
Farewell from FSAE.com and good luck.
I will keep an eye on you in FB.

Hang in there and most of all, stay safe.

Pat

[Kevin Hayward]

Geoff,

You will be sorely missed, unless you take up my offer of coming over to the west. I am sure it is the Victorian absence of sun that causes half the problems.

This community and FSAE Oz will not be the same without you. You taught me that the alienated imaginative engineers would find friends and not just opponents in FSAE. That and you danced with my nan.

Kev

[mech5496]

Geoff it has been a hell of a ride so far... We might not have met in person, but I consider you a friend and an inspiration! Keep on fighting BB!

[MCoach]

I hope you stay safe.


Take care, good friend.

[Big Bird]

Thanks Pat, Harry, MC, Julian, Kev - cheers for your well wishes. I'm doing fine, amusing myself by contemplating the flaws of the medical and mental health systems and writing "Reasoning your way through the psychoanalytical testing process"....

[Bemo]

After not having been around this forum a lot for some time as things where quite busy, I just read the latest posts of this thread.

It's kind of hard to find words after reading this. As someone wrote before, although we never met in person, I consider you a good friend with whome I had some incredible discussions over the years who brought new thoughts to me and widened my mind on a lot of things. Without you a huge gap is opened on this forum.

All I can do is send you my best wishes and hope the best for you.

[Z]

Geoff,

I sent you an email (on "y7...").

Z

[Westly]

Thanks Geoff for the effort you put into helping FSAE.

I have just been re-reading this thread today and you and the other contributors have created an invaluable resource for future engineers and FSAE teams. I personally believe reading this thread and the discussions on this topic at your seminars have been the one most useful things I have learnt so far in engineering.

Thank you,

Westly.

[ed_pratt]

Really sorry to hear about your troubles Geoff.
A decade of FS involvement hasn't been enough to soak up half of what you've contributed. It's always been nice to log on and see a well constructed piece of advice about cooking in amongst all the car talk.

Wishing you all the best.

Ed

[make mcdermott]

Goeff,
FSAE and this forum will be much poorer for your absence until you work through your problems and can return. I am confident that you will reason your way through your current situation, as you have in the design process and project management.

You and your team earned my respect in 2006 - first as engineers by the performance of your car, then as honorable people by the way you handled the scoring problems.

“Reasoning your way through the design process” has been required reading for my students since it appeared. It very closely parallels the design process that we teach and applies to much more than FSAE cars. And you present it in a much more eloquent and entertaining way than I. To be sure that they read it, I told them that there would be a quiz; and I had to keep my word.

Be safe.

Make McDermott
Retired Texas A&M FSAE Advisor
1999-2014

[Ahmad Rezq]

Ops!
Something Perfect had disappeared :/

[cajunboy]

so sad that first post is gone.

[Big Bird]

Discussion of above process
There is nothing particularly ground-breaking about any of the above. However I personally think it is really important to break down this complex project into its constituent parts, and know how where each sub-problem ties into the project as a whole. Being part of the leadership group in our team years ago, we were faced with all manner of issues to deal with: budget and time management issues, workshop access, setting performance goals, design queries about individual components, packaging conflicts, tooling purchases etc etc etc. We certainly couldn’t solve these problems and make decisions without knowing where to file them and how they all linked into each other in the overall heirarchy.

I’ve made a few simplifications with the above process. Most notably, you could easily split up Levels 1 and 2 even further, into components integrating into sub-systems then integrating into the full vehicle. That is up to the individual, but probably not too relevant to my following argument.

I won’t bore you with too much analysis of Level 1 component design, as there are plenty of books out there on vehicle technical design. We should all be reasonably aware of what goes on here, our universities tend to focus on this for our engineering training and most of us should know how to use engineering software and even how to design and build individual components. This level is where most of the hard edged “science” takes place, (although even at this level we need to use some judgment, e.g. weight vs stiffness vs material cost vs manufacturability….). There are probably plenty of people around a uni who can offer you advice about component level design. It is also the level of design where you can spend lots of time and effort refining, for rather small gains overall.

Level 2 vehicle integration is where things start getting interesting, and this is where the good teams begin to shine. This is how, for instance, how your diff choice or your inner wheel packaging interacts with your suspension geometry, how all the suspension system ties in with the chassis, how power delivery matches up with tyre grip characteristics / chassis geometry, etc. In my year, we learnt some interesting lessons about integration when our choice of 10” wheels, large camber gains and floor mounted shock absorbers (all justified at an overall vehicle level), resulted in next to zero shock movement. We had to make some rather ugly tetrahedral upper a-arms to get around it, but we learnt from it.

