Motorsport or Design?

[Kevin Hayward]

First up I am very sorry if I offend people unduly with this post. What I post here are my opinions and are not representative of the University I teach at, nor the team I am faculty advisor for.

I was very disappointed in reading the latest "Pat's Corner". In it Pat bemoaned the fact that Formula Student / FSAE has become more about motorsport than engineering design education. Furthermore there was some indication that the points score in the competition reflects this. I have heard this view from a couple of people and I find it both frustrating and at times condescending.

To start off with I think it is a bit crazy to try and excite students about engineering using motorsports and then turn around and complain that students are excited about motorsports.

Secondly ALL of the points allocated in an event are allocated on the decisions made by the students:

- Engineering design tests the ability of students to present the reasoning of their DESIGN to experts
- Marketing tests the ability of the students to present a business case behind their DESIGN
- Cost measures the amount of resources required to manufacture the DESIGN and how well documented it is
- The dynamic events test the actual outcome (or success/failure) of the DESIGN and development process.

Particularly:
- Skidpan, acceleration, and autocross test the overall performance of the DESIGN
- Endurance tests the reliability of the DESIGN while operating at its expected limits
- Fuel efficiency / Economy measures the resources required during the operation of the DESIGNED vehicle

Most points are allocated to the performance of the designed vehicle. How can this be a bad thing? The real engineering world we are training students for is not a kind one. It is not a place where the consumers accept products that do not meet their design goals.

There appears to be a continuing misunderstanding that the teams that are doing well in this competition are somehow offering a substandard education to their students. Because they are targeted at maximising the points output of the vehicles that they are missing the subtleties of engineering design. This is utter crap!! Engineering is very simple. You have a problem and you need to solve it as effectively as you can within resource constraints. In FSAE that is attempting to get as many points out of 1000 as possible, with whatever money and time from team members that you can get together.

Some teams label themselves with a motorsport name, does that make it easier or harder to get the required resources?

Some teams focus on development at the expense design, which will yield the best success over time?

Some teams go the motorsport promotion route and drape women over cars, how does that work out for them?

Some teams do not try some of the innovative ideas for novel suspension or faster manufacturing, does this leave them open to lose in the future?



Numerous times I have seen involvement in FSAE transform students from uninterested students plodding along in their degrees into excited capable engineers that have been welcomed by industry. To suggest that this whole thing is now more of a motorsport competition (paid drivers/rides, big sponsorship, closed doors etc.) instead of a design education competition (students pushing themselves to be better, know more and develop as engineers) is ridiculous.

It appears that there is a growing desire amongst some people in decision making roles in the competition to fiddle with things. Hundreds of universities around the world have shown their support for the competition as it was formed. This would not happen if they felt that FSAE / FStudent was against the goals in providing high quality engineering education.

For those (few) growing increasingly vocal in their efforts to drastically change the outcomes of the competition I ask one thing:

Please Stop!

It is like a bad parody of Dr Frankenstein distraught at the fact that his experiment turned out to be a success.

Kev

[Will M]

Education or Motorsport?
There is no doubt that FS has been wildly successful, and I would argue that it has been because it is not ‘Formula Sewing Machine’.
Every year hundreds of teams have to recruit new members.
And these recruits are not professionals or experienced engineering students.
They are, at least for my old team, 18 years olds.
And 18 year olds don’t care about sewing machines.

In the end FS is about the students.
The teams have to sell themselves to the Uni and sponsors for funding but also to the students.
They have to sell that the idea of FS is worth the years of work and the all-nighters.
That having a week long competition in the middle of exams is worth it.
That the busted knuckles and endless bureaucracy are worth it.
That the writing the cost and design reports so your work can literally be judged is worth it.
All to make you a better engineer.
That is what you have to sell to an 18 year old.

And no 18 year old is going to buy that, so instead we sell the idea of a racecar.
Even though it really isn’t one.
You have to get 18 year olds to suspend their disbelief and buy into your team.
They might stay for the education but they come for the racing.
Even though it really isn’t racing.

If they want to take the what motorsport there is in FS out you might gain more Uni support, more sponsor funding, and happier insurance companies.
But you will lose your students.

That is my two cents for what it is worth.
-William

[mech5496]

Allow me to disagree. If you take a look at top teams, you will understand that we resemble motorsport teams in many ways; from DAQ and testing to the sometimes ashtonishing build quality of some cars. To that extend we might as well be way ahead of many non professional motorsport team. And I always find the final 10 cars in Endurance quite a sight...

[Charles Kaneb]

This competition is about teaching practical project management, design, and construction. A race car is just a sufficiently complex project that going through the full process takes up all your time for a year. So why should most of the points be given to a bunch of rather boring-to-watch racing events driven by some old go-karters?

How else would you tell how well everyone's design works? When I go to buy a sewing machine, I care about how well it sews - can it hold a straight line, can it avoid derailing around a corner, can it put a needle through Kevlar even after it gets dull? When I go to buy a drill, I care about how well it drills - how straight and hard does the chuck hold the bit, how much torque can it exert before stalling, how long does the battery last? When I go to buy a cement mixer, I care about how well it mixes - is it easy to clean, is it capable of making good concrete from cheap, damaged sacks, is it going to be able to run continuously when plugged in without tripping the breaker?

When I buy a car, I care about performance, and so does everyone else! So it makes sense that we decide the success or failure of our year's work by a series of time trials.

If you want to get rid of the "build what everyone else does and find a better driver and win the race" approach and the "we'll just build the same car we did last year because it worked then and we don't know as much as last year's team did" approach, then you need to change the puzzle we solve each year.

Motorsport encourages these approaches, because car owners like trying to justify their expenditures on cars as multi-year investments, and spectators don't claim to like going to races where one team understands something the others don't yet. The main objective of rules writers in most series is to try to turn the clock back to somewhere between 1967 and 1976, to where everyone understands that more downforce equals less straightaway speed and where everyone understands that a more durable car is going to be heavier and slower.

But those rules writers are like King Canute's courtiers, believing that the King can turn back the sea! Ground effect exists. Carbon fiber exists. Engineers who can analyze complicated, optimized geometries for parts and machinists who can make them exist.

Racing - and for that matter any other worthwhile advanced engineering endeavor - takes up every dollar that can be spared, regardless of your approach or that of the rulesmakers. Do you want us to be worried about minutiae and spending all our money on a steady stream of new, limited-lifespan junk like the karters? Do you want us spending $50,000 on data acquistion, searching for hundredths of a second within "if we don't say you can modify this, then you can't" rulesets like the sporty car racers? A guy with some plywood and a couple of one-way clutches out of an automatic transmission could build a significantly faster kart than anything the CIK will let you have. A guy with access to a Summit Racing catalog can throw together a significantly faster Camaro-with-a-rollcage sportscar than any GT series will let you have.

We should've seen a 250-MPH lap at Indy or an Indy 500 finisher running unrefueled on a 60 gallon tank of methanol by now. Race teams will either spend the money on technological progress or on more gas, tires, and motorhomes.

FIRST Robotics has the right approach. Change the game enough that you can't win every year with anything resembling the same bot. We have a vehicle dynamics problem to solve when we design a new car each year, and we're going to build a new car each year. No reason it shouldn't be a different one each year. Next year, mandate a spool, but only for next year.

And in the end, it's the dynamic events that'll tell us whether we're really making progress with all this work! You can't tell whether a team has understood what's important and what's not without making a storming performance in the dynamic events the goal every team goes for. We won't get to the $30,000, 300-mile range, 300,000 mile durability, 0-60 in 3 seconds electric car without making the measurable goals the ones worth going for.

[exFSAE]

Originally posted by mech5496:
Allow me to disagree. If you take a look at top teams, you will understand that we resemble motorsport teams in many ways

Resemblance in overconfidence, yes.

[Z]

Kevin,

Well, I've just read that particular "Pat's Corner", and, unsurprisingly, find it to be HYPOCRISY IN THE EXTREME.

For more than a decade Pat has encouraged students to build cars that are effectively small clones of Formula Fords. Yes, real racing cars! To paraphrase;
"Don't think the problem through!"
"Don't try anything original!"
"Just blindly copy the same-old, same-old, boring old racing cars!"

Despite my asking many times, Pat has yet to make any comment regarding his support, or otherwise, of the "Creativity and Imagination" clause in the Rules. This lack of response strongly suggests he is opposed to C&I. But what is an "engineer" other than someone who solves a problem by using tradesman-like skills in an "ingenious" way? (FWIW, "ingenium" is the etymological root of "engineer".) Yes, hypocrisy in the extreme.
~o0o~

When UWA turned up at FSAE-A 2012 with perhaps the most original and advanced suspension DESIGN in the history of FSAE, they were rewarded with 3 points out of 200! Sure, the car was unfinished, but that didn't stop it competing normally in Cost and Presentation. Clearly, there was an intent by the Officials (Pat?) to penalise UWA for their excellent DESIGN efforts.

Furthermore, it appears there were attempts to discourage ALL students from ever actually DESIGNING their cars, as opposed to just copying the same-old, same-old "PAT" ("polish a turd") racing car. From Pete Marsh's post in the "UWA/Lotus 88..." thread;
The issue was "this was not allowed in F1, so what would make you think you could bring it here?",
"The FIA has ruled on this and it is not allowed.", ...

The Officials (Pat?) tried to ban the car, and presumably ALL future such cars, using arguments equating FSAE to real Motorsports! Yes, real Motorsports, which are now effectively all "spec series", and any original DESIGN is banned. Hypocrisy in the extreme.
~o0o~

And as for EDUCATING the students, who will do this?

I hope it is not Pat, because for years he has been peddling the fallacious claptrap that "migrating roll centres" are a bad thing. This is one of the many fairy-tales that still exist in the Motorsports cottage-industry, but have no basis whatsoever in the age-old field of Rigid-Body Mechanics. Poor old Newton, Euler, etc... Why did they bother?

How about Claude, who is an internationally renowned expert in, ... wait for it, ... MOTORSPORTS! Well, again from Pete's post;
"We spent a couple of hours, with pencil sketches and the actual car, with Claude before he could see what we had done and how it worked."
So, who is educating who? Hypocrisy in the extreme.
~o0o~

Too much hypocrisy.....

I will add something positive later, but first I have to go out back and be sick.... http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_frown.gif

Z

[Charles Kaneb]

Z, they got three points in design because the car didn't run and wasn't anywhere near complete. Most cars that do not take part in dynamic events score under 50 points in design.

[mech5496]

Charles I have an objection here. We scored 80/150 in design at FSAE Michigan 2010 although we didn't ran a single dynamic event. And theres a huge difference between 3 and 50 points.

[billywight]

I don't know Pat personally and have never met him, but I do know that he has put forth years of hard work and an incredible amount of time and effort to help FSAE grow, and more importantly help the students grow into great engineers. Don't turn this into an anti-Pat thread as this is not what he deserves after all he has done for us! Just like you are entitled to your own opinion, so is he, and this article is is just that, an opinion (and one based on a lot of experience at that).

Kevin makes good points in his post, but so does Pat. I'm currently the community adviser for the team at my former university and see the very issues Pat mentions. It's always been hard to get money and/or any form of support out of the school because they always thought it was just a racecar or motorsport and not the amazing engineering learning opportunity that it really is. It was always the human powered submarine team or some other equally disappointing club that got all the attention simply because of the motorsports connotations that FSAE has. With big corporate sponsorships like Red Bull coming in, that's only making these connotations worse. Sure, it is on us to convince the university of the benefits of FSAE as an engineering competition and not a motorsports event, and that is certainly a great skill to have, however, things are not getting any easier.

I'm not saying that Red Bull as a sponsor is a bad thing or that the current direction FSAE is heading is a bad thing, but it is certainly a change from years past. I'm also not offering any solutions to this "problem", I'm just trying to point out that Pat does have valid points just as much as Kevin does. Teams are going to have to work harder to convince outsiders of the amazing benefits of FSAE and that it isn't just a motorsports competition.

As far as changing the competition to emphasize more on engineering and less on "motorsports", my vote is to leave it the same (or very nearly the same). It would be nice if there were some way to level the playing field as far as driver ability, however, that's easier said than done, and a good reason to get your cars finished early for lots of driver training and debugging!

[onemaniac]

It's really hard to take motorsports away from FS. If we are here to design and build race cars we're certainly part of motorsports, but not racing teams because we don't really race these cars.

To me what Pat is trying to say is that 'some' students mix up their priorities (between classes and hands-on FS experience) and often neglect the importance of theoretical part of their education. I would not argue with this because it is quite true.
The moral of the story is "go to class"

[Charlie]

My opinion is simple; students get academia everywhere else they turn at university. FSAE is intended to give a practical face to their studies. Results are what practical experience is made of. In the real world, there is ZERO credit for an interesting design that doesn't work in the field (on track). The design event is great and important, but it is judged on opinion not real-world merit and is not jusitified to be the bulk of the points for that reason.

I could not disagree more with the referenced article's premise. Using examples of what students say in design to reinforce the premise is irrelevant, I've heard a little bit of everything in design. University boards were fickle 20 years ago and still are. Worried parents, well they exist no matter what and I doubt too much extracurricular project is the first worry they have. My personal experience is that some sponsors really like the 'racing' side and some don't care. If there are some that don't like the motorsport side, there is plenty else to talk about. Either way, sponsors are more about results than learning (one might say that you learn more with less), so why would the article care about sponsors?

If teams are focused more on results now instead of trying to impress judges, all I can say is IT IS ABOUT TIME! I am tired of hearing how great a concept is when it flat out doesn't work because of the details. In the real world, details and results matter (perhaps more so in motorsport than other industries) so I see this trend as overwhelmingly positive and achieving the goals of the competition.

[atm92484]

If this monster really does exist it is not entirely the students' fault. The rule book has been rewarding this for years so why wouldn't teams roll with it?

In the Carroll Smith days, it was about building a weekend autocrosser. Nobody in the real autocross world wants to pay for an all composite car nor will they be capable of repairing it using stuff in their garage. The competition "back then" recognized that and simple cars resulted. The mid-2000s cars from Cornell and Texas A&M were probably the best example of this. I didn't recognize it then but now I really admire what they did - it was good stuff.

