FSAE Team Structure Q's

[Urvina]

Would someone be willing to give me some good ideas as to how I could organized the team into groups, e.g.- Engine/Drivtrain crew, Safety crew, Body/Frame crew, Finance crew...

I have scheduled a metting that's open to all full-time students at my univeristy, and I need to be able to answer a lot of questions. This has been one of the most frequent one brought up to me. I will be looking at other team's websites to see what they have done, too.

Any suggestions would be great, I am overwhelmed with this whole FSAE Team Leader thing...

Erin Urvina
University of Alaska Anchorage
ME http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_confused.gif

[Urvina]

Would someone be willing to give me some good ideas as to how I could organized the team into groups, e.g.- Engine/Drivtrain crew, Safety crew, Body/Frame crew, Finance crew...

I have scheduled a metting that's open to all full-time students at my univeristy, and I need to be able to answer a lot of questions. This has been one of the most frequent one brought up to me. I will be looking at other team's websites to see what they have done, too.

Any suggestions would be great, I am overwhelmed with this whole FSAE Team Leader thing...

Erin Urvina
University of Alaska Anchorage
ME http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_confused.gif

[IsheeM]

Well first of all get used to being overwhelmed. Secondly, it doesn't matter how great of an organizational chart you have it you don't have enough/right people to fill it.

However, I think the optimum setup would be to have a team leader for suspension, chassis, drive-train, engine, controls, maybe ergonomics and a chief vehicle engineer to oversee the team leaders. I also think it would be important to have someone whose only task is to monitor the budget and spending as well as researching/recruiting companies who give product discounts to FSAE teams. A PR person is very helpful also. I personally would like to have someone solely designated to CAD vehicle assembly, kind of a packaging group. This person/group would assemble the most recent CAD data at least twice a month; this concept works better for established teams though.

In anticipation of new members an in an effort to take full advantage of the benefits provided by SAE, we will be restructuring our team next year. We currently only have a FSAE team. However, we plan to actually have a SAE section and FSAE section. This will elevate some stress from the FSAE team and free up some of their time. Now if we have just got to find the people.

Just an observation, as I live in a place where people don't care too much about motorsports or don't think of it as anything other than NASCAR. There are many engineering students willing to volunteer their time for officer positions and typical club bs, as proven by our ASME section. However, they are not so willing to volunteer their time to do any engineering work. There seems to be a misconception around here that you don't have to work too hard in school in order to get a job out of college, which do to our awesome Career Center is partly true. Therefore, it is increasingly difficult to motivate these individuals (or find self motivated people) as most of them don't aspire to be in the motorsports industry. They are just going to get the ME degree. So my plan is to involve these people in the SAE bureaucracy/club bs and then suck them into the FSAE team. We'll see how that works out though.

[Denny Trimble]

Here's how we structure our team:

TA (grad student): Professional Cat Herder

Co-Captains (2 undegrads): Drill Sergeants

Tech Groups:
Engine
Drivetrain
Chassis (frame + bodywork)
Driver Interface (seat, pedals, steering column, shifter, dash)
Suspension

Admin Groups:
Fundraising / Sponsorship
Driver Training & Maintenance
Finance
Public Relations

Every team member must serve on a tech and admin group. Each tech and admin group has a leader that reports to the weekly Group Leader Meeting. We have two team meetings a week, alternating between tech and admin presentations and meetings.

You need about 20 people minimum to make this system work; you could consolidate groups a little bit if you have fewer people.

[syoung]

Check out the "Team Structure" link on our website http://www.formulastudent.warwick.ac.uk/ - there are 14 of us and the structure is working quite well.

[dartmouth01]

my advice is to have at least two captains, if you dont have enough people to field a hierarchial organization such as Warwick. Things change year to year, but this year we are running with three captains, two technical advisors, and 8 project teams( ie Engine Management, Driver Controls, Suspension, etc).

[Frank]

orginise people wrt skills not "systems"

Actual "leadership" is not difficult for a first year team. It is the "technical direction" that is difficult, and problems with technical direction is the quickest way to pull apart a team. Clever research and reverse engineering is important. Keep the design simple.

Remember to establish a geometric reference for the design, to avoid confusion. We found it easy (if you have a vertical main roll hoop) to set the geometric reference at the main roll hoop, central, on the ground.

In fact the orginisation of CAD is an art in itself, I could talk for hours about this.

Buy your parts as quickly as possible (you need them before you design), and insist that they are modelled acurately. DONT trust someone else's engine model. Get a set of wheels with much offset. (keizer wheels 13*6 and wilwood dynalight single calipers are a good start). Obviously get your engine (and diff?) ASAP

make sure the integration of bodywork is in your minds whilst you design.

Best advise, dont cut chassis tube too early. Try and have the suspension sorted. I suggest its easier to avoid ARB's altoghether on a first year car (many top teams still run no ARB's)

best of luck

Frank

[Sam Zimmerman]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Frank:
Keep the design simple.
</div></BLOCKQUOTE>
I couldn't agree more. Our simplest car to date turned the best lap times.

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">the orginisation of CAD is an art in itself, I could talk for hours about this. </div></BLOCKQUOTE>
We do talk for hours about this. Use cad as a real tool, not just a pretty picture. Make sure you model EVERYTHING, including how you are going to attach your seat, rack, etc. Almost without fail when there is a problem with assembly the same problem can be found on the solid model. Put someone in charge of making sure there are no errors here.

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">I suggest its easier to avoid ARB's altoghether on a first year car (many top teams still run no ARB's) </div></BLOCKQUOTE>
I found it interesting at the conference last weekend that Lee Stohr doesn't put anti-roll bars on his D sports racers. They are about 200 lbs heavier, go about 100 mph faster, and swept the podium at the SCCA runoffs. If these are too light for ARB's, then I see no reason why any FSAE car needs them, other than for sex appeal. We are looking into running a pretty extensive experiment in this area this semester.

[Cement Legs]

One of the biggest suggestions that I could make for a team trying to come up with administration ideas is to get eveyone together who really really really wants to be a part of the club, and democratically brainstorm through any issues that people want to discuss. Open floor. Let eveyone feel like they have a say and that as a team you guys can go by the book or invent your own systems. I think more important than the systems themselves is how well people buy into them http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_wink.gif.