Visually, you can get an idea of integration by how well load paths are fed into the chassis, or how the various controls sit comfortably with the driver. Teams could possibly assess their success at this level in terms of the overall handling of the vehicle, drivability, and overall track speed. Certainly when you see a Cornell or a UWA on track and at their best, you can see the effects of a well integrated vehicle.

Getting your Level 2 vehicle integration right is a pretty complex task, and is certainly not achievable simply by optimizing all your Level 1 components and then bolting them all together. Personally I found this Level 2 stuff to be the most technically challenging of the tasks that I faced, as it requires wisdom that you just don’t have as an incoming FSAE designer. Experience is the key and assistance and advice from alumni and design judges can be a wealth of information in this respect. (I am loath to say, that your academic support at uni might not be much help at this level. Once again, most academics are hard edged scientists / researchers, and their expertise is usually more about depth than it is about breadth. They are not often too helpful when trying to reason your way through a complex maze of competing priorities).

Level 3 is where this particular competition gets interesting, and where I would say the greatest gains can be had for the least impact on your time and money. I’d also say that it receives the least attention of the majority of teams, as it seems many have already decided what their overall design “answer” is before they enter the event (usually “we’re going to build the fastest lightest most powerful car and blow everyone to the weeds”). The organizers have developed a clever set of rules that not only reward vehicle speed, but also some “non-racing” parameters such as fuel economy, cost, manufacturability and even knowledge and ability to communicate. It gives teams who may lack the resources to build a full on mini-F1 a chance to compete, but at the same time it makes the competition possibly even more complex than F1 (i.e. vehicle speed and lap times aren’t the sole measure of success). Making some effort to understand the conflicts that are inherent in the rules and the scoring formulae goes a long way to developing an integrated strategy that scores well across the whole competition. I will address this a little further later in my ramblings.

Level 4 Project Management is just that – it is the set of tasks that ensures that the whole team works together, that deliverables are delivered in a timely manner, that key relationships are maintained with outside stakeholders, and that future teams’ chances of success are enhanced by this particular project. Level 3 competition success is an important factor, but not the only factor to be addressed at this level. Did you complete the project on time and on budget? Is your university happy with your year’s work? Are your team members / workshop staff / sponsors and supporters happy? Did you manage to put a decent effort into all parts of the project (e.g. both dynamic AND static events)? Have you enhanced the prospects of future teams by your effort? These are the sorts of questions that define success at the project management level.

Measures of success at each level
When you break a project up into the four steps above, you can then make sense of how to measure your progress at each level. As engineers we should be letting data make decisions for us, so it is important to understand what measures are relevant.

Level 1: Typical engineering detail level performance parameters – masses, power figures, coefficients of friction, stiffnesses, natural frequencies, damping coefficients, piece costs, etc
Level 2: Whole vehicle level performance parameters: acceleration capabilities in each direction (forward, lateral and braking), fuel consumption, whole vehicle cost
Level 3: Competition points scored
Level 4: Management level measurables – key ones I would suggest being time, money and goodwill. (I have no idea how you measure goodwill, but I’d still call it a measurable as we can get a sense of whether it is increasing or decreasing).

From the above I’d hope it is apparent there is a bit of a “flow” occurring between levels. The individual pieces with their masses, stiffnesses, power outputs etc, all come together at a higher level to give us a complete vehicle with certain acceleration & fuel consumption characteristics. The whole-vehicle performance characteristics then tie in with our static event skills to enable us to score a certain amount of points in the competition. The number of points scored can then be tied into the dollars and hours spent to determine the overall value of the project (I’d suggest dollars / point and hours / point being the most useful tools at this level).

It is our job as designers to try to understand this flow, and how the relationships work between different variables and different levels so that we can make wise decisions that give us greatest return for our own given resources. Many of the mistakes we make come from not taking the time to understand some of these relationships, or assuming some of these relationships are obvious or given.

I’ll come back to this later, but note that many of the parameters that are often used as outright deciding factors by many of us in our projects, such as mass & power, are deeply buried in the detail design of level 1. If your team management is making project level decisions based on Level 1 parameters (e.g. “this year we need to lose 5kg” or “this year we need another 5hp”), then either your management is fluent in the way that these values convert across the various levels to dollars per point and hours per point, or they are misguided.