If you want to make it not about motorsports and more about training engineers, how about reward teams that come up with simple designs and penalize teams that come up with overly complicated and expensive ones? No employer will reward something that costs 10x as much but only performs 5% better (the wannabe mini-F1 car); they'll gladly take the solution that does 95% of the task for a fraction of the cost (the 2/3 scale Formula Ford).

Everyone knows that if you want to be in the top 5, 10, whatever you need to do well in all events since this competition has gotten so competitive. However the events that are more engineering and less motorsports are worth a smaller percentage of the score. The competition contradicts what Pat says. How about this - if your car costs twice as much, it should be twice as fast?

I find it funny that he writes this then criticizes tapered wheel nuts. Why not criticizing under designed wheels instead of starting another automotive red herring?

If I ever found myself involved in FSAE again, I'd push for the car to use MIG welded ERW tubing, rod-ends in bending, a naturally aspirated 600cc engine, rubber pucks for shocks (ala F500), and tapered wheel nuts....

[Charles Kaneb]

The 2006 and 2007 Texas A&M teams had much larger budgets than A&M has now. We've less support from the oil companies, but Castrol's been generous this year. Fewer and smaller cash donations, but some donated machine time allows a couple well-placed exotic parts that give us a lot more design freedom and allow some assemblies to be simplified into one part. Thanks go to G&H Diversified, TPO Parts, Schlumberger, and MIC. We build the car we're capable of and that's a different car from the one we had in the mid-2000s.

I'd like to see the 600/4 become the "right" choice again. You don't know what you've got till it's gone. The aero rules favor lighter cars, the load sensitivity of the tires does as well, and the heavier, smaller-cylindered engine hurts you both ways on fuel mileage. The 600s are better engines in so many ways - broad powerband, low vibration, designed to last 50,000 miles spinning to 14,000+ regularly, enough power to make these cars get in the same time bracket as the A-Mods on fast SCCA courses, a stator/reg-rec that puts out enough power to allow some interesting electronics and works reliably all season.

If I had a $20,000 budget for the whole season and had to think "finish all the events, go fast enough to be top-ten at Lincoln" I'd definitely run a four. Kansas won Lincoln with a four, but the JMS12c definitely qualifies as a mini-Indycar. Mini-Indycar is a major compliment; why wouldn't employers want to hire engineers capable of successfully designing and producing a vehicle that sophisticated?

Tube frames are nice especially if you want to be able to make big changes even during the testing season. OnlineMetals.com finally came through with a good selection and source of inexpensive DOM mild steel tube in the sizes we need. It would save over half the materials cost compared to 4130. Laser-cutting is fast (inexpensive) enough that I'd do it no matter how small my budget was; at this point manually mitering and fishmouthing every tube on the frame is a "what did your last slave die of" task.

Rod ends in bending are just bad design. Seriously, it's not like a staked-in spherical bearing in a camber shoe is some deep dark Texas A&M Racing secret. You can do it. It's cheaper than going three sizes up on the rod end just so you can build it in a configuration with the worst load path available.

As for rubber-puck shocks, why not use a couple old motorcycle clutch packs and make your own friction dampers?

If I were building a low-budget car I'd be using the entire outboard assembly from an ATV so my wheels would have to match its hubs. Even so, I wouldn't use tapered lugs; a lug-centric wheel is a pain to balance and you'd have to match it up the same way every time.

[JulianH]

Do we really have to decide if it's "Motorsport" or not?

Yes, we all love Motorsport and we all know how much we can learn from FSAE. So that's about it.

FSAE is a Design competition. You got your rules and you design a product in this rule set. Everything else is a consequence from this.

One major issue why the cars are so complicated and so ridiculously expensive is, because the rules want it that way. Yes, I know that our Electric car will never be bought by someone as a weekend crosser, but we design our car to maximize points in a competition. That's our design goal. And therefore we build a lightweight (read CFRP), powerful (read crazy high performance batteries, inverters and of course motors) and "high lateral acceleration" (read wings) car.

And what is also an important factor.. FSAE is probably the only time in a life of an engineer where you can just "build what you want".. you don't have to be profitable. Therefore we use Rapid Prototyping, casted and eroded parts and so on. It's simply awesome and you don't have to pay for it.

Z,
when it comes to "Creativity". As you probably know, we are one of the teams that changes its concept most radically from year to year. (E.g. the last time we used the same motor/engine as in the year before was in 2009!) But still we are running the infamous double A-Arm suspension. Not because we copy everything but it's lightweight, it works and we can control our tires as we want to. Maybe there is a better way to go, but you can't force creativity. Sometimes it's just better to stick to the used principle.

I think FSAE promotes cars that are finished 2-3 months before the competition. This is the major issue when it comes to radical new designs. If you can't test it, it's out.

At least for us, our team changes every year to about 80-90%. So everybody has just "one shot", one car. Risking the whole season (like UWA did) is just really gutsy...


To sum up, I think the competition works in this fashion, I don't care about labels (we never experienced problems with our sponsors because we call ourselves a "Racing" team, and according to their success, neither did Global Formula "Racing", DUT "Racing", TuFast "Racing", "Renn"team Stuttgart, Ka-"Race"ing or Tu Graz "Racing"...).

[Racer-X]

FSAE is what you make it. That said motorsport and design are not conflicting sides, they are part of the learning experience. I'd say the argument is more about motorsport versus science fair.

Teams like Kansas and GFR are in it to win and do take it rather seriously, they are not only good engineers but a good race team. Their success in this completion is a result of their ability to accomplish both of these things. They have not only shown they can design a car that satisfies FSAE criteria, they also manage an effective race team. To me that's what engineering and this competition are about, solving problems and dealing with people. The more motorsport competition becomes and the less science fair it is the better, iterative design and steady improvement pays in the real world.

The level of motorsport vs. science fair really depends on the team, and the individuals that are on it. We have a good mix of people on our team and it leads to some interesting discussion. I wonder at times what would happen if two teams like Lehigh and Kansas were required to collaborate on a car and what the end result would be. Take a very "science fair" team and make them compromise with the more "motorsport" team.

[Micko..]

Wow I think there are a few posts that are a little harsh here.

I for one agree with Pat. My previous team seems to have been overrun with people more interested in fully sic race cars than they are with the engineering problem. Sponsorship has suffered, they haven’t produced a new car in years and unless something changes, the uni will lose interest and can the project.

Everyone has had a guy join the team who was more interested in race cars than engineering, they tell everyone their designs are puss because “that’s not how they do it in F1/V8’s/Indy/formula v/high school billy carts… for us, they were the perfect person to build a push bar, a battery trolley, put stickers on the trailer or a paint the floor in the workshop. They are not a problem for established teams as they are promptly and politely told to f*ck off by people who are in it for the right reasons. But new teams with a lot of this attitude don’t get far and I felt this was what Pat was angling at.

Z,
Before you blast pat about his design suggestions, keep in mind that most of the teams he advises are new/inexperienced teams who need to master/understand a basic robust design (read clone). Once they have a grip on designing and building the “clone” (and this can take years) they can progress to justify more “creative designs". If these "creative designs" are not properly justified they will be shot down and the team with be suggested to go back to cloning. I have been in the new team that has asked Pat for help with the initial design stage and was very glad that he was there to help. Do you really think that the top teams are getting their design ideas from Pat’s corner? There is so much to be learned at the clone stage… show me a new team that has successfully bypassed this stage straight to “new and creative”. and you can't say you don't have a preferred design you push for.

UWA guys… please finish the 2012 car I’m sick of the speculation… and I want to see a race between it and the 2011 car ;-)

[Canuck Racing]

I have to agree with a lot of various points here about getting back to basics, though one point seems to have been overlooked - the Business Logic Plan.

I think that if implemented properly, which will take a few years, using the target # of cars per year should have a drastic change in design (along with the possible points increase there.)
For example, a team that shows up with a carbon tub and "billet all the things" could do well in design as long as the judges realize that this is a very expensive, specialized car. On the other hand, a team that shows up with some bent sheet-metal brackets and no fancy electronics can have engineered a better design if that is what they've determined to be the target market.
I know this isn't supposed to be a marketing competition, but the current rules leave much to be open with regards to what you are actually supposed to be designing (Mini F1 car or glorified go-kart? - there's a big difference.)

[jlangholzj]

For those of you who want to "change" the competition, this should have started out as a discussion about the likes/dislikes of the competition and what you would like to see done. Not a public criticism of Pat, Claude or anyone else for that matter. Generally speaking, if you want to get something done coming at it with a negative attitude is NOT the correct approach.

Guess what, most (if not all) of these guys (as in pat, claude, Edward, Steve or any of the other judges) are successful in what they do,for a reason! Also I'm pretty sure that Micko hit the nail on the head about making sure you have the fundamentals down before going all crazy with design.

You gotta crawl before you can walk boys. I know I'd feel bad if I lead our team down a bad path that resulted in either a poor competition or an unfinished car. If we wanted to make some radical changes, we simply don't have the student body to have one team build and another research and design a car for 2-3 years out. Its just simple logistics.

If anyone's really interested in changing the competition, then I'd suggest ASKING THE JUDGES about their opinion and having a civil discussion about it and bring up any points you have, not poking a proding them with snide remarks and waiting for a response. The latter is something you do on the playground, not in profession.

[Owen Thomas]

+1 to what jlangholzj said. There's no reason something so boring as a rule set should turn to animosity. Like ever.

I would also like to throw it out there that both approaches (ie Motorsport or engineering design) can be successful, if done right. I think the very top teams recognize that while approaching the competition from an engineering design perspective will yield the best results, there is no reason to shun the "tricks of the trade" in motorsports. In fact, they are extremely advantageous, if you can justify them, and will likely save the team a massive amount of time.

I also think that the reason the experienced teams operate similarly to a motorsports team is that it is simply the most effective way to manage a project like this. They learn the processes, the logistics, etc and grow as an organization. Other teams do not retain information well, and never get to a professional level - these are the teams who are overly focused on engineering design, because they do not know anything else.

What I'm trying to say here is that Pat is correct in that the competition rewards dynamic events, which are easier to do well in using "motorsport" practices. However, Kevin is also correct in that the same goals can be achieved strictly from an engineering design approach. Changing the competition may balance the playing field for newer teams, but not for very long anyways. The strong teams will always adapt to the competition because they realize how to score points, and that will never change. In my opinion, making the dynamic events worth less will just make the competition a little less exciting and further remove it from the "real world", where the end product is really what matters.

[Charlie]

Originally posted by Micko..:
I for one agree with Pat. My previous team seems to have been overrun with people more interested in fully sic race cars than they are with the engineering problem.

I don't believe you have read or at least understood the article's premise.

The premise is that students are not learning about engineering, but instead focusing on winning the competition. Quote from the article:

It has become more important to ‘win the competition’ than to learn along the way.

Every team has people that show up talking about building a F1 car or something even more complex (fully active, etc). I don't see how that is relevant the the current discussion. These students are not trying to apply motorsports strategies to win the competition, they are just the typical dreamers.

The discussion is based on whether FSAE is still achieving it's goal of engineering fundamentals or if teams are just rebuilding old cars and testing them like race teams & training drivers. A team that talks a big talk but can't find sponsors or actually build a car is not part of FSAE anyway and no rules changes are going to impact that team.

[Edward M. Kasprzak]

My, my we're a hyper bunch! It's nice to see some calming, moderating voices.

Here's the part of Pat's column I'd like to talk about:



FS cars are generally unattractive, narrow focus vehicles that are not particularly exciting to watch on track. If you want to see exciting motorsport, try find a short dirt oval where they are running winged sprint cars, or possible the purest and most intense motorsport of all, speedway motorcycles. 4 laps, 4 riders, balls out and all over in about 60 seconds! That’s exciting!


I agree 100% on the winged sprint cars, and I want to see a speedway motorcycle race in person someday.

In an attempt to hijack this thread ;-) I'd like to say that I really enjoy watching Formula SAE/Student cars. Where else can I see such a broad range of vehicle behaviors in one location? The best cars & drivers are a joy to watch. The crisp roll and yaw transients, braking on the verge of lockup (with correct brake balance) and the quickness of these cars in a slalom are all very impressive. Seeing a well-practiced driver learn the endurance course in the first 3-4 laps and then be a model of consistency for the remaining circuits is something special. The rest of the field exhibits all sorts of less-desireable characteristics, each of which is also interesting and fun to pick out: excessive roll gradients, poor damping of the vertical tire mode, K&C-induced stabilty issues, visible suspension compliance, etc. Of course, some drivers/cars are just plain slow and uninteresting--should have finished building the car sooner and done some testing and driver training!

[Will M]

I was thinking about the top FSAE teams and was trying to figure out what their equivalent opposite would be.
Their cars are well built, their teams well run, and overall are very professional.
All good things.

So I guess their opposite (in the USA) would a be a University '24 Hours of Lemons' team.
Rusty heaps of junk, driven by armature weekend endurance drivers (and a few pro-teams having fun)!
Full on racing with next to no design (for most of the cars I've seen at their races).
Exactly the kind of thing that no sane Uni would sponsor but very rewarding in it's own way.

-William

[js10coastr]

I think the responsibility for the subject in question lies in the hands of the respective advisers and/or team leaders for the university teams. What is more important? Winning the competition or the education/well being of the students?

Also, FSAE is much more fun than professional motorsports. Sure you can get paid to work on racecars, but you have to answer to many bosses (many without an engineering clue), make compromises for the sponsor, and can't stretch your creative juices. In most pro motorsports, its the dollar over winning.

[Nicky]

Originally posted by Will M:

Full on racing with next to no design (for most of the cars I've seen at their races).


Quite the contrary. Le Mans cars are designed far ahead than the spec cars that you see on Formula One. The Audis pull higher G's than the F1's and that too with a diesel engine. There is a lot of design that goes into getting the smallest of components right, say injectors. They work at pressures exceeding 3500Bar and are designed to work the whole 24hrs.

