Oval track

[Jersey Tom]

This has been discussed before but we'll bring it up again.

I was fortunate enough to talk to a design judge of ours who had valuable feedback for once (previous years.. not so much. Poor luck I guess). Sounded like for some years he has been lobbying SAE to run a wheel-to-wheel oval track event at FSAE. Oval track is obviously also the by far and large dominant form of auto racing in the US.

While I think wheel-to-wheel is a little extreme and way dangerous, the more I think about it the more intrigued I am by having an oval event, especially among a number of others that require the car to be balanced L/R! As boring as I think NASCAR and IRL are to watch, I give a lot of credit to the race engineers. Being able to set up a car asymmetrically seems like a real challenge to do right and make the most of it. Maybe even make the event slightly higher speed (80mph avg?) to make use of aero more of a possibility.. assuming we have less load sensitive tires.

Those crazy baja guys have separate unique events at each of their competitions, why not us? The new FSAE East could have the road race setup.. maybe have FSAE Michigan with the oval track.. and the FSAE West - Low rider competition.

[Jersey Tom]

This has been discussed before but we'll bring it up again.

I was fortunate enough to talk to a design judge of ours who had valuable feedback for once (previous years.. not so much. Poor luck I guess). Sounded like for some years he has been lobbying SAE to run a wheel-to-wheel oval track event at FSAE. Oval track is obviously also the by far and large dominant form of auto racing in the US.

While I think wheel-to-wheel is a little extreme and way dangerous, the more I think about it the more intrigued I am by having an oval event, especially among a number of others that require the car to be balanced L/R! As boring as I think NASCAR and IRL are to watch, I give a lot of credit to the race engineers. Being able to set up a car asymmetrically seems like a real challenge to do right and make the most of it. Maybe even make the event slightly higher speed (80mph avg?) to make use of aero more of a possibility.. assuming we have less load sensitive tires.

Those crazy baja guys have separate unique events at each of their competitions, why not us? The new FSAE East could have the road race setup.. maybe have FSAE Michigan with the oval track.. and the FSAE West - Low rider competition.

[PatClarke]

Interesting comment John. You mean A design Judge gave you advice of no value in the past?
In my experience, any design judge I know would bend over backwards to give helpful advice.
However, there are a lot of teams and not many judges to go around, so perhaps thats the root cause of the problem.
Or possibly a problem based on communication being a two way street?

In any case, forget the 'Low Rider' comp...remember, there is a minimum ground clearance rule from next year ;-)

Pat

[The Bunker]

Hahaha,Ill agree its cool to imagine the chance to put the car you just spent a year building up against other teams in such a way. Unfortunately I highly doubt we will ever see such a thing....mostly due to the safety aspect of it.

It would however be interesting to see the performance differnce between all the engine/chassis/tire (singles vs 4 cyl, etc.) combinations in such an event.

Guess we'll never know......

[Jersey Tom]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">You mean A design Judge gave you advice of no value in the past? </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

In particular last year, we went to two judges for some feedback on our car. One was from our queue, one was just around and was nice enough to offer some comments.

The guy from our queue didn't remember our car at all, we would ask both specific and general questions and get vague answers at best before he had to leave. The second guy commented on it being a well-made, cleanly laid out car.. but then pointed out "Well one of the big issues is rod ends in bending."

There were no rod ends in bending. Our a-arms were all spherical bearings, and somehow he thought one of our tie rods was an a-arm or part of an a-arm or something that would see other than axial loading. Took a good couple minutes to convince him otherwise.

The guy this year on the other hand gave us in-depth feedback on everything, design decisions, how we presented it, suspension, powertrain, everything. Real cool guy.

Getting back to the oval idea though, I meant in my original post that for the FSAE event it would not be wheel to wheel.. one or maybe two cars out at a time, spaced out, depending on big the oval was. Just a test to see how well you can engineer and setup your car for such a track.

[Jersey Tom]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">In any case, forget the 'Low Rider' comp...remember, there is a minimum ground clearance rule from next year ;-) </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

I just noticed this now.. where is there mention of this? Or proposed 08 rule changes..

[Kurt Bilinski]

I think it would be kinda funny seeing 80mph cars of any kind on the oval at California Speedway. You'd be up to speed in about 3 seconds then you could take a nap. It would be pretty boring since the car's wouldn't see more than 0.3 lateral Gs. The wheel-to-wheel aspect of it I think would be too dangerous from a liability point, though in practice, the cars would quickly get so strung out it wouldn't be an issue.