2014 FSAE-Australasia

[Kevin Hayward]

GTS,

Despite an impressive CG height, it'll take more - or a relative fall in the competition's standards - to win design. Because it takes more to make a great overall design. This is a function of the competition presented, not the relative slickness of the competition's presentations. The CG height different is indeed transformative in a performance context (whilst it's unique); and there are plenty of dynamic events to show of the magnitude of this effect in where it can be demonstrated ceteris paribus. As it turned out (and as those judging broadly, anecdotally predicted) it couldn't, because the design was simply not as strong (and even compromised) in other areas, despite there being much that's a good base to move forwards from. There are no doubts that a development of this car could herald a genuine performance breakthrough in the competition.

Just a quick point here, although once again I am stressing that I am not arguing the result. ECU was behind Monash in the dynamics by less than 8 points (This will be less once the efficiency results are corrected). The only event that Monash was faster was Autocross. Monash had a better trained and more experienced driver team. Take out hit cones and ECU would have won the dynamic events. A fair comment given that most of the cones were hit by drivers competing in their first competition. Perhaps Monash would have gone faster in Endurance, but they had a few notable reliability concerns. Of the two most objective dynamic events (skidpan and Accel) ECU came out with a big margin to Monash.

Yes the ECU car was compromised in some areas, as was Monash. I don't think in this case that the dynamic event results confirm the statement you have made.

I will say thank you for your feedback. We have received no other feedback from the design team. The only thing that another judge mentioned to the guys was that the car needed more adjustability. A confusing comment given that every adjustment available for a conventional car could be made on the ECU car and then some (as evidenced by the difference between the skidpan and accel setup).

Kev

[Big Bird]

Hear, hear. Thanks GTS. Whoever you are

[Mitchell]

At UQ our competition week went something like this:
Wednesday 3rd: we hadn't had a track day in over a week due to exams, component failures, mistakes and workshop delays. All the stars aligned on this day and the car was prepared for a track day with a brand new beam axle and spool. It was around 1am when it was discovered the toe links didn't really fit.

Thursday 4th: Early start to try and get the car to track because we desperately wanted aero data before comp. Undertray was pressure tapped. Toe links were put in the kitten killing single shear. No kittens died. Car got to the track (Willowbank) which is about a 1 hour drive from uni at 2:30pm. We managed 2 hours of testing time and logged some aero data.

Friday 5th: Car was taken to lakeside (~1 hour away too.) for the first no-failure track day of the year. I use the term no-failure lightly, during the day the steering wheel broke off (was only tack welded to check steering wheel angle and meant to be fully welded afterwards, this was forgotten) and the firewall delaminated and folded in half. Both were easy backyard fixes and repaired correctly that weekend. The good news of this is it gave us some confidence in the car which was severely lacking until this point. When we got back from the track day at ~5pm we painted our new trailer.

Saturday 6th: Bits and pieces were repaired, full day in the workshop.

Sunday 7th: Everything packed and trailer loom made (all nighter for a couple guys)

Monday 8th: Discovered the car we intended to tow with was not compatible with our trailer lights (at 4am .. ) had to tow with one of the slowest cars known to man, a nissan navara 2.5. We drove 19-22 hours to Shepparton. This was a massive day but turned out to be very valuable as it allowed us to get some driving time on tuesday. Got into bed at ~2am.

Tuesday 9th: Headed to Monash and managed some testing time at the netball courts, mostly skidpan. ARB was broken, maybe from transport but most likely from poor design. We replaced it with a 25mm barstock (no risks at this point) for some more testing time in the afternoon. We then went to our to the campsite and resealed the stator cover to get rid of an oil leak. All the clutch cover bolts were loose too! another 2am finish

Wednesday 10th: Testing with Melbourne at the oakliegh kart track. The car was behaving perfectly until the welds on the beam axle cracked, due to the stainless filler wire on a mild steel beam (not our decision .. ) We took the car to Monash and had a 1:30am finish in the workshop plating up the corners. We also re-welded our swirl pot tabs as they had torn off completely.