Le Mans has teams that are equally or more competitive than the F1 temas. It is all about the media publicity that you get. F1 is portrayed more like the WWF while Le Mans is depicted as a kick-boxing tournament. Again, that's just a personal opinion.

Regards,
Nikhil

Hint: The real fight is in kick-boxing!

[MCoach]

Originally posted by Nicky:
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Will M:

Full on racing with next to no design (for most of the cars I've seen at their races).


Quite the contrary. Le Mans cars are designed far ahead than the spec cars that you see on Formula One. The Audis pull higher G's than the F1's and that too with a diesel engine. There is a lot of design that goes into getting the smallest of components right, say injectors. They work at pressures exceeding 3500Bar and are designed to work the whole 24hrs.

Le Mans has teams that are equally or more competitive than the F1 temas. It is all about the media publicity that you get. F1 is portrayed more like the WWF while Le Mans is depicted as a kick-boxing tournament. Again, that's just a personal opinion.

Regards,
Nikhil

Hint: The real fight is in kick-boxing! </div></BLOCKQUOTE>


Nicky,

Will is referring to the 24 Hours of Lemons. This is very, very different from the 24 of Le Mans.

Things like the diesel powered Audi, and interesting fueled Aston Martins (ran iso-butanol) exist and GT cars compete within seconds of their lives against each other at Le mans. What you speak of is high-dollar, high visibility racing.

24 Hours of Lemons requires all entries to be costed under $500. This may seem like the cars will be boring to watch.
However, a quick look into the Lemons culture reveal things that are shocking, confusing and sometimes - repulsive. Vehicles exist like the MRolla, which is a two engined MR2 rear half of the car and front half Carolla. The 3rd gen Camaro run by the infamous team of Pratt & Miller employees which had a NASCAR cup car motor making ~700hp put in it, bending the rules in half and back. Another worthy mention is the pop-up camper driven by a man known as 'speedycop'. My favorite so far is the Cessna plane that speedycop is about to enter into a race... "The Spirit of Lemons".

Here's the plane/car/thing itself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2VntYQDw90

And

a clip of one of the races:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRGdjOMxaRE


As you can see, the only real design involved is the comical livery and accessories adorned by each team. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif

[Nicky]

Oops!! Never knew something like that ever existed. It's hilarious though.

[Will M]

Oh I have nothing but the highest respect for 24H Le Mans.
But there is something that appeals to me about 24H Lemons.

I think we're off topic though.

-William

[rjwoods77]

Speaking of sprint cars....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...PFz9DY&feature=share (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFK--PFz9DY&feature=share)

...try explaining all that is going on with those cars jeez!!!

[Test Driver]

Apologies for hijacking.

I see more and more ex FSAE people in LeMons and Chumpcar every time I do one of these events. They are actually great venues to test your creativity and engineering relatively unchecked. The rules are very wide open, judge corruption is encouraged, rules cheating is expected (though the People's Curse always looms) and there is probably no better seat time per dollar value out there.

Now, back to our customarily hubristic topics.

[Will M]

Although I think the OP wanted to talk about what the compitition should be I just noticed this article on the SAE web site.

http://www.sae.org/servlets/pr...MULA&RELEASE_ID=2021 (http://www.sae.org/servlets/pressRoom?OBJECT_TYPE=PressReleases&PAGE=showCDSNews&EVENT=FORMULA&RELEASE_ID=2021)

It has this gem at the end.
"The Formula SAE competitions are engineering design competitions and not motorsports events. Thinking otherwise is dangerous."

-William

[Bemo]

It has become more important to ‘win the competition’ than to learn along the way.

To get back to this particular sentence, I'd like to say that we in Stuttgart always had officially the major goal to win the competition. The learning is a side effect which is resulting directly from this.

My opinion always was that in FSAE you get a very clear major design goal: to score as high as possible at competition. To do so you have to understand quite a lot about how a car works.
I never liked the idea of implementing fancy stuff just for having done it. This is not engineering, that's just playing around.

What a lot of people oversee is that the most basic car is already an extremely complex system and nearly impossible to understand completely. Therefore you don't need to build a lot of fancy stuff to learn a lot. For me it is much more interesting to learn how a car is working in general.
Over the years we had similar discussions within the team. There were always people who wanted to design new stuff before they were near of understanding the old stuff.

First part is about the official goal of my former teams, the rest is just my personal opinion.

[Mike Cook]

I don't understand this. If you look at the top 10 cars from each competition, they are all pretty well engineered. If you look at GFR, they not only win design but dominate the whole competition. Looking at the last couple years there is a strong correlation with winning design and winning the entire competition. Have we ever had a real dark horse come up out of nowhere with a great driver and dominate and win the entire competition? No...not that I can recall.

The competition has become increasingly popular. Why should we change the formula?


Also, not sure I agree with Claude. There are some really good drivers out there. We have had drivers who go on to be top level SCCA drivers. Looking back at the guys from UTA, Kansas, UMR, we all had pretty good drivers. It is very unlikely that someone is going to bring a ringer in and beat our times by much. Not enough to out weigh a poor design score...

[Claude Rouelle]

MIke Cook,

SCCA is not a good enough / large enough reference as far as driver skills measurement. Think a bit larger. Think global. In SCCA there is an A for Amateur. Even is there is potential prodigy Senna or Schumacher-like in SCCA (which I doubt because US hasn't been able to produce a good F1 driver since Mario Andretti) this driver has not yet been gaining experience competing 20 weekends a year with la creme de la creme. Think real professional drivers such as DTM, WEC, WRC, some ALMS and Japanese GT500 or OZ V8 Supercar drivers ... (you can only dream to have one day one good F1 driver in your car) then you have a reference. When you put a driver like Mike Rockenfeller (WEC/Le Mans) in just a few laps in your FSAE / FS car you immediately see on the track and on the data (braking distance to start with) where they make the difference. Plus tons of comments on ergonomy and handling than most students would never notice. Ask Stuttgart.

Some drivers are better than others in FS / FSAE. I have seen a C- car doing A- results (ISAT in Germany for example because one of their driver was a decent Formula Renault driver) but in 15 years and a minimum of 5 FSAE / FS event each year I never saw FSAE / FS car being driven at the limit. Maybe at at 80 % at best.

Want a criteria? Show me the lap times of a stint of one driver finishing the endurance in the top 10 where the lap time standard deviation is within 1 % (except maybe the first 2 laps on cold tires). That is +/- 0.5 second on a about 50 second average lap time. That means a driver who is QUICK and CONSISTENT. Have you seen such results? I could be wrong but haven't. THAT would be a reference.

[Mike Cook]

I agree with most of your points. Universities can learn a lot about thier car by putting a quality driver in it. However, even though SCCA is amature, there are a lot of quality drivers who have been autocrossing for decades running dozens of weekends a year. While pro drivers are probably better in general, this doesn't necessarily mean they will be good right off the bat at autocrossing (thinking F1 drivers who transitioned to NASCAR).


My point really is that increasing the driver skill starts to become diminishing returns because of the way the point system works. Even if I concede that top level driver may be 1-2 seconds faster than a top level autocrosser, that doesn't exactly equate to that many points. Certainly not enough to make up for not making it to design finals.

See you at MIS?

Mike.

Ps. lap times for MIS 2010:
43.751 43.522 43.468 43.465 43.953 43.161 43.362 43.613 44.066 44.630 44.171 43.478 43.138 43.673

Fontana 2011 (lots of traffic and tires fell off)
67.083 64.546 64.810 65.931 65.914 65.636 65.804 67.449 65.953 67.533

[Claude Rouelle]

Mike Coach

"Ps. lap times for MIS 2010:
43.751 43.522 43.468 43.465 43.953 43.161 43.362 43.613 44.066 44.630 44.171 43.478 43.138 43.673"

Top ten?

Your F1 to Nascar is a bad example. It is a negative slope. Nascar to F1 that would be a positive slope. But it ain't gonna happen, you all.

Yes I will be at MIS next Wednesday morning. With great pleasure

[Charles Kaneb]

Originally posted by Claude Rouelle:
In SCCA there is an A for Amateur. Even is there is potential prodigy Senna or Schumacher-like in SCCA (which I doubt because US hasn't been able to produce a good F1 driver since Mario Andretti) this driver has not yet been gaining experience competing 20 weekends a year with la creme de la creme.

Some drivers are better than others in FS / FSAE. I have seen a C- car doing A- results (ISAT in Germany for example because one of their driver was a decent Formula Renault driver) but in 15 years and a minimum of 5 FSAE / FS event each year I never saw FSAE / FS car being driven at the limit. Maybe at at 80 % at best.

Want a criteria? Show me the lap times of a stint of one driver finishing the endurance in the top 10 where the lap time standard deviation is within 1 % (except maybe the first 2 laps on cold tires). That is +/- 0.5 second on a about 50 second average lap time. That means a driver who is QUICK and CONSISTENT. Have you seen such results? I could be wrong but haven't. THAT would be a reference.

A) SCCA stands for "Sports Car Club of America". They have organized professional races in the past, most notably CanAm.

B) America's best drivers aren't going to go down a path that leads to F1. They head to where their sponsors can see 'em and where they can be paid - NASCAR and World of Outlaws. We had an ace driver a couple years ago who raced a "Late Model". He was exceptionally smooth and good at shock tuning - and now does this for a living at GM. Stock car and sprint car seasons are much longer than the pavement open-wheel seasons. 25 races a year would be a "part-time" schedule.

C) Don't you remember last year's endurance at Lincoln?

[Charles Kaneb]

Originally posted by Claude Rouelle:
Mike Coach

"Ps. lap times for MIS 2010:
43.751 43.522 43.468 43.465 43.953 43.161 43.362 43.613 44.066 44.630 44.171 43.478 43.138 43.673"

Top ten?

Your F1 to Nascar is a bad example. It is a negative slope. Nascar to F1 that would be a positive slope. But it ain't gonna happen, you all.

Yes I will be at MIS next Wednesday morning. With great pleasure

Ask Kimi Raikkonen (2007 F1 champion, no top-tens in NASCAR) or Juan Pablo Montoya (1999 CART champion back when that mattered, 1 FIA decision away from being F1 champion in 2003, 1 NASCAR win) their opinion on the difficulty of NASCAR. The cars suck. The drivers, engineers, and technicians don't.

[Mike Cook]

I think 3rd in 2010, second in 2011, fourth overall both years.

I will be flying into DTW wednesday morning. Looking forward to seeing everyone again.



Originally posted by Claude Rouelle:
Mike Coach

"Ps. lap times for MIS 2010:
43.751 43.522 43.468 43.465 43.953 43.161 43.362 43.613 44.066 44.630 44.171 43.478 43.138 43.673"

Top ten?

Your F1 to Nascar is a bad example. It is a negative slope. Nascar to F1 that would be a positive slope. But it ain't gonna happen, you all.

Yes I will be at MIS next Wednesday morning. With great pleasure

[Claude Rouelle]

Charles,

You think within the US. I think as citizen of the world. I feel the need to measure myself and our company to the biggest and to be facing in the biggest challenge. I think Indianapolis, Sebring and Pikes Peak but also think Le Mans, Monaco, Nurburgring, Suzuka, Bathurst, Interlagos (all circuits where we work with consulting customers). It is a different perspective. I respect yours.

About Nascar to F1 (not the other way round) you did not get my point: tell me a driver who went from being successful in Nascar to get successful in F1? The drivers going F1 to Nascar are at the end of their career (Kimi so eclectic (alos in Rally) that he is the exception and the team was not at his level) and they do not have the same motivations / skills slopes.

What I and other judges do remember from Lincoln is some issues in the design and specifically the strange, very unusual to say the least, discrepancy between your suspended weight distribution and your anti-roll stiffness distribution. Your car and drivers were quick but you could have made them much quicker.

[Claude Rouelle]

Coming back to the title of this forum topic "Motorsport or Design" instigated by Kevin Hayward I would say the following (I wanted to do this for a while)http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

- If any choice had to be made I would prefer to have FSAE / FS being the university side of Motorsport than the university side of amateur racing. I have seen a clear tendency of some design judges (especially in the UK. Boom! I said it!) reluctant to innovation and who would prefer to see universities building cars similar to the hill climb or Formula Ford cars that they build or drove 20 or 30 years ago.

- The automotive industry has serious challenges: weight reduction, safety, emission, energy consumption, traffic, recycling, global competition, manufacturing cost, less energy demanding and less polluting manufacturing ....! It needs to constantly reinvent itself. Do we want universities to imagine the 2030 mobility solutions (I said mobility not even cars) or do we want universities to replicate the 60's and 70's cars? Universities are the best think tank for innovation, problem solving and out-of-the-box thinking. Because they have less bureaucracy, more Independence, more freedom, less "industry dogmatism". We should let universities explore these paths. In that case a FSAE / FS car could look more like an F1 or a concept car than a club racer. So what? By the way,...speaking about FS UK, one of the very good thing is that they allow Hydrogen cars.

- If I had a son who could work with a FSAE / FS team which collaborates with a engine developer like AMG or Formula one team aerodynamics engineers like the ones Sauber or the Dallara simulator I would sure be very happy for him! In fact I do encourage such collaboration.

- HOWEVER when you have a such a team which comes with a technology marvel that no student can explain and it becomes clear that the work comes more from their industrial partner / sponsor than from the students, I will condemn it with the harshest words and the poorest score. EVERYBODY lose: the students, the sponsor, the judges, the while community. We make a fool of ourselves. We lose our soul. It becomes a joke. Innovation yes but innovation with brains, STUDENT's brains.