The design path
In a complex project like this, you need to construct yourself a logical pathway that neatly weaves its way through the above levels of integration. You certainly can’t start at level 1 component design and then work your way up. I would say a successful vehicle project plan would look something like this:

1. Establish Level 4 Project goals and constraints, defining your measures of success for the overall project
2. Develop Level 3 competition strategy outlining what resources will be attributed to what events
3. Develop Level 2 vehicle performance goals based on your competition strategy, detailing whole vehicle and sub-system goals
4. Design Level 1 components to suit sub system and vehicle goals
5. Manufacture Level 1 components and assemble into working whole
6. Test vehicle to see how it matches up to Level 2 vehicle performance goals, developing as required
7. Compete at event, in accordance with Level 3 strategy previously determined
8. Finalize project, comparing final outcomes with initial measures of success and reporting to key stakeholders accordingly.

Notice how the process follows a bit of a “V”. We start with top level project goals, work our way down through all the various levels to define our individual component goals. We then work our way back up through to the higher levels, at each level cross referencing where we are, to where we had planned to be. The plan might be a little simplified, and we may very well do a bit of back-and-forth at the middle levels as our project might not work out as wanted, but the basic process is there.

[Big Bird]

Determining a Competition Strategy
From my observation over the years, I’d say that a large proportion of teams have very little idea of how to deal with the middle levels of the project. Many come in with roughly thrown-together ideas of Level 4 project goals (e.g. “We’re going to blow everyone away”) and then barge straight into Level 1 detail design decisions (our car needs to be 190kg, we need a Honda engine, do we want a turbo, our uprights need to be CNC’ed 7071 aluminium, what diff should we use, we really need a carbon tub, etc etc etc). The level 2 & 3 reasoning are mainly glossed over on the basis of a series of untried assumptions.

I believe the greatest understanding of what is important in this project can be gained by some reasoned analysis at level 3. We have a very tightly defined set of rules that set out what sort of track we are competing on (70 metre long straights, slaloms of defined spacing, average speeds, etc), and we have a set of point-scoring formulae that tightly define how well we will score for given performance outcomes. Competition results can give us a good idea of what sort of longitudinal and lateral g’s these cars can achieve, and we can usually find some sort of track map with a bit of searching too, so we can’t argue we don’t know what we are in for.

The competition rules are too complex to make absolute generalizations like “more power is better” or “less weight is better”. In some cases we have conflicts directly related to the performance of the vehicle (e.g. more power can drive down lap times but can also drive up fuel consumption), in some cases the conflicts are less direct (less weight can increase track speed but can tend to decrease vehicle robustness and reliability). FSAE is all about finding balance, and you will not find that balance point if you can only think in absolutes.

When sorting out a strategy at this level I think it is important to stand above the specific technical details of the vehicle and look at the design on a very basic level. You are looking at the car at a conceptual level, and the goal is to establish whether a car of “x” kW and “y” kg will score better than a car of “a” kW and “b” kg. Is your strategy to try for outright straight line speed, or cornering speed, or fuel economy, or some middle ground with a bit of each? We are basically looking for trends in the rules, and specifics such as gear ratios or suspension settings are not particularly relevant at this level. (For example, when you are considering the choice between a 165kg single and a 200kg 4 cyl, it is not worth worrying about specific gearing ratios or suspension geometries of the two options because either can be optimized when you get further into the detail design). The essence of good decision making is in reducing a complex problem down to a limited number of variables that you can deal with, (and of course picking the variables that are going to give you the most useful info).

The best few hours work I ever did in this project was to set up a simple lapsim to see how longitudinal and lateral accelerations affect laptimes, (i.e. taking the level 2 vehicle performance outputs, and seeing how they affect level 3 pointscoring). The first lapsim I did was really simple – breaking up an autocross/endurance trackmap into a series of straight lines and circular arcs, assigning appropriate lateral and longitudinal accelerations (assuming constant accel), and then finding laptimes. Change acceleration values, see change in outcome. Although very simple, it was one step up from simple “more power:weight ratio is better” reasoning, and gave some really useful results. For example, according to this simple autocross/endurance lapsim:
- A 10% increase in lateral acceleration gives approximately 8 times the points return of a 10% increase in forward acceleration.
- A 10% increase in lateral acceleration gives approximately 14 times the points return of a 10% increase in braking deceleration
(I have no concern sharing these figures, because people like Pat Clarke or Claude Rouelle aren’t going to believe you unless you can prove it yourself. Or come up with your own lapsims that disprove me. Just do it).

