Claude,

My time in FSAE is short but the team's body of knowledge is large.
That is why the same teams, in pretty much every collegiate sport or competition, stay near the top or bottom.

From the scorn that is heaped on the cars on even mid field teams it is clear that pretty much everyone is dissatisfied with the current state of things.
Teams that show up with a non-competitive unreliable car one year tend to do so year after year.
Teams rarely continuously improve and I would bet that some of the ‘top’ teams are heavily dependent on momentum.

A well run organization team tends to remain well run.
A poorly run organization tends to remain poorly run unless acted on by an outside force.

If the goal is for them to learn then we should not be so upset when they fail; that is how they will learn.
And the students will learn the same key lessons if their car is a carbon fiber dream or a 500kg mess.
FSAE is mostly about engineering project management.
Students dump time into suspension and chassis design and then never use it; while the lessons about how to organize a team will last their entire career.

So you are correct that the best way is to jump in cold water.
But that also means most teams will never improve beyond their current level of performance.
If you want more teams to compete at a high level or even just finish endurance then a solution with intermediate steps is needed.

It is not the individual students that need to improve; they are already learning the correct lessons.
It is the teams as organizations that need to be pushed to do better.

***
What did you think about the other idea of having a mini event a few weeks before the large competitions?

-William