- What I have seen in the last 10 years in FSAE / FS is:

A) Teams more and more functioning as New York Stock Exchange investors looking for the best return of their time and money investment in points. Fair. Yes, OK, the goal is to win. But what about out of the box thinking, what about new material or simpler, lighter, stiffer, cheaper solutions? What about cleverness, invention, originality, and creativity? I am not a big fan of solid axle or, to take one of the latest examples, the Sacli suspension, but if somebody comes with good arguments I will sure listen. If on top of that they demonstrate on the track that the car is reliable and decently fast, I will be happy for them and recognize that my opinion was probably biased or even unfair. I was at first not a big fan of the UWA last concept. In total honesty I did not understand it at first glance (hey Z, sorry, I can't know everything) but the UWA guys took the time to cope with my ignorance and frontal honesty and I became more convinced. If a new concept car is FINISHED and WORKING (that is where UWA failed), if the team knows how to play the game with good engineering arguments and prior opinion / authorization from the deign judges /rule committee especially if their solutions are "tangent" (that is where UWA also failed), if such innovation work is materialized by decent performances and reliability (even if the car is not the quickest)... then I believe that these students will probably have acquired more knowledge, skills and confidence for their career with 700 points than the winner at 900 points. Teams may have becoming a bit too reasonable and less daring. I have in my mind 2 examples of Formula student innovations which look very promising that were not pursued because the team thought there was too much risk and because "it did not look like last year winner".... Hmm

B) Students use computers too much and not their brain enough. I am not against computers or software! We create and sell simulations software and we use it constantly in our racing consulting operations. But you won't find creativity or team work efficiency and fun in your laptop! I see less concept and equation being discussed and written on paper and more numbers input with rush and without enough thinking in Matlab, Solidworks and Excel. Laptops are often the comfort zone, the cave were here we can retreat, away from other's confrontational judgement (at least momentarily), where we can lose ourselves in our intellectual dreams.... The worst answer I hear (more and more) from student in design competition is "because the software X tells us that this is what to do" They give away their decision power and their intelligence to the machine...

C) A touch more whining and a touch less ability to know how to have fun. Probably because winning is becoming too much of a focus compared to the learning experience.

But I always have 100 % fun at any FSAE / FS competition (can't wait next week Michigan) and I am always amazed by the exceptional spirit of camaraderie of any event

My 2 cents observations

[Charles Kaneb]

Originally posted by Claude Rouelle:
Charles,

You think within the US. I think as citizen of the world. I feel the need to measure myself and our company to the biggest and to be facing in the biggest challenge. I think Indianapolis, Sebring and Pikes Peak but also think Le Mans, Monaco, Nurburgring, Suzuka, Bathurst, Interlagos (all circuits where we work with consulting customers). It is a different perspective. I respect yours.

About Nascar to F1 (not the other way round) you did not get my point: tell me a driver who went from being successful in Nascar to get successful in F1? The drivers going F1 to Nascar are at the end of their career (Kimi so eclectic (alos in Rally) that he is the exception and the team was not at his level) and they do not have the same motivations / skills slopes.

What I and other judges do remember from Lincoln is some issues in the design and specifically the strange, very unusual to say the least, discrepancy between your suspended weight distribution and your anti-roll stiffness distribution. Your car and drivers were quick but you could have made them much quicker.

Claude,

Pardon the length and opinionated nature of this post, but the American perspective on F1 is probably of interest here.

Mario Andretti is the only example of an American stock-car driver (USAC, not NASCAR) enjoying success in F1. As this example's half a century old, I don't think it's a good one. He's also one of eight Americans to have gotten a decent ride in F1 - Phil Hill (Ferrari, champion 1961), Richie Ginther (Honda), Dan Gurney (Porsche, Brabham), Peter Revson (McLaren, Shadow), Mark Donohue (McLaren,Penske), Mario Andretti (Ferrari, Lotus, champion 1978), Eddie Cheever* (Renault), Michael Andretti (McLaren). That's it; every American who either won a race or was the full-season teammate of a race winner.

Please note that aside from Michael's, all of these F1 careers ended before I was born. There simply isn't enough of a sample size from the last few decades to conclude that American drivers are no good on an international scale.

In 1995 - the last year before the "split" that sent almost every American midget-car ace to NASCAR - the top eight drivers in CART were American or Canadian. Jacques Villeneuve damn near won his first F1 race and was champion two years later. Michael Andretti blew his one-year shot with McLaren by pigheaded personal decisions.

"Little Al", Bobby Rahal, Robby Gordon, Paul Tracy, Scott Pruett, and Jimmy Vasser never ended up in Formula 1. Our top series, at its absolute peak, 900 horsepower monsters hitting 400 kph at the end of the straights... and somehow inferior to F3000?

We'd like to measure ourselves against the rest of the world, but please understand that American sponsors wouldn't pay millions of dollars twenty years ago to watch Bobby Rahal finish 9th in a Footwork for a couple years before finally getting to drive a decent car.

Ever since then the top American drivers have gone directly to stock cars because there's simply no such thing as a profitable open-wheel ladder in this country anymore.

As for the TAMU 2012 car - we'll be bringing more extensive vehicle dynamics and design documentation this year than last. You'll see the ride/roll rate spreadsheet and the tire model. The 40F/60R LLTD number I gave you last year was erroneous; after the calculation error was fixed, the result was 48/52 for a 52/48 car. I think we also fixed the issues that made the car plow like a dump-truck at 52/48 LLTD last year.

*American descent but from Rome - the opposite of Mario

[Charles Kaneb]

Claude, I think your last post could stand alone as a "Pat's Corner" article.

We went back to the basic equations of vehicle dynamics and our tire data this year. We found something interesting. Other teams could replicate it fairly quickly, so we'll explain it at competition.

[Edward M. Kasprzak]

Originally posted by Charles Kaneb:
Claude,

Pardon the length and opinionated nature of this post, but the American perspective on F1 is probably of interest here.

Mario Andretti is the only example of an American stock-car driver (USAC, not NASCAR) enjoying success in F1. As this example's half a century old, I don't think it's a good one. He's also one of eight Americans to have gotten a decent ride in F1 - Phil Hill (Ferrari, champion 1961), Richie Ginther (Honda), Dan Gurney (Porsche, Brabham), Peter Revson (McLaren, Shadow), Mark Donohue (McLaren,Penske), Mario Andretti (Ferrari, Lotus, champion 1978), Eddie Cheever* (Renault), Michael Andretti (McLaren). That's it; every American who either won a race or was the full-season teammate of a race winner.

Please note that aside from Michael's, all of these F1 careers ended before I was born. There simply isn't enough of a sample size from the last few decades to conclude that American drivers are no good on an international scale.

In 1995 - the last year before the "split" that sent almost every American midget-car ace to NASCAR - the top eight drivers in CART were American or Canadian. Jacques Villeneuve damn near won his first F1 race and was champion two years later. Michael Andretti blew his one-year shot with McLaren by pigheaded personal decisions.

"Little Al", Bobby Rahal, Robby Gordon, Paul Tracy, Scott Pruett, and Jimmy Vasser never ended up in Formula 1. Our top series, at its absolute peak, 900 horsepower monsters hitting 400 kph at the end of the straights... and somehow inferior to F3000?

We'd like to measure ourselves against the rest of the world, but please understand that American sponsors wouldn't pay millions of dollars twenty years ago to watch Bobby Rahal finish 9th in a Footwork for a couple years before finally getting to drive a decent car.

Ever since then the top American drivers have gone directly to stock cars because there's simply no such thing as a profitable open-wheel ladder in this country anymore.

*American descent but from Rome - the opposite of Mario

I'll leave the arguments about Americans in F1 and the quality of American drivers to others--people have too many emotional opinions about it for the engineering mind to comprehend. Instead a few specific comments:

+ I wouldn't call Mario a stock-car driver. Mario drove EVERYTHING. Started in modifieds, drove midgets and sprints, yes USAC stock cars, NASCAR stock cars, IndyCars, sports cars, F1. Mario just can't be typecast. He's Mario and we should leave it at that.

+ To nitpick, your list of 8 Americans who raced for a full-season on a winning team included Michael Andretti, who did not complete a full season. Still, I see the virtue of your list.

+ To say the "split" in 1995/6 drove midget drivers to NASCAR is not true. That road was paved by Jeff Gordon in 1992/3 and the road was there before he got on it.

+ Ever since I can remember (I was a kid in the 80s) there's been a quest to define the CART/Indycar "ladder system". The "sprints/midgets to Indy" system faded after the previous "split" (1979), and it's been unclear ever since. In the 80s, Super Vee and Atlantics were a good training ground, which made sense because CART formed from a combination of Indycar owners and those abandoning the failing SCCA Can-Am and F5000 series. Suddenly road racing was a huge part of Indycar racing. ARS, Indy Lights, Star Mazda, etc. There hasn't been a clear path since the '60s.

+ CART was incredible in the 90s. Amazing cars and incredible competition. Pre-split it was even rivaling F1 in popularity in some non-US countries. The split changed all that--it's fallen a looooong way from where it was 20 years ago.

Just my $0.02.

[Kevin Hayward]

Claude,

Thanks for your last post. You have a high view of both the competition and what the students are capable of. While we may disagree on some of the details I wholly agree with your desire to push the teams to greater things.

I would argue that what you are looking for is already happening in the competition. The fast teams are also some of the most innovative. With so many teams in the competition you cannot ensure success by just out-managing teams as you could 10 years ago. (Which was Cornell's great strength.)

I think one of the issues that some of the judges have with some of the teams is that they confuse economy and efficiency when they look at points analysis. Economy would be to use the least resources to meet a desired points target (in this case usually well below a win). This is achieved by setting a points target and determining the minimum resources to meet this goal. A great way to ensure mediocrity.

Another approach is to try to improve the efficiency of turning resources into points. This involves analysing the points structure and determining the best areas to allocate resources to get the best points yield. When more resources are added, a team focused on efficiency will be able to increase their points potential. Done properly a focus on efficiency will reduce waste while produce better performance.

Both of these approaches require analysis of points, and point simulations, but the outcomes are very different. You could argue that the economy approach is good engineering, I would say in the context of competition success it is a poor one. However I don't understand how the second, which clearly involves chasing performance, could be seen as a negative, or bad design.

...

On a side note my biggest problem with the current setup of FSAE / Student is the massive amount of waste. We worry about a litre of fuel, but are happy to expect the students to redesign and manufacture every component every year. Teams chew through super soft tyres at an alarming rate. Carbon fibre and high strength steel chassis lay discarded in large numbers across the world after seeing one year's use (most often just one competition). And in the chase for lowest weight we leave 90% of the starting material on the shop floor as swarf. All of this is either mandated by the competition (i.e. new chassis every year) or encouraged by the design judges (i.e. low weight focus, and innovation in everything).

Kev

[Luke Phersson]

I think Kev really hit the nail on the head.

Others may disagree, but I think of Engineering as solving a problem. In our context the problem is winning the competition (not necessarily true for all teams). Any engineer can solve a problem by throwing huge amounts of money/resource at it, but I believe the quality of the engineer is measured by how efficiently the problem is solved. A better engineer will accomplish the same (or better) thing using less time/money/people etc. Reminds me a little of the whole thing about NASA spending millions on a pen that would work in space, and the Russians just used a pencil. This is not saying you should not be simultaneously trying to increase your 'resources'.

This approach requires a much deeper understanding of the car as a system, what is important and why. Consider this against the usual local/part optimization without regard to it's value, in terms of achieving the goal (solving the problem).
It is like spending months and thousands of dollars on titanium uprights that weigh 300 grams, half the weight of last year, then only getting to test a week before competition due to spending so much time 'designing' and manufacturing such an 'engineering marvel' and losing out on a potential 5+ seconds a lap which you could have made through more thorough car setup and driver training. Or after spending so much money on your uprights you cannot afford to make decent wheel centers, so you end up buying cheap ones that weigh 5kg a piece. That is bad engineering. Good 'design' of a component but bad engineering. This competition is a balance of compromises, and you need to be able to make informed and quantifiable decisions.
You need a certain metric to make these decisions... should we spend $1000 on new higher compression pistons for between xx and yy% improvement in BSFC or use that money to CNC new rear uprights that will save zz kg? Should we design for an extra month to reduce vehicle weight by 10kg or would that extra month of testing increase our achieved grip coefficients enough to make up for the weight?

Points is this metric. It allows you to easily compare the relative value of any aspect of your car/project/problem and make the most advantageous compromises. I fail to see how using this engineering tool could possibly be deemed bad engineering. Gut feelings and hand wavy arguments is not the pinnacle of engineering. Saying this approach hampers innovation also seems ridiculous, if anything it would promote it in more effective areas.

I have a great deal of respect for Pat, but It seems to me he has an issue with teams focusing so much on on-track performance instead of detailed component design. If teams make the decision to reduce the complexity of their designs to allow for more track time because they have quantified their predicted points loss due to more weight/less perfect geometry etc, and their predicted points increase from x days extra driver training and car setup, and it comes out as positive - that is good engineering design. The 'Engineering Design' event should be assessing how well the students have solved their 'problem'(ie winning the competition), not how well they have designed individual components with no regards to how useful or important that component is.

I believe teams going down this type of path is great for the future of engineering and society, not just because of the typical engineering knowledge they gain. It's the culture/attitude and holistic way of thinking that is promoted, and which seems so badly needed in todays society - where it seems we never look to the root cause of issues, but spend massive resources on band-aid solutions.

As a side idea - what would peoples opinions be on adding a "Management Event" to the competition? Either combining it with the Presentation event, or combining cost with design more directly and having a stand alone event with teams defending their approach to team management, strategies used to achieve goals, knowledge transfer etc. You could say the competition itself is essentially a management competition, and I agree that the majority of the top teams take it very seriously. But having an actual event in the competition could be the catalyst to improving the vast majority of low to mid field teams.

Cheers,
Luke.

[Z]

Originally posted by Claude Rouelle:
... But what about out of the box thinking,
... What about cleverness, invention, originality, and creativity?
... I was at first not a big fan of the UWA last concept.
... but the UWA guys took the time ... and I became more convinced.
Claude,

So in the interest of transparency, could you please let us know why UWA only got 3 points out of 200 in Design in 2012?