Thursday 11th: Set up at Calder Park, missed our scrutineering slot because our event guide was a previous version. The car wasn't really ready though so no big deal. Worked on the car for the rest of the day checking over bits and pieces.

Friday 12th: First pass through scrutineering was simple. only minor fixes: heat shield on filler, trim the tray, better catch can mounting, drain hole in tray and longer bolts in submarines. Passed clear second attempt. Everyone passed egress first try. Small fuel leak from rollover valve in tilt test, relocated valve higher and this was fixed. Passed noise and brake first attempt.

Saturday 13th: Put new tyres on (our only set) in the morning and went out for skidpan. Set a decent time and then our academic adviser found a broken bolt on the tray. Every single sprocket bolt was completely sheared, had probably never been tensioned properly. Threw new bolts in and did a few more skidpans. Then went to acceleration, surface was very dusty but we managed a solid time. Car was then prepped for autocross. Rob, our tech director, set the fastest time. Few loose bolts were luckily found beforehand. Car was performing well.

Sunday 14th: Sent car out for first endurance with the intention of running before the track got way too hot as we only had the single set of tyres. Was going to be Rob and Jarryd (a karting driver on the team) but a few wires shorted in Robs session and the car was turned into a lawn ornament. We assumed it was the killswitch but luckily review of the video revealed otherwise. Our electrics guy did a great job finding the broken wires and the car was sent out for endurance 2 with Chan (Team principal) and Jarryd. I was an absolute mess and for someone who doesn't usually get rattled was in tears for most of this run and after. Geoff tried to interview me but I actually couldn't speak due to being completely emotionally overwhelmed and physically exhausted. The drivers did a brilliant job with fairly clean runs until the steering rack broke. Chan still brought her home though and amazingly only used 1.9kg of fuel! Great engine. Got our trophy for acceleration and then discovered we were 5th overall. Extremely happy with that. Thing get hazy from about 1 hour previous to the afterparty til about 10am the next day.

Monday 15th: Steering was fixed at Monash. Car went out in the driver swap day. This is when I left to fly home for work but I saw the car come rolling to a stop as I was leaving. ARB arm had completely broken which is pretty impressive and a great data point for future designs.

There has been a bit of discussion here about the price of innovation. I would like to add my thoughts. Firstly I should specify that I don't really believe that we were particularly innovative on a competition scale as what we tried had been done before by the great guys at UWA. We were however innovative internally to our team as we worked out all our design and manufacturing processes with minimal external reference. Many things were overlooked, a few components were neglected, but we achieved our overall goals with an improvement in competition results and a completely new car finished in a year. Everyone even did well with their university results too! I can't even count the all nighters this year and we were pushing them as early as febuary, I have estimated that this years process was somewhere around the 150-200 hours per week. When you split that between ~8-10 people it is a massive task. Lack of sleep, stress and a massive emotional investment means things get overlooked/forgotten/ignored. We were extremely lucky to finish every event.

Our car was well received in design and our result (9th) reflects upon the sacrifices that had to be made to just get it done. Despite zero practice or planning for the design event the judges seemed to enjoy the car, our explanations and our efforts - where they were actually applied. I am still yet to receive any detailed feedback. I would love to say that I would do it differently but I am not sure how. ECUs decision to skip a competition and focus the car on the following year is a safe one. The risks of changing so many components & concept could be controlled with better team management. I don't know how Monash do it but we have tried multiple different ways to get more team members motivated and involved with little or no effect. There is a pretty big problem in the sense that everyone on our team is a volunteer with no academic or other benefit from participating, besides the obvious --to some-- effect of becoming a better engineer. When just completing a job is significantly quicker than teaching someone new to do it, with a massive amount of time already invested, it takes someone special to sit down and share that knowledge. This is compounded when the skill/knowledge they are sharing is close to completely self learnt. Sorting out these problems, applying more rigour to our design process and iterating our car will hopefully provide the return on our investment. I want to fill that silver cup with xxxx.