Although every model is an abstraction of reality in some way, (in particular this lapsim didn’t cover transients, and assumed constant forward accel whereas we are usually diminishing along the straight) I was confident that the figures were at least ballpark. Average speeds were around 55kmh, max speed was 100-110kmh, laptimes were around a second off from actual event times, WOT time was around 17%. So there were enough “ticks” there to indicate that we weren’t way off the ball.

Note that by analysing how accelerations in each direction are affecting pointscore, we are completely removing the means by which we are achieving these accelerations. Therefore we are clearing our mind of details like whether the vehicle is a 600/4 or 450 single, or carbon tub or spaceframe, or any other design details that may be clouding the argument.

Once you have a rough acceleration-based lapsim, you can start to extend it incrementally to incorporate lower level data. Do whatever you want, but at this point in time my own lapsim inputs include overall mass, engine power, tyre grip coefficients in each direction and tyre load sensitivity, rear axle load under acceleration, frontal area and drag coefficients, and engine thermal efficiency; and outputs are times and pointscores for each event, % time grip limited and power limited, min and max speeds, fuel used, and maybe a few other things I’ve forgotten.

(One of the important things is to model fuel economy. Hard to do exactly, but as a start I broke it down into an overall energy load, [including kinetic energy, drag and rolling resistance], and an estimated engine thermal efficiency. Knowing petrol is around 44MJ/kg, and is around 0.7 kg per litre, you can get an idea of litres used. Presently my model predicts around 2.5 litres for the RMIT car, and around 3.2 litres for a UWA style car – which is pretty well representative).

The importance of going through the above is that you can start to get some idea of how your level 1 detail design decisions affect level 3 competition scores. If you know how a 1kg weight difference or a 1kW power difference affects overall scores, you can start making informed decisions on your overall strategy based on engineering data, rather than “we need to lose 2kg because University X is lighter than us”.

You can also start reasoning your way through some of the more complex issues related to this event. Rather than simple arguments like “we have to have engine X because it the most powerful”, we can start to be a little more refined:
“We use engine Y. It has 10kW less than engine X, and this costs us approximately 30 points in straight line acceleration across the dynamic events. However engine Y weighs 10kg less than engine X, and this gains us 15 points in cornering performance. Also, the lighter weight and lower speeds save us 10 points in fuel economy, and the cost saving saves us 5 points in the cost event. Therefore we are at no potential disadvantage to engine Y, and the time saving from this simpler design gives us more time for driver training and testing”.

(The figures might be a little different, but that last argument is heading in the direction of where we were going at RMIT a few years back).

Reality Check
The greatest lesson I learnt by working through the above process is how little effect the potential performance of a design really plays out on final results. For example, my own model indicates that a 1kg weight saving is worth around 1 point in the overall event. If we can see that for instance, a 5kg saving is worth maybe 5-10 points in terms of overall potential - and then we see that the top 5 in a comp may be spread by 200 to 300 points – it puts perspective on all that time you spend saving 1kg out of your chassis or a few hundred grams out of your uprights. And that if your team ended up 250 points behind the winner, or even 50 points behind the winner, it is not going to be a change in your vehicle’s performance specs that is going to bridge the gap.

On that note I might call it quits for now. There is plenty more to go depending on when I find the time, and whether or not anyone cares to read any of this (full marks for getting this far if you have). Any comments or feedback most appreciated.

Cheers all,

Geoff

[mech5496]

Thanks for having that back Geoff, possibly the most valuable single post in the entire forums. Also glad to see you back in here buddy!

[Lachys114]

Thank you Geoff. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading through your "Thesis" and many excellent additions by others.

[mrrc]

Does anyone know of a video series or playlist to introduce new students to FSAE?

[DougMilliken]

SAE Detroit section has a few videos, start here: https://www.youtube.com/user/SAEDetroit
I'm sure there are others on YouTube, have fun searching!
Once you get serious, my choice would be books to study, see topic Sticky: BOOK LIST to reference for car design (http://www.fsae.com/forums/showthread.php?1834-BOOK-LIST-to-reference-for-car-design)

The new edition of Learn & Compete is excellent, order page,
https://www.sae.org/publications/books/content/b-990/