(Please don't say it was because of "unfinished car", because many other unfinished cars have scored much higher...)
~~~~~o0o~~~~~

Kevin and Luke,

I agree wholeheartedly with your above posts (and, of course, with Geoff's similar "Reasoning..." thread). In brief,
"An engineer is someone who can do with one dollar, what any fool can do with ten."

In fact, as per my rants since 2005, I think it possible to get a several hundred point jump on the opposition while building a significantly simpler and cheaper car. But that requires a good engineering (= "ingenuity") appreciation of what is important, rather than a slavish, mindless, and very expensive, copying of "real racecars".

Z

[Claude Rouelle]

Some people describe the camber varaiation in heave in deg/mm or deg/m or deg/in, some quantify it with the length of the initial VSAL.

Some people describe the anti-dive as a percentage of geometric weight transfer compared to a total suspended weight transfer while some others will quantify it as an angle of rotation of the wheel about the hub axle (or a induced caster variation if you want) induced by a chassis pitch or heave movement

Roll stiffness is often quantified in deg / G but also G per deg or Nm/ deg or Nm/rad or roll frequency.

And vertical suspension stiffness can be expressed in N/mm or Hz. If frequency is the way most of the people has been describing the effect of stiffness I am happy to use this definition.

Who cares?

I don't. Not more than the fact that some people speak English some others Chinese, some French, some Portuguese, some German....providing that we understand each other.

In the specific FSAE / FS design competition case providing that I quickly get the feeling that the students understand want the numbers mean and show how they use them to design / tune their car I am happy. No need to be academically pinpointing definition.

Mister Zapletal, you are a smart guy with useful perspectives (that many in this forum and as design judges do not have) but you are also the kind of person who is not happy ... unless... he is not happy.

That is what is probably preventing you to share your knowledge, your perspectives and your experience in a more encouraging and constructive way. Too bad for you and for the students. Have a life!

[Z]

Claude,

I think your above post was intended for the "Rates Again!" thread.

Even so, it doesn't answer my question on that thread whether or not you will start teaching UWA-style interconnected suspensions in your future seminars. Why are you so reluctant to answer this question?

Unlike you, I have been teaching that here since 2005, for free! And some of the students are getting useful knowledge from it... http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif
~o0o~

And what about that 3/200 score for UWA in 2012 (my question on this thread)?

A similarly long post to above explaining how/why that happened would be nice... http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

Z

[Moreboost]

I think a cage match is in order.

2013 Aust comp.

z vs Claude, now taking bets!

[exFSAE]

Originally posted by Claude Rouelle:
The worst answer I hear (more and more) from student in design competition is "because the software X tells us that this is what to do"

I would make the case that just as bad - or arguably worse - are students that have the mindset that, "Well in ____ it says you need to..." where ____ can be 'Tune to Win', 'Race Car Vehicle Dynamics', or even an OptimumG seminar. Not that any of those are bad resources, but they should be treated as such - resources and things to consider, not to just be brainwashed with.

Same could be said of students who assume the tire data or models are 100% accurate of indicative of what they'll get on track, etc.

[tromoly]

Originally posted by exFSAE:

I would make the case that just as bad - or arguably worse - are students that have the mindset that, "Well in ____ it says you need to..." where ____ can be 'Tune to Win', 'Race Car Vehicle Dynamics', or even an OptimumG seminar. Not that any of those are bad resources, but they should be treated as such - resources and things to consider, not to just be brainwashed with.

Same could be said of students who assume the tire data or models are 100% accurate of indicative of what they'll get on track, etc.

Couldn't agree more. Yesterday at senior design gateways the engine team captain was saying that he used very short intake runners because alumni had told him to not used curved runners, but did not do any analysis to back it up, and subsequently his intake designs don't work and aren't on the car.

[RenM]

Originally posted by Claude Rouelle:
Want a criteria? Show me the lap times of a stint of one driver finishing the endurance in the top 10 where the lap time standard deviation is within 1 % (except maybe the first 2 laps on cold tires). That is +/- 0.5 second on a about 50 second average lap time. That means a driver who is QUICK and CONSISTENT. Have you seen such results? I could be wrong but haven't. THAT would be a reference.

FSG 2009 Stuttgart:

(57,25) ; (55,46) ; 54,21 ; 54,20 ; 54,61 ; 53,93 ; 54,00 ; 54,35 ; 54,15 ; 54,27 ; 54,09 ; 54,08 ; 54,70

first 2 laps taken out, all laptimes are covered within 0.77s
standard deviation is 0.5%
Driver did fastest lap of all cars and fastest stint of all cars.

[Pete Marsh]

Actually IMO this performance is BETTER than you would expect from most circuit racers. The skill set for FSAE is more akin to rally rather than circuit.
Don't forget this is the first time you get to drive the track ever, and the car can't even be driven/warmed up on the same surface for that day.
The total lack of practice at the competition venue is very different from what most professionals would be used to.

I ask Claude, how many of the drivers you have worked with can produce a lap within .2% of their best on their 3rd lap at a new venue to them, in a car that they may be familiar with, but with settings from a different venue? Some, no doubt, but think it would be a small minority of only the very best drivers.

I wonder if Seb Loeb has particularly good early sessions despite having to learn new tracks now he is doing circuit?

Pete

[Jersey Tom]

Originally posted by Pete Marsh:
Actually IMO this performance is BETTER than you would expect from most circuit racers. The skill set for FSAE is more akin to rally rather than circuit.
Don't forget this is the first time you get to drive the track ever, and the car can't even be driven/warmed up on the same surface for that day.
The total lack of practice at the competition venue is very different from what most professionals would be used to.

This is a good observation. Makes me wonder what things would be like if some of the dynamic portion of the event were setup more like a professional circuit racing weekend. E.g. the course is setup once and stays in that configuration the whole time.

1. Sometime before the event, post or distribute the proposed course layout and let teams do their best to engineer their setup to make the most of it.

2. After tech, the circuit is the practice area. Let the teams and drivers get some laps and collect some data and notes.

3. Autocross becomes qualifying to set the endurance run order (which it pretty much is already).

4. Endurance is what it is, just on the same course configuration as it's been all weekend.

I'd say that type of arrangement more closely emulates a real race weekend, but at the same time emphasizes good engineering: How do you do your predictive prep work for a well-defined objective? What do you change based on subjective and objective data once you get there? What car setup or engine tune changes do you make for qualifying? How does that then change for the "race"?

[mdavis]

Originally posted by Pete Marsh:
Actually IMO this performance is BETTER than you would expect from most circuit racers. The skill set for FSAE is more akin to rally rather than circuit.
Don't forget this is the first time you get to drive the track ever, and the car can't even be driven/warmed up on the same surface for that day.
The total lack of practice at the competition venue is very different from what most professionals would be used to.

I ask Claude, how many of the drivers you have worked with can produce a lap within .2% of their best on their 3rd lap at a new venue to them, in a car that they may be familiar with, but with settings from a different venue? Some, no doubt, but think it would be a small minority of only the very best drivers.

I wonder if Seb Loeb has particularly good early sessions despite having to learn new tracks now he is doing circuit?

Pete

Don't forget cones. We've put a couple of very good (one professional) road racers in our car and they have no idea what to do around cones. The local autocross hotshoe was much quicker in our car through some cones when compared to the guy that ran Indycar.

[Jay Lawrence]

I would echo that sentiment. UoW has had top level Oz race car drivers (including championship winning V8SC drivers) in their cars, and they are never quite a match for our own drivers on a typical FSAE track.

[Kevin Hayward]

The talent pool that professional drivers are pulled from is very small. It takes a lot of money to become a driver, and generally quite a lot of sacrifice from a supportive family. You also need to be pretty sole minded in the pursuit of driving.

There are plenty of professional drivers that are not as good as amateur drivers and we should not be surprised by this. There are plenty of great drivers who never made the cut (who tried and were successful in lower formulae), due to poor ability to get sponsorship rather than an inability to drive. In FSAE we look at a pool of around 3000 young healthy, intelligent drivers each year. In turn this group is the best performing group from about 20000 students. Pure statistics would indicate that there would be a few of these drivers that would be as talented as a lot of professional drivers.

What the pros have going for them is that they train and develop their skills on a very regular basis, and I would probably agree with Claude that their feedback on vehicle setup and development (and usefulness in the development process) would far exceed that of all but a few FSAE drivers. We need to remember that Pro drivers are often fluent with analysing their own data and have worked with a number of professional engineers in their career. The attitude is also different. If you are getting paid on the basis of your competitiveness there is a huge motivation to improve.

However I would agree with the rest in saying I would not expect pro drivers to be any faster than some of the better FSAE drivers in a FSAE car on a FSAE course. When I was driving in FSAE I was good enough to be one of the quickest out of probably a couple of hundred that went through UWA (over 4-5 years). I beat out most drivers from other teams in competition as well. But I went against some guys that were truly fantastic drivers. Watching Rotor drive the RMIT car within a cm of every main apex cone every corner every lap was humbling. Being beaten out in Autocross by Dangerous Dave from UOW in what was a worse setup and probably slower car was frustrating to say the least. Going up against some of the best in the US, including one driver that was in the Red Bull driver program definitely helped me to overcome any pride I had in my own driving ability. I have seen similarly talented drivers in much worse cars get further up the scoresheets than their cars ever deserved.

Most often you don't get to see the very best of the FSAE drivers during endurance, which Claude has mentioned, but not becasue they lack the skill. 1 cone is worth 0.2s every lap for 10 laps. Just about every team will dial back the driving just a notch during to endurance to prevent hitting cones. Add to this driving to target times, conservation of fuel (the big one), nursing cars to make sure they finish and the enduance event does not show the true potential of the drivers in raw speed. The autocross event is a much better indicator of talent, but again the raw speed is not shown, mainly because it is the first time driving on a brand new course. This is much more difficult than qualifying on a track that you have driven many times before, and in this case one cone means a completely wasted lap. In comparison to a normal race weekend by the time the pro gets to qualifying they have already done more laps on the circuit than a FSAE driver sees on the whole weekend. This is why the best teams are using simulations (where they program their own tracks in), visualisation exercises, sports psychologists etc. to make sure that a driver can perform well first run out on a new course. Instead of bulk laps drivers are ran through exercises involving building up "clean" speed (no cone strikes). You try drivers driving without brakes, driving to conserve fuel, driving to manage vehicle temperature. Now on skidpan you tarin them to control the car when the two inside wheels are lifted. On accel you train them to be able to make traction and launch control settings adjustments between runs. Drivers are regulars at the gym and manage their diet. A lot of Pros undergo less involved training than this.

In any engineering endeavour that involves the piloting of a vehicle it is incredibly important to have processes in place to improve the pilot(s). This is true of fighter pilots, machinery operators, astronauts etc. Many of the top teams have well developed driver programs in place to help in this area. With respect to the original question does this focus on improving the driver (as part of the larger project) make this motorsport or design?

Kev

[theTTshark]

Originally posted by Mike Cook:
Also, not sure I agree with Claude. There are some really good drivers out there. We have had drivers who go on to be top level SCCA drivers. Looking back at the guys from UTA, Kansas, UMR, we all had pretty good drivers. It is very unlikely that someone is going to bring a ringer in and beat our times by much. Not enough to out weigh a poor design score...

Two things:
1) I've talked to professionals who talk about how FSAE cars are some of the most difficult cars they've driven on the limit due to their quickness (autocrosses happen a lot faster than road racing).

2) I won't say any names, but I've driven with and against someone who I would put in any car in FSAE and put money on them beating the team's regular drivers. And I would certainly put money on him beating "professionals". They may be professionals on the circuits, but they're stepping into a different realm. Seat time is seat time of course, but we aren't slouches between the cones.

[Claude Rouelle]

RenM

For the sake of curiosity what were the lap times difference and the drivers comments when the DTM drivers drove you cars a few years ago.

[RenM]

I dont know the laptimes anymore. They were not very represantitive though. Bernd Schneider was driving our 2007 car, which had a clutch pedal that was needed for downshifts. He said he wasn't used to driving with a clutch pedal anymore and had big troubles to adapt to the car and therefore said himself he was unable to extract the true performance of the car.

All in all he had very little seat time with just a few practive laps before the show run.
IMO he would have needed a lot of practice in the car to come close to the lap times of our main driver (M. Kissling).

[Charlie]

Everyone thinks they can beat a pro if they've never had to compete with one.

There are some good drivers in FSAE, but not professional grade drivers. Unless someone can show me someone that's 'graduated' to a top level...

[Kevin Hayward]

Did some interesting look at the data of past events over the past couple of days (including the latest from Michigan). I did this to see how the actual scoring matches the perception of the event, and how important it is.

It appears that there is a clear pattern to design judging that is very far from the close distribution we see on the dynamic and other static events. In Germany and Michigan it is clear that a few things occur:

- Only 9-15% of teams score above 100 points (less than 9% in 2013) These effectively form the group of teams that are selected as being potential winners. Winning outside of this group is virtually impossible.
- Minimum scores for competing teams is around 40 points (event dependent) and maximum is 150. The actual range of points applied is only 110 and for 90% of the teams it is only 60 points.
- If the design scores were redistributed from 0 to 100% then approximately 90% of teams are scoring 55% or less
- Resolution of placing is very poor. For example in 2013 Michigan 29 teams scored 100 points.
- There is no clear relationship between performance in design and the dynamic performance of the car (although there is a very rough positive relationship)
- There is no clear relationship between performance in design and marketing of the vehicles. There is a slightly better fit for this data indicating teams that do better in marketing generally do better in design
- There is no clear relationship between the cost of a car and its design score. If anything it appears that lower cost cars generally score less.

The simple conclusion is that the top placings (and in most cases the order) in the comp are selected by the design judges. Beyond the top 10% the design scores are very inaccurate and it appears more of a crapshoot, but it is of little relevance as the score difference in this group is minimal. The design score only really matters to the top 10%.


A very different picture occurs with the UK scoring (2012):

- 24% of the teams score over 100
- Resolution of placings is excellent, spacing as low as 1 point
- There is a clear statistical distribution to scores
- There is a reasonable relationship between dynamic performance and design event performance
- Design scores range from almost 0 to almost 150 points
- Slightly more than half the teams score higher than 75 points.

The simple conclusion here is that the design event scores use the full available points. Teams must absolutely score well in design to place in the event, but it is a little softer at the top end. Much more interestingly design scores matter for any team and affect places throughout the whole competition.