[Z]

In what'll be my last post before Z resurfaces to explain his conduct;

GTS,

Regarding presentation within Design, you earlier wrote,

It's not about the best designed car at competition, neither about the best presentation. it's about both,
...
in terms of design ownership, the latter [presentation] is a requirement to talk about the former [design]. You can't expect the judges to award mega points to an awesome-looking car that can't be explained by those presenting it.
...
I only judged aero - which the Monash team presented excellently ... They do a bit of stuff differently: presenting team members wore a shirt, were ready, present, and were engaging. ... Which was a good and industry-relevant thing.

(My added emphasis.)

And so on it goes...

The DJs are all human. It is a fact that half of them are of below average resistance to sweet-talking spin-doctoring. (Think about it, it is a statistical fact.) The end result is that the Design Event is the second most influenced by subjective bias in the whole competition. I am fine with 100/1000 points being awarded to the Team with the best ability to peddle bulldust, ie. "Presentation Event". That is good education for the realities of the real world.

But I do not want to see ~300/1000 points handed out for purely subjective reasons. This could happen if Design scoring was pushed up to, say, 200 points, not forgetting that Cost has a fair degree of subjectivity in it as well.

Design Event should be about the design of the car itself.
~~~o0o~~~

Regarding the DJ's ability to judge the students' "knowledge".

Earlier (page 7) I wrote,

"SOME "HOW TO GO FASTER" NOTES -
...
* VEHICLE DYNAMICS -
...
AutoX and Enduro - Again, MORE R%!!! And less Yaw-Inertia. All these cars will go a lot faster if they can turn into the corners faster, and then use their abundant power better when coming out of the slow to mid-speed corners. There is far too much rear-wheel spinning in the slower sections, always accompanied by glacially slow forward progress.

This has not changed since the first comp I saw a dozen years ago, and is a direct result of the never-changing fashion of building (almost) every new car with the "ideal" ~50:50 weight distribution. <= WRONG!
...
I personally think the non-winged Auckland car would have won this comp if it had a bit more R%."

(Some emphasis added.)

This was blindingly obvious to me when I first saw these cars in 2002. I was harping on about it on these Forums back in 2005, as per the link back on page 12. I have continued to push this point over the last few years.

This single issue of R% is the most overwhelming factor in improving the performance of these cars. It is a trivially simple thing to explain theoretically. Small boys with no education at all can understand it practically.

But how many Design Judges have discussed this issue with the students over the last ~30 years of FS/FSAE?

It appears the answer must be "NOT many!", given that so few Teams have gone down this path.

Pat has posted here since I asked this question, but NO SPECIFIC REPLY to "R%?". I doubt Claude will give a specific reply, since he won't even post his thoughts on "DASDs?".

It follows that there is very little FUNDAMENTAL education happening here.
~~~o0o~~~

GTS, I have read and re-read your post addressing this question of "R%?". Again, I CANNOT FIND ANY SPECIFIC ANSWER! The most I can find is,

... good design will deserve more points if the students can explain it.
...
Among the judges we counted at least five national and three international racing categories of experience, over 10 road vehicle development groups and more. Your assertion ... is bullshit.

Paraphrased, that is,
"You are students, so you have to explain everything.
But we are DJs, so we are very clever, so WE DON'T HAVE TO EXPLAIN ANYTHING!"

I am not seeing good Education in that attitude.

Z

[Jonny Rochester]

Thanks for that story Mitchell, I can relate to it well.

Fasteners and good welding is sort of important. These cars seam to shake themselves to bits. I wonder if we soft-mount the engine reliability would go up.

[Big Bird]

For a little comp, we write a lot of words...

Now, lining myself up here to get shot down mercilessly...

GTS and Z, I know you both personally. And I have had lengthy discussions with the both of you about the state of Australian education, the future of FSAE-A, the lack of dedicated Design judges, and the decline in quality of current graduates. And you know what? You are both batting for the same team. You might have some differences in the way you want to implement change, but you both want the same change. As do I. And as do many people in this community.

We do have problems with lack of feedback in this competition. I knew it as a student competitor, I pushed for it as a faculty advisor, and then I struggled to push it through as one of the organizing consortium committee. It is an area that needs work.

GTS, you are one of the first design judges to take this issue seriously, and we thank you for that. Sincerely. Sincerely sincerely. Your efforts have been a breath of fresh air.

Z, you have been pushing for greater understanding and have played devils advocate on many occasions. Your methods are provocative, but I also note that you have taken extreme lengths over the years to explain your point of view. And the sketches you have provided are engineering art.

Now please, can we shake hands and make up? Move on? It pains me no end to see people of the same opinion tearing each other to shreds to win a battle within your own team. With the dwindling fortunes of Australian industry slowly pulling the curtains on us all, we need to fight together, not with each other.

Thanks gents,

Geoff

[Jonny Rochester]

More hand shaking and hugs.
10364184_606261329503486_8701928208189106711_n.jpg

[Big Bird]

Its all one big love-fest Jonny. And you seem to be at the centre of it all

[Pete Marsh]

Moke, re Comp strategy and practices to win,
Unlike Kev, I was there, and will accept responsibility. I was in roles directly responsible for the type of things you see going on, FROM WINNING TEAMS. I make no apology, because as any team that competes regularly to win international comps will tell you, this is what the FSAE competition is at the top level, right or wrong. Every point counts. If a competitor starts 1m behind the line and you can't get their time excluded (RMIT), then you have to do it to, you can't let them have those extra couple of points, or you will get beaten. (and did anyway that year). There may even be a case for this being relevant to the educational aspect of the comp. In business, it is important to be able to see where and why you are winning or loosing to your competitors. An engineer should understand the role they have in their enterprise to make the product win by more and loose by less.

RE Team structure styles-

As I tell all our new guys on the UWA team, Kev, Nando and others delivered a very capable concept in their time in the team, but they didn't race it too well. So while there were some good results, and design event wins, a comp win eluded them. My influence brought a trade background and Rally experience. A discipline better suited to FSAE than you might at first imagine. With some star team members in key areas, and more focus on driveability and usability, a lot of work on tyres and set up consistency, and more aggressive pursuit of every available point, wins followed.


BUT! With continuous iteration it ended up requiring fairly advanced knowledge in each vehicle area just to understand the car, let alone make an improvement on it. With school support disappearing, and close Faculty guidance along with it, it became difficult for new team members to learn enough during their time in the team to do much, or any, design improvement.

There was somehow an unwritten, unspoken, expectation, I think from Kev's time, that each car would be better than the last. We held onto this FAR too long. The team found itself trying to out do previous efforts, (and other top teams), with less manufacturing resource, a smaller team with less experience (recruiting went away with faculty support), no guidance, and a underlying design concept from people that left 5 years ago. Needless to say, it didn't end well.
Even without reducing resources, it now seems ridiculous to me a group of new fresh faces can somehow out design and build the previous group each year indefinitely. This requires you to absorb the lessons learned by your predecessors, and carry on where they left off, which of course you can do to an extent, but eventually this process takes up all the available time, and there is nothing left for the car.

Many teams iterate and develop the designs to a state of awesomeness, which is cool, and they are rewarded for it in the event, which is easy to understand. Claude suggested to us a five year plan is right, with a world championship (attempt) at the end, and a new start after. I can see that, IF there is long term control and guidance of the team and it's resources.

But what if that's not there, and you try to run a 1 year program?

If you allow your somewhat fresh team members design freedom to work from first principles, address the stated need, and find a solution, honestly, compared to the iterative way, the designs are rubbish. A car that is a collection of these things iterated by a slightly more experienced group having their first go at that, well, it's going to have some LTI (Less Than Ideal) about it. BUT, it IS their work! The reality, at my school at least, is that 3rd and 4th years CAN NOT, by a big margin, design a GFR (insert whatever awesome team you like) beater in their first attempt OF DESIGNING ANYTHING on their own. At UWAM this is slightly further complicated by not having the resources to manufacture a complete car, so a large number of components must be sourced from old cars, so some great concept ideas have to be scrapped if they need too many different big ticket items.