Looking at this a few conclusions arise:
- In both cases the design event is incredibly important for the win (or high places)
- The US/Germany have a more elitist scoring scheme. Only a few are selected as potential comp winners
- The UK design event affects placings all the way down and provides much more accurate feedback for the majority of the teams.
- It appears that the UK has the most understandable and statistically viable design scoring.
- The UK design scores are a more accurate predictor of vehicle performance for the bulk of cars.


The scores are very indicative of what is occuring. The results of the competition are heavily affected by design, and in the case of the US and Germany it acts as a selection process for the top teams (only the top teams). The comps do not treat this event the same and in the case of the US and Germany do not use the full point score allocated to the event, which makes it less important for most teams.



Personally I prefer the UK scoring approach. It rewards the winners a little less, but uses the full spread of the points, and is better linked to the actual engineering outcomes of the vehicle. It also punishes poor design performers much more, which I imagine might encourage more teams to improve their design year in year out. The best designed car scored 140 points better than the worst, as compared to only 110 in the US/Germany.

Once again I would reiterate that there is no need to increase the design score to 200 out of 1000 (unless you are in the UK). The design event is already incredibly important to a teams placings (depending on the event it is the most important event in terms of points difference).

Additionally the full range of the design event score is not being used as it is (which is different to the dynamic events, that use the full score from best to worst). The US and German judges can make their event worth about 40% more by changing their scoring approach. This is more than the change to 200 would achieve.

Effort should be made to make sure that design event is relevant to all teams. The UK does this well. Without doing this it is clear that by the scores 85-90% have no real reason to care about design as it has a minimal effect on their score. In the UK 100% of teams have to worry.

Kev

[Markus]

Kevin, I agree with your opinion and honestly have been waiting someone to raise conversation on this.

It seems UK's approach is "how well was the car designed" opposed to Germany's "who designed the best car".

But I do find some problems in the whole concept of design event - in my opinion it defeats fair competition when the judges get to hand pick the winners. After all human opinions are the worst metric to measure competitiveness of any kind.

Personalities, nationalities, looks, non-professional opinions, verbal & non-verbal communication, marketing tricks, etc. will effect the outcome to some extent, and all this changes from competition to competition.

On the other hand I must admit that design event is the part of the competition that is most useful in "real life" after FSAE: it's not about who makes the best or most reasonable product/solution - it's about who is most convincing claiming to have done it...

[Mbirt]

Charlie, was this the first time Jordan Taylor had driven an FSAE car? Looks pretty impressive. Nice work on the restoration too! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWAda8qhij0

It'd be interesting to get Randy Pobst in an FSAE car, as he was once an amateur autocrosser like the rest of us. We've got a humanities professor here that always talks about getting MR2 setup tips from Randy in the 80's. http://www.randypobst.com/inde...ography&form_years=1 (http://www.randypobst.com/index.cfm?template=biography&form_years=1)

[Tinomik]

I agree that reserving 50 points for 9 teams is ultimately "unfair". especially if half of the 29 teams, barely did not make the pick.

How to change that is an interesting discussion. I do not believe FSUK to have the best system.

It is a fact though that driver skill is very important in the competition. especially now that so many teams have the reliability to finish endurance.

If anything, I believe the business logic case can bring a lot of educational experience (and hopefully points). A team with limited resources should not be punished at design as much, because the design choices, given the limitations may be ingenious. That should give them points at some event (design?)

Cost still confuses me. I find it puzzling how teams full of titanium and carbon everything cost cars at 15k or less.

Last, adding a "real case" aspect to design (as in cost) or as a separate static event, might bring some design back and take some motorsport out.

[Test Driver]

Originally posted by Tinomik:
Cost still confuses me. I find it puzzling how teams full of titanium and carbon everything cost cars at 15k or less.



I've often thought that FSAE should have a claimer clause to keep unobtanium in check. It would also promote manufacturability in that it would force teams to make at least two of everything.

[Goost]

Cost still confuses me. I find it puzzling how teams full of titanium and carbon everything cost cars at 15k or less.

The 2013 rules state they will publish all Cost Reports sometime this year. Prices like this (and lower) probably become the norm once everyone copies the best parts from the winners of the previous year.

[tromoly]

Originally posted by Goost:
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Cost still confuses me. I find it puzzling how teams full of titanium and carbon everything cost cars at 15k or less.

The 2013 rules state they will publish all Cost Reports sometime this year. Prices like this (and lower) probably become the norm once everyone copies the best parts from the winners of the previous year. </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

Yeah, unfortunately if you car costs less than that you get red flags thrown and audited. Our car was built for $8k (less donated materials) and we were audited up to $11k on cost report (no problems with that), I have no idea how someone with full composite aero is building a car for $15k on cost report. Do people not include labor needed to build?

[JulianH]

In the Cost report every action (labour / machining / laminating..) has a fixed price. It is also for a production of 1000 cars, therefore some things are quiet cheap in Cost (e.g. casting of uprights) although it's very expensive to do it only for 4 items. Especially for Electric cars, the price range "real vs Cost Report" can get quiet large.

I think the cars in Europe are quiet a bit more expensive than what I saw at Michigan.

I don't know if the Cost Reports will get published "automatically". If I remember correctly the organisation "plans to do it". If so, we will see a lot of copying from the teams and everybody is trying to get the parts "as cheap as the cheapest team". I don't like that...

[whiltebeitel]

Julian, some of the problem is the ambiguity in how the rules are applied at competition vs. what you see when you are preparing a report, especially "new" teams.

In the case of rules compliance issues for the physical aspects of the cars, that is openly discussed opn this forum, and compared with pictures, etc. Does this happen with cost reports? No. You only get to use the previous year's result to compare. Increased transparency for the cost report would lead to more uniform reporting of part costs, and even discussion on the cost rules themselves.

In my opinion, the cost report shouldn't benefit clever accounting skills, the actual cost of each team's "prototype" car, but rather through creative design of parts. Teams should be able to compare design choices apples to apples. If we compare the cars by weight, accel times, lap times, etc. Then why not try to achieve more pairity between the cost report results?

[Kevin Hayward]

Julian has a good point about copying to get the best points return.

I think that sharing cost reports (and every other static event materials) between teams is a good thing. All teams and members can learn by observing best practice, it will also make it much less likely that we will see the most common form of cheating in the cost report, which is leaving parts out. It is much too likely that other teams will spot it.

In order to alleviate Julian's concern of reducing the value of the cost event, it would probably be worthwhile to review a couple of other potential changes:

- Make the overall cost worth less of the event and make it more about report quality and the manufacturing cases
- Make the costs much more linked to design decisions. There has been a great improvement in this area with the simplification of the cost report some years ago.
- Make sure that the full cost score is still spread over the entire field. Smaller design decisions might become more important if there is a big points incentive between $11k and $11.2k

...

When I first started in FSAE the cost event was an absolute shambles. It was very easy to cheat, and I was flat out told by the teams doing well exactly how they cheated. It was a massive effort to produce each year, and had students scouring the internet for the cheapest rod ends etc. that they didn't use to make their cost as low as possible. It has never reflected the true cost of cars.

The simplification of the cost event has made it much more manageable for teams and something that can be used in the design process. For teams that haven't gone through the exercise go and find out how many points $1000 on the final design is actually worth at comp. You might be surprised at how hard this is to make up on track. Then go through the report and figure out how you could change your design to reduce your cost without sacrificing performance. It is a real eye opener.

Less parts = lower cost
Simple parts substitution without losing performance = lower cost
Not all areas are valued equally
Less material needed (either waste or on car) = lower cost

Great lessons for jobs in design and manufacturing. As long as the cost of the car reflects the actual design there is no disadvantage to sharing the reports. Although maybe we only need to share the cost summaries.

Kev

[Charlie]

Originally posted by coleasterling:
Not that it is close to "top level(F1?)," but Jordon Musser, one of our (A&M) former drivers, raced professionally in Grand Am.

From what I understand he raced in a Grand Am feeder series. No offense t Jordon, but the driver talent in that series is dubious (not that there are no good drivers there, I'm sure there can be).

A top level driver to me is someone that is competitive in a top series.

[Kevin Hayward]

Following some discussion with Charlie Ping here are the scores from Michigan 2013 including design, but not efficiency and endurance:

1 - Oregon State Univ (530.8)
2 - Universitat Stuttgart (504)
3 - Tallinn University of Technology (483.9)
4 - Ecole De Technologie Superieure (483.6)
5 - Auburn Univ (456.1)
6 - Univ of Michigan - Ann Arbor (452.7)
7 - Universite Laval (452.2)
8 - Missouri University of Science and Tech (448.7)
9 - Univ of Akron (439.8)
10 - Univ of Wisconsin - Madison (439.1)
11 - Graz Univ of Technology (438.2)

This list takes the top 11 to get all the design finalists in the list, only two of the top 11 are non-finalists (ETS 100 pts and Missouri 80pts) and the top three were the top three in design. For Missouri to win the comp they would have had to equal the best endurance time and win efficiency at the same time, or dominate endurance by around 30-40 points. 92 points separates 1 from 11, but the design score range on these teams is 70 points. More than 70%, even excluding the 80 from Missouri we see more than half the difference of the potential 600 points that these teams could have scored has come from design.

If we take out the design scores the list looks like this:

1 - Ecole De Technologie Superieure
2 - Oregon State Univ
3 - Universitat Stuttgart
4 - Missouri University of Science and Tech
5 - Auburn Univ
6 - Univ of Michigan - Ann Arbor
7 - Tallinn University of Technology
8 - Universite Laval
9 - Univ of Kansas - Lawrence
10 - Univ of Akron
11 - Cornell Univ
12 - Univ of Western Ontario
13 - Graz Univ of Technology
14 - Univ of Illinois - Urbana Champaign
15 - Univ of Wisconsin - Madison

We now need 15 teams to cover the design finalists and we also see very clearly how much the design scores affect the teams with a chance to do well. Interestingly the difference between Stuttgart (the eventual winners) and ten places behind them on this list is 46 points.

Kev

[Kevin Hayward]

I will add, as per the Michigan thread, that I am not trying to create conspiracy theories here. In fact the 9 finalists came from a list of the top 15 before endurance in Michigan 2013. The design judges are largely taking the best cars / teams into the finals.

What I am trying to clearly show is that the design event has a massive effect on the ordering of the top teams. This effect is much larger than you would think without looking at the numbers. I personally believe that the design finals points effect is too great at the moment, but appreciate that this is a matter of opinion.

I would love to post the pages and pages of graphs I put together on the scores before making my original comments, but this forum is not really suitable, nor do I want to put the time in to clean them up to "print" standard.

Instead I encourage others to have a look at the previous scores in events and make their own conclusions.

Kev

[Charlie]

Kevin-

Apologies for my very poor and misleading comment! I had some bad information and a few minutes after I posted I realized my mistake. I deleted my post thinking it hadn't been read yet, otherwise I would have just corrected it.

Anyway it doesn't hurt that you added the new info. I have some other thoughts on the subject, but no proper time to put them into words today.

[Mbirt]

What do you guys think about this fairly even distribution from 50-150 points at Formula North: http://formulanorth.com/wp-con...gn-Event-Results.pdf (http://formulanorth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/FN2013-Design-Event-Results.pdf)

Teams that did well but were too numerous to make a tidy design finals lineup were not normalized down to 100 points. Earning 125 points in design made it much easier to compete with design finalists by snagging some points back in the cost event due to lack of bling.

[Kevin Hayward]

Looks good. I steered away from looking at the smaller comps (including Australia) simply because as the numbers get smaller statistical approaches become less valid.

How did people feel about the design results:

- Was the design event still important?
- Was there still a competitive advantage to winning design?
- Was there good feedback to teams? (right from top to bottom)
- Did the results of design correlate with performance in the other events?

Kev

[Mbirt]

Originally posted by Kevin Hayward:
Looks good. I steered away from looking at the smaller comps (including Australia) simply because as the numbers get smaller statistical approaches become less valid.

How did people feel about the design results:

- Was the design event still important?
- Was there still a competitive advantage to winning design?
- Was there good feedback to teams? (right from top to bottom)
- Did the results of design correlate with performance in the other events?

Kev From what I saw, the design event was still important and was taken seriously by all in attendance. Claude was the roaming chief judge, so we were kept on our toes.

The three design finalists were top 4 in static events (we crashed their party with strong cost and presentation scores) and two design finalists were 1-2 in dynamic events. The third finalist would have finished around 5th in dynamics if they had finished endurance. I would say there was an advantage to winning design and the design event results correlated to strong performance in dynamic events at the very least.

Good feedback from judges was readily available, but I'm not sure what mechanisms were used to reach out to teams that did not actively seek feedback. The close proximity of our indoor paddocks to the tech inspection and design judging areas that shared the floor of the arena with us allowed for lots of interaction with the judges. We had one traditional feedback session with a group of judges in our pit and many more helpful discussions with individual judges until the end of the competition. This is probably an experience unique to a small competition.

Another notable point about FN2013 is that it was the first competition of the season for only 3 teams. Of the 24 who attempted, 18 finished endurance. I can see why the small competitions are difficult to use as data points.

[Big Bird]

Greetings all,

I’ve been following this thread from the start, just haven’t responded yet as I thought it best for the initial fervour to die down a little.

Firstly, in regard to the original question – FSAE is Motorsport AND Design. That is the foundation of its success. The motorsport / competition flavour reels in the students, AND while they are having fun designing and building a competition vehicle they happen to learn a whole heap about technical design and project management and dealing with people and politics and academia and manufacturing and cultural differences and….

The OP raised this topic in response to some arguments that were put forth after FSAE Oz last year, that some teams were treating this too much like a competition and not enough like a learning opportunity. My primary concern with the argument was its “adversarial” framing – that somehow if your focus is on competing, then you are getting a lesser educational outcome. I believe you can have both. I also believe we would be opening a Pandora’s Box if the judging process were to include assessment of not only what you have learnt, but a judgement of what motives you had as you learnt it. And I share the OP’s concerns about running a competition where competitors are potentially criticized for being competitive.

I also agree that a team can get itself in trouble if it doesn’t have the smarts to know when to trim back the “motorsport angle”, especially when seeking sponsors or talking to uni hierarchy.

This event is about making us better engineers. Good engineering design can be, for example:
1. Refining component and system designs to increase stiffness, reduce mass, etc.
2. Redefining component and system design goals to achieve objectives such as reduced cost, or ease of manufacture
These two definitions can be contradictory. In the second case, for example, your engineering calculations may indicate that mass or stiffness has negligible effect on the functional operation of your product – and therefore you can use a lower spec material or cheaper manufacturing technique. In fact, I think it often requires greater understanding of your design problem and greater mental flexibility to investigate relaxing your mass target, for instance, than doggedly sticking to the lighter is always better mantra.

A good engineer is one who can adapt their approach to the problem being solved. It is about following a sound design process, and understanding the problem itself – and recognizing that “universal truths” such as greater stiffness / lighter weight / more power aren’t always the desired outcome.

I absolutely, 100% oppose any philosophy that defines success only in terms of the basic vehicle specifications. I am impressed by some of the light cars being built, but I do not believe that a heavier car is a lesser one necessarily. Evidence of good engineering is in understanding what the designer was trying to achieve, and how they went about achieving those goals.

I also see a sad end to our competition if success becomes defined by how much money your team can raise. Is raising sponsorship a good skill to gain? Most definitely, I would never argue against that. And I am in awe of some of the high tech and high spec cars we see each year, and the high quality technical engineering that goes into them. But I sincerely worry about the sustainability of FSAE if we have 600 teams around the globe each defining success by how much money they can raise and how close they can get their car to F1 spec.

The success of this competition is that, because of all the competing objectives written into or implied in the competition rules (such as the competing objectives of high power and low fuel usage, or low weight versus low cost, etc.), teams can come into this competition with any level of resources or technical ambitions and still be competitive. If your team and university want a carbon wonder car, then you can build one and be successful. But if your budget or resource base don’t allow this, there are alternative paths to success written into the points distribution awaiting your discovery. The low-cost special. The low-power fuel miser. The simple, quick-to-build car designed to allow more testing time. A combination of all the above.

This world needs all kinds of engineers, because we have all kinds of problems to solve. Some of us will be called upon to solve technical problems in our later careers, some will end up managing people and driving strategy and simplifying processes and who knows what else. FSAE is just about the only thing I experienced in my uni career that can prepare us for all these possibilities.

Cheers all

[Michael Royce]

Geoff,
Amen!!!

Michael Royce

[Charles Kaneb]

Big Bird,

Superior results in the design event seem to be a LOT more resource-dependent once you get to the final. The top three teams in design at Lincoln 2013 (Washington: carbon monocoque, hot-rod 450, unsprung sandwich-panel tunnels, Kansas: carbon monocoque, integrated undertray and sidepods, paddle shifting, Texas-Arlington: Reher-Morrison built 450, independently and automatically controlled five-element wings on each corner of the car) brought machinery that 90% of the teams there could not have built even if they knew how. There's a difference in knowledge between those three and the next fifteen teams but can the gap in knowledge really be that great if everyone gets beaten by Missouri S&T in autocross?

Furthermore, the point-spread in the design final (35 points) is much bigger than the spreads in each dynamic event. To make up 35 points in autocross, you must be 3 1/2 seconds faster. To make up 35 points in the endurance, you must be 3 seconds per lap faster.

These are gigantic differences! Dynamic-event margins like that are rare; 3.5 seconds covered 1st through 16th in the autocross. A 35-point difference in skidpad covered 37 cars, a 35-point difference in acceleration covered 30.

I'm not sure that being able to convince the design judges that you can design a fast and reliable car should be more important than demonstrating this on the track.

[JulianH]

Charles, I see your point. 35 points is a big pot, that's true. In the UK, the spread between Design Finalists and Non-Finalists is smaller. This year, Chalmers as the best Non-Finals team scored 129 points. I think in a Design Competition this spread is ok.

I disagree that the "car" is the factor in the Design Finals. At least in Europe, the Finals could be held without the cars. In Germany, I even had to answer some philosophical questions from Claude http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

In the first Design round, you surely can impress the judges with your car. But in the Finals it is all up to you. E.g. in the combustion class at FSG 2013, a lot of "sophisticated" cars didn't qualify for the Finals. Maybe this is different in the States.

[JT A.]

Originally posted by Charles Kaneb:
Superior results in the design event seem to be a LOT more resource-dependent once you get to the final. The top three teams in design at Lincoln 2013 (Washington: carbon monocoque, hot-rod 450, unsprung sandwich-panel tunnels, Kansas: carbon monocoque, integrated undertray and sidepods, paddle shifting, Texas-Arlington: Reher-Morrison built 450, independently and automatically controlled five-element wings on each corner of the car) brought machinery that 90% of the teams there could not have built even if they knew how.

You can find carbon monocoques, complex wing packages (admitted, not as fancy as UTA's), hopped up engines, paddle shifters, etc on several cars that didn't make design finals, so whats your point? Your implication that those cars made top 3 in design just because of expensive features is some pretty flawed logic and disrespectful to those teams. You don't know what was discussed between the teams and the design judges, and what their reasoning for their scores was, so you're basically talking out of your ass.

As a side note, our "integrated undertray and sidepods" consisted of a couple right angle brackets, quarter turn fasteners, and some 15 minute epoxy. I didn't realize those were super high dollar materials. And I guarantee that no team can build a tube frame for cheaper than we built our monocoque, unless they actually make money doing it. Its amazing what kind of resources you can get when you make an effort to get them instead of whining and feeling sorry for yourself.


can the gap in knowledge really be that great if everyone gets beaten by Missouri S&T in autocross?

I've asked a former MS&T team member why their design scores never seem to live up to their on-track performance, and they told me it because a lot of the designers of critical systems can't make it to competition, so underclassmen had to cover for them in design & didn't know what they were talking about. As well as a general lack of effort and preparation. (Those were his words, not mine). So for all we know, MS&T's vehicle dynamics knowledge could be the best out of the whole competition, but the judges have to judge based on what is presented to them. If they just assumed that the fastest cars must also be the most well designed, there wouldn't be any point in having design at all. Might as well just get rid of it and put the points back into dynamic events.

Sorry if this comes off as hostile towards you, but I think your comments are off the mark and its not the first time I've heard comments like this from Texas A&M team members. Every encounter I've had with people from A&M they've had a very negative, bitter, whiney, grass-is-always-greener attitude and they are constantly criticizing the competition, design judges, and other teams. It's the only group of people in this whole competition that I've found unpleasant to be around.

[theTTshark]

Originally posted by Charles Kaneb:
Big Bird,

Superior results in the design event seem to be a LOT more resource-dependent once you get to the final. The top three teams in design at Lincoln 2013 (Washington: carbon monocoque, hot-rod 450, unsprung sandwich-panel tunnels, Kansas: carbon monocoque, integrated undertray and sidepods, paddle shifting, Texas-Arlington: Reher-Morrison built 450, independently and automatically controlled five-element wings on each corner of the car) brought machinery that 90% of the teams there could not have built even if they knew how. There's a difference in knowledge between those three and the next fifteen teams but can the gap in knowledge really be that great if everyone gets beaten by Missouri S&T in autocross?

Furthermore, the point-spread in the design final (35 points) is much bigger than the spreads in each dynamic event. To make up 35 points in autocross, you must be 3 1/2 seconds faster. To make up 35 points in the endurance, you must be 3 seconds per lap faster.

These are gigantic differences! Dynamic-event margins like that are rare; 3.5 seconds covered 1st through 16th in the autocross. A 35-point difference in skidpad covered 37 cars, a 35-point difference in acceleration covered 30.

I'm not sure that being able to convince the design judges that you can design a fast and reliable car should be more important than demonstrating this on the track.

Charles, you make some pretty big assumptions. Being from Kansas, I'll primarily focus on us.

Our undertray was simply bolted onto the bottom of our chassis and used a system to hold the outer edges up. We did it no differently then the dozens of other teams who are running undertrays currently, many of whom didn't even make finals at Lincoln. You also bring up sidepods. But please be honest with yourself, sidepods are not the reason we finished 2nd in design.

Paddle shifting is another topic that people always seem to believe is overly expensive. Buttons are cheap, air cylinders are practically being thrown at FSAE teams if you call the right companies, ECUs already have shifting features built in, and if you add in some parts from paintballing you have a paddle shift system. Besides that, many other teams at Lincoln had paddle shift systems that didn't make it to finals.

You bring up monocoques as well, but you forget that both us and Washington are located very close to locations of large aircraft companies. Utilizing carbon fiber is key to a lot of team members employment in these fields once we graduate. We've made monocoques for a long time now and it far from guarantees us a place in design finals, or even semis back when we used to do those. Yet again, a monocoque doesn't guarantee you anything. Besides your point is moot when the 3rd place team is a tubeframe car.

Stop making it seem like resources are what is keeping teams, like Texas A&M, out of design finals. Furthermore, Missouri S&T used to make it into design finals a lot in the past. Sometimes teams forget how to do that. In 2011, our car won autocross in Michigan, and we weren't included in finals. Why? Because we didn't understand why we were fast. We were 2nd in autocross in Cali that year, yet again we didn't make it to design finals. Why? Because we didn't understand why we were fast. Being fast =! knowing why you were fast.

Bringing up these three teams and then claiming the only reason they were top 3 (two years in a row I might add) is because we have the coolest stuff, is not only insulting to the teams who made it into the top three but a BS excuse for why you weren't there. All of the suspension/aero design judges wanted to know our design process, (I'm sure the other subsystems asked questions along the same lines) and what did we do to justify our design decisions. They didn't care about gimmicks, exotic materials/processes. Have you ever thought that maybe your team wasn't able to justify them to an extent that another team was? There were enough regular FSAE judges and motorsports professionals there that just using carbon/aluminum/titanium/whatever isn't going to impress them. But good design work will, and good vehicle dynamics knowledge certainly will. I'm tired of this crap where an FSAE team (even my own!) will say they weren't let into design finals/didn't place higher in design finals because of a judge bias/lack of X material/not pretty enough/not enough money. All it is, is an excuse of not doing a good enough job to beat the other teams. Even if you think you're the smartest FSAE team ever, but you can't communicate that brilliance, that does not tarnish what the other teams did. Because at the end of the day, that is still a fault with YOUR team, no one else.

Is the points gap too big? Maybe, but if you take all of the dynamic events together it becomes a lot easier to claw back points if you really are that much faster. Endurance may be tough to do that in, but remember last year the difference between KU (1st in endurance) and Texas A&M (2nd in endurance) was 21.8 points. So it is possible to claw points from people in dynamic events by just being fast, but this is a competition of both design and real performance and currently that balance is being pretty well achieved. Besides, I don't know why you're complaining about a 35 point deficit from 6th to 1st(Washington) in design when you guys finished 291 points down to 1st(Washington again) in endurance. You lost far more points in the dynamic portion than you did in design.

EDIT: Regarding the end of JT A's post, I had a similar ending to mine at first but decided not to post it. Maybe you're not the problem in the team Charles, but there seems to be a attitude problem with your team. If it's just a problem with us, considering it's two Kansas people posting the same thing at the same time, then we'll continue to let the competition scores speak for themselves. I have a feeling it isn't though based on what other teams have told me as well. Either change your attitudes or keep it in the shop.

[Charles Kaneb]

Yes, I was a bit too aggressive with that comment. The obnoxious attitude is also an A&M problem - particularly a CPK problem - we operate too much in a vacuum. "Just because it can't be done with a dull drill bit and a couple of clamps doesn't mean it shouldn't be done" is something we should consider before dismissing an entire system as impractical.

On the other hand, my point is still that the design event is a serious obstacle in the way of "twelve kids, twenty-five grand, and a welder" winning an FSAE event. There's not much to discuss with a composites judge when the only composite item on the car is the nosecone, for example.

After looking at how much our wings cost I'm still doubtful of any good monocoque being in the ballpark of a tubeframe's cost. If you've got the ability to cut foam in three dimensions to be able to provide complex contours, and achieve a good surface finish from it without burning up a grand's worth of sandpaper, then you know something we don't and our team will have to figure out how.

We made the design finals this year, and last year, and crashed out of design shortly afterwards partly due to a lack of data on the car, and partly due to a lack of anything to talk about. Our fault - a lot of data got lost this year, and it never existed last year.

We broke down this year, explaining the 291-point deficit in endurance. That was about the ultimate in "That's Racing" deals - it had never given trouble before, was a good COTS part, and doesn't appear to be a common design flaw with these.

[Big Bird]

Some interesting material here. I'll make a few comments in a few posts.

"After looking at how much our wings cost I'm still doubtful of any good monocoque being in the ballpark of a tubeframe's cost. If you've got the ability to cut foam in three dimensions to be able to provide complex contours, and achieve a good surface finish from it without burning up a grand's worth of sandpaper, then you know something we don't and our team will have to figure out how."

Who says composites require complex contours? We are the designers, we choose the shape. We have the power to choose a shape that is easy to manufacture as much as we do one that is optimized for stiffness, or mass, or cost...

Example - Edith Cowan Uni

And Charles, we found the A&M team to be utterly charming when we were over there. One of my fondest memories of FSAE was having dinner with Make and the team after FSAE West in 2006. Just sayin'...

[Charles Kaneb]

Originally posted by Big Bird:
Some interesting material here. I'll make a few comments in a few posts.

"Who says composites require complex contours?

And Charles, we found the A&M team to be utterly charming when we were over there. One of my fondest memories of FSAE was having dinner with Make and the team after FSAE West in 2006. Just sayin'...

I don't know how much damage I've done to the team I was on but I guess it's been pretty substantial. The last three years have gone pretty well but I've acted like we were one step ahead of the sheriff the whole time.

[Big Bird]

Strewth man, sorry. I wasn't implying you were the problem - I was more trying to stick up for you guys!

[Charles Kaneb]

Doesn't a part require curvature in both directions other than the release direction to be able to come off or out of the mold? It's always been a massive pain for us to get stuff out when it wasn't.

[Big Bird]

Who is insisting you need a mould? http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_wink.gif

[Charles Kaneb]

Originally posted by Big Bird:
Strewth man, sorry. I wasn't implying you were the problem - I was more trying to stick up for you guys!

Yeah. I think I crushed TAMU-13 under the weight of expectations. Had the Kansas guys talked to anyone but me they'd probably have had a different impression of A&M. We had the "Travis/Nick/CPK" driver nucleus coming back, had some sponsors and alumni who were willing to make a few parts for us (laser-cut steel tubes for the frame from G&H Diversified, hubs from TPO Parts, uprights from Schlumberger's local contractor, and some help with the first A&M wings from Paul Costas), and a couple ideas show up early on in the design process that looked REALLY good in the calculations. So I thought we'd do well this year.

What I hadn't counted on was that concentrating on the big stuff to solve a problem we didn't have (make it go WAY faster! beat the teams that can do things we can't!) kept us from solving the problems we did have - like losing the tire machine, like blowing up two trucks on the way to the competition, like continuing to run our engines long past when they should have been rebuilt, like treating used-up parts as "good as new"...

[Kevin Hayward]

Anyone on these forums ever built a strip built kayak? I would be really interested to see those techniques applied to FSAE chassis' with balsa (or foam) and carbon (or fibreglass). The ECU guys use balsa to do close-outs and it is super easy to shape. Although not quite as easy as shaping foam for mouldless wings. It wouldn't be as easy to do mounting points as a folded chassis, but should be almost identical
performance to the higher tech solutions. Some of those kayak weights and strengths are very impressive. If you do want moulds, you can also think of fabricating moulds directly, instead of plug then mould. No autoclaves are required, and if you want to use pre-pregs just make yourself a very big oven. A few insulated foam panels, a few temp controlled heaters and you can hold a very sizeable volume of air at 80-120degC very easily and cheaply.

Personally I think that spending 800-900 hours on a FSAE chassis is a bad use of resources, and effectively bad design. Mind you I think slavishly sticking to tube frames, which are also labour intensive and most definitely of lower performance is also bad design.

If only you could get a group of resource poor people together to build one of these cars that haven't got the burden of too much experience that are willing to make a few mistakes and try different methods of manufacture ...

Kev

[Charles Kaneb]

I thought we were invincible, right up until we were finally defeated.

David led the detail design of a car that got the weight distribution, c.g. height, and overall weight we wanted. Jason oversaw a manufacturing process that took us from a bare frame to a painted and running car. Will did more with tire data than we've ever performed in the past (that we lost all of our correlations and plots after the design of the car was done was another awful "just racing" thing). Jacob designed an aero package whose benefits were obvious the second it went on the car. Alex tuned the engine to run better than most passenger cars I've driven. In the last week before Lincoln we somehow overcame blowing an engine, breaking a wheel and having it hit a car in the pits, blowing up two trucks on the way to competition, and losing the suspension notebook right before the design final to be where we were right before the engine stopped running.

I think Parnelli Jones said it best. When we left, it just felt like I'd forgotten something important and couldn't remember what it was.

[theTTshark]

Originally posted by Charles Kaneb:
Yes, I was a bit too aggressive with that comment. The obnoxious attitude is also an A&M problem - particularly a CPK problem - we operate too much in a vacuum. "Just because it can't be done with a dull drill bit and a couple of clamps doesn't mean it shouldn't be done" is something we should consider before dismissing an entire system as impractical.

On the other hand, my point is still that the design event is a serious obstacle in the way of "twelve kids, twenty-five grand, and a welder" winning an FSAE event. There's not much to discuss with a composites judge when the only composite item on the car is the nosecone, for example.

After looking at how much our wings cost I'm still doubtful of any good monocoque being in the ballpark of a tubeframe's cost. If you've got the ability to cut foam in three dimensions to be able to provide complex contours, and achieve a good surface finish from it without burning up a grand's worth of sandpaper, then you know something we don't and our team will have to figure out how.

We made the design finals this year, and last year, and crashed out of design shortly afterwards partly due to a lack of data on the car, and partly due to a lack of anything to talk about. Our fault - a lot of data got lost this year, and it never existed last year.

We broke down this year, explaining the 291-point deficit in endurance. That was about the ultimate in "That's Racing" deals - it had never given trouble before, was a good COTS part, and doesn't appear to be a common design flaw with these.

Every team can have annoying people on the team. It has just seemed that maybe those annoying people have been especially loud, and we made the assumption it was a majority of people who were like that. So for that, I apologize.

Let me tell you something about Formula SAE that I've learned. No matter the size, budget, resources, expertise, etc of a team, we all deal with the same issues. I've talked to a lot of teams over the years and every single team I talk to have the same problems. A lot of the holes drilled on our car are done more with friction than actual cutting. The last time I saw new drill bits in the shop they were dull in 10 minutes! Haha. We have to do stuff janky as well. But we try to make sure that processes are continually passed on to the next team so that we get better over time. We have to train 20ish new people every year for our team. Here in a couple weeks we'll start doing the same thing all over again. We had maybe 8 or so experienced people at the beginning of last year. Less the year before and less this year. But that's the way it is for us so we learn to adapt and to try and teach people how to racecar in a couple weeks. Every team has the same story. Maybe the starting point, A, and the ending point, B, are different, but we share that road between the two. I remind our new people every year that no matter how ugly/heavy/janky a car looks, you still have to give all of your respect to the people on that team. Because there's a lot of people out there who aren't capable of doing what FSAE students do, and just because someone's car looks better doesn't make it a better racecar. I also have to remind people not to hate on better looking cars either, because they were able to utilize the constraints they were giving. That doesn't make them better or worse then you, just that their A and B points are different then ours. Formula SAE/Student is a fraternity of people who the rest of the world can't comprehend and most wouldn't be able to do, so just remind people that no matter the competition we're all in this together.

Like I said, UTA has found a way to do it without a Monocoque, so clearly the composites judges aren't that paramount. And if I were to be honest, I feel like we're hindered by the composite chassis a lot of the time. It is not a "perfect" solution. Also, we take our points hit in cost pretty hard, so it's not like we get away scot-free with all the composites. Moreover, JT and I both would prefer less composites as yet again we feel that a lot of the time they are used to a determent to the overall car performance. But that's a whole other matter.

You have to remember Charles. We made our first monocoque in 1999. We basically only know how to make a monocoque. In fact we have to borrow people's welders when we need to weld in the shop, we don't have our own. We've built wings since 07 and ran them at FSAE comps since 09. Sometimes these things take time to learn. The key is knowledge transfer. Design notebooks and pictures are key.

I know your failure was due to a sensor, but I wanted to make a point. In this competition, the real difference between all of our concepts is down to testing/knowledge/ability to communicate/lots of driving, aka execution. What this means is that the ball is in your court whether or not you succeed. No one elses. I guarantee JT and I would have done just as good answering Vehicle Dynamics questions with a tubeframe car or a 10" wheel car or a non-aero car or a single cylinder car. There's a lot of ways to justify your design. The key is to develop the tools to justify the car. Before 2012, we simply couldn't do that. We had some beautiful cars, but they didn't get us anywhere because we couldn't explain it. In 2011 JT had his but whooped in Michigan and California by Claude and he developed the tools to justify the car. We've increased our knowledge of vehicle dynamics as a team more in 2 years than we did in the previous 6 if I had to guess. All because we figured out how to justify our design. Optimum G seminars were also a huge help, as well as speaking to design judges.

Yet again Charles, no hard feelings. But if there's one thing I always remember at competition and online is that there is always someone watching, and it's easier to make a good image when those people hear compliments rather than critiques or complaints. Believe me, there's a lot of teams who have resources we want! But that's no excuse.

BTW, sorry for the thread jack.

Double BTW, great posts as usual Big Bird.

EDIT: Triple BTW! If you haven't Charles, or anyone else for that matter, read Racecar by Superfast Matt McCoy. You need to. It's an autobiography of a guy from the OU 2007 team, but it is the story of every FSAE guy/girl out there. The struggle, the joy, the loneliness. It's free here: http://www.superfastmatt.com/2...1/free-racecars.html (http://www.superfastmatt.com/2012/01/free-racecars.html)

[Z]

Originally posted by Charles Kaneb:
... a couple ideas show up early on in the design process that looked REALLY good in the calculations. So I thought we'd do well this year...
Charles,

I think you mentioned something similar on another thread (can't remember where...).

Any chance of you letting us know what that "REALLY good' idea is, now that the comps are over? http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

Or is it still trade secret? http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_frown.gif

Z

[AxelRipper]

Random $0.02 to put in here on the resources gap in the design almost-finalists vs finalists.

Everything I've always seen has been the difference between testing and not testing. We all (should) know that having test data in design that you can use to justify your design decisions is really a key aspect of the competition. How do you get this data? Testing, of course. However, it is much easier to do this testing if you have a larger resource pool.

There are many aspects to this. You could say that more resources (money, sponsors, team members) can make it easier to get the car done earlier, and give you more testing. You could define resources as having an easily accessible (and/or quality) area to test.

What if you have an area to test and your car is done then? Well you need repeatable drivers and (ideally) a data acquisition system. If you don't have data acquisition then you can still (IMO) make design finals, but you have your work cut out for you. Set up a course and spend time testing. Pure testing VS a stop watch. Lots of laps to log, change, log more laps, change, etc. While you would still have to do this with data acq, you don't get as much data out of it. In design I can see this being key as with it (and people understanding how to use it) then you can give a more detailed explanation on WHY something helps versus simply HOW something works. For sure the how will work for you in design by being able to explain how your tuning makes you faster, and you can get book explanations as to why this is, but having data sure seems like it would be nice to point to as well (gives you a bit more in-depth knowledge of the systems).

Now, there is the last part of this, which is really the icing on the cake of all testing: driver competency. You can drive around the parking lot all you want, but how do you know that your data is actually valid? If you don't have a good driver, first off you'll never really get to the limits of your car. Second off, if they're driving above their heads it is unlikely they'll be able to give good feedback on the car because either they don't know what they're supposed to be feeling, they don't know what they're feeling, or they're too busy going "AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH" or "I have such a *censored* right now, because I'm in a racecar and this is the greatest ever" to be able to concentrate on what the car is doing. With a good driver and some test time, you can make a car competitive or at least get good data because you can get truly repeatable data and feedback with back to back changes.

What it really seems is there is a massive amount of diminishing returns to be able to get that extra 50 points in design, as to hit 100 points (at Michigan at least) you can get by with knowing what you did, why you did it, and how what you did effects other systems. The rest of that 50 points is icing on the cake that requires significant gains in resources (or something that really sticks out that you can really justify).

(And on a side point, someone mentioned the FSUK point gap being smaller. That may be the case, but if an electric car gets 110 points in design, they'd be almost automatically equal with a combustion car that won design provided both finish endurance to get an efficiency score. Thats the #1 issue I have with combined competitions)

[js10coastr]

If only you could get a group of resource poor people together to build one of these cars that haven't got the burden of too much experience that are willing to make a few mistakes and try different methods of manufacture ...

Kev

Dear Lord... where in the world will we ever find that?!?

[mdavis]

Originally posted by AxelRipper:
Random $0.02 to put in here on the resources gap in the design almost-finalists vs finalists.

Everything I've always seen has been the difference between testing and not testing. We all (should) know that having test data in design that you can use to justify your design decisions is really a key aspect of the competition. How do you get this data? Testing, of course. However, it is much easier to do this testing if you have a larger resource pool.

There are many aspects to this. You could say that more resources (money, sponsors, team members) can make it easier to get the car done earlier, and give you more testing. You could define resources as having an easily accessible (and/or quality) area to test.

What if you have an area to test and your car is done then? Well you need repeatable drivers and (ideally) a data acquisition system. If you don't have data acquisition then you can still (IMO) make design finals, but you have your work cut out for you. Set up a course and spend time testing. Pure testing VS a stop watch. Lots of laps to log, change, log more laps, change, etc. While you would still have to do this with data acq, you don't get as much data out of it. In design I can see this being key as with it (and people understanding how to use it) then you can give a more detailed explanation on WHY something helps versus simply HOW something works. For sure the how will work for you in design by being able to explain how your tuning makes you faster, and you can get book explanations as to why this is, but having data sure seems like it would be nice to point to as well (gives you a bit more in-depth knowledge of the systems).

Now, there is the last part of this, which is really the icing on the cake of all testing: driver competency. You can drive around the parking lot all you want, but how do you know that your data is actually valid? If you don't have a good driver, first off you'll never really get to the limits of your car. Second off, if they're driving above their heads it is unlikely they'll be able to give good feedback on the car because either they don't know what they're supposed to be feeling, they don't know what they're feeling, or they're too busy going "AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH" or "I have such a *censored* right now, because I'm in a racecar and this is the greatest ever" to be able to concentrate on what the car is doing. With a good driver and some test time, you can make a car competitive or at least get good data because you can get truly repeatable data and feedback with back to back changes.

What it really seems is there is a massive amount of diminishing returns to be able to get that extra 50 points in design, as to hit 100 points (at Michigan at least) you can get by with knowing what you did, why you did it, and how what you did effects other systems. The rest of that 50 points is icing on the cake that requires significant gains in resources (or something that really sticks out that you can really justify).

We have fairly similar thought processes on the Design competition, and our teams ended up within about 5-10 points of each other in Design at all 3 competitions this year (I think you beat us by a handful of points in Canada, but at the US competitions, we were in the same grouping). I think our teams probably have similar amounts of resources, and we both have what I would call "curriculum based hurdles" to deal with (co-op, etc.).

We didn't have DAQ up and running until ~2 test days before Lincoln, yet were able to use what little data we had from our testing prior to MIS and Canada (testing tool budget of something like $20 for a tire pyrometer and stop watch app's on cell phones) to score right around the 100 point mark. We had a little more data in Lincoln, but hadn't fully processed it (all 3 competitions were after the core of our team had graduated, and all but 2 Design team members had started working our full time jobs by then, and I was in Japan for a business trip the week before Lincoln, so I didn't have time to process the accelerometer data before competition) but I also forgot some of our initial simulation work (sensitivity analysis results) that I had at MIS and Canada, which ended up being most of what I talked about in Lincoln.

-Matt