SO, the car is going to have it's issues, and won't be at the comp standard, and hence will score poorly. But the students will have learnt a LOT about fundamental engineering design and project management. Arguably a LOT more than the student handed a well defined component design brief, and a half a dozen previous examples of the part, and a specific shortcoming that requires addressing. Still a very valid engineering design experience sure, but of a very different nature. Ideally, you would of course do both, and this is UWAM's goal, but achieving it has proved difficult. Should this be rewarded at all at the comp?

Realistically, a first year design car by students with 0 to 1 year FSAE prior experience will never do well at comp the way things are, and this is probably as it should be, but it would be kind of nice (in a group hug kind of way) if there was some recognition that what they had done was at least worthwhile, and maybe even good. The treatment UWAM '12 got was soul destroying for those involved. Only Claude (of the DJ/officials) took the time to look at our idea and offer some words of encouragement, for which I thank him very much, and without which would have almost certainly meant the end of the concept and probably the team. The support from other teams was also really good, greatly appreciated, and made a big difference.

I applaud UQ for having a go at the side rocker beam suspension system ("mechanically mode separated suspension" I call it), and I don't know what their team structure is like, but I would be chuffed if they could refine it into a world beater, or at least an Aus comp winner. It is great to hear from GTS they were well received in design event this year. I would be interested to here from them on their take of this years comp and design event with an "innovative", but not fully developed, car.
Likewise, I strongly suspect ECU has a long term development plan, and the guidance, stability and resources to carry it out. It seems easy to forget that that car is the first iteration of a pretty radical, and impressive, solution. They may not have won this year, but I'll be stunned if they don't win with that concept in the future.

Pete

[Kevin Hayward]

Nicely said Pete. I think UWA needed to change direction after 2006. I would hold that car as almost the pinnacle of the era, and competitive against any of the current crop. Hard to iterate from there. I wonder how things would have gone for the Uni if the EV team was more friendly to students running the show instead of being a Uni driven exercise. One good electric team instead of 2 marginal teams would have been a very interesting development for the Uni. I hope that one day there can be a revival at UWA. As much as they are now competitors it was a lot of hard work to get it going and competitive. The new crop have a massive task in front of them, and none of the advantages of being unheard of.

I think there are 3 important stages in developing a world competitive team:

1. Develop a belief that at some stage you can win. This means building 1-2 fairly straightforward cars and getting your team organised and pointed in the right direction. Very important in this stage to learn how to design a car that finishes all events. Reliability is key here and needs to be continued on as the team develops. The only important comp results here is to put a score up for every event. Many teams never achieve a belief in themselves to develop a good product and expect that they can never be competitive with the flashy cars up front.

2. Develop your design and manufacturing skills in order to create a unique competitive advantage. This is the time for innovation and rapid improvement in what you design and build. During this your statics results should be improving markedly, and you should be starting to press against the edges in the rulebook.

3. Learn to race the cars. Development and driver training become crucial as does racecraft. Finally you can begin to hope to win Autocross, and as we all know autocross performance is a pretty good indicator of the finishing place of a team (assuming reliability).


As the time goes on stage 2 may often need to be revisited, and after a big fall maybe stage 1. I have seen teams get no further than stage 2, and plenty that try to skip stage 2 altogether. When I left UWA we were only just starting to get the final stage into place. The team was much better at racecraft and vehicle development by Detroit 2005 than it was in Oz 2004. Monash have been the best team I have seen in being able to maintain themselves at such a high level for so long. They came up out of a lull in the Oz comp and maybe the first few years they didn't have a lot of competition, but instead of taking easy wins they destroyed the opposition. Last year they won by around 200 points, the year before by over 100. While they haven't been one of the most innovative teams in terms of design they have done a lot more than most, walking a very tight path of doing enough to stay highly competitive, while not doing too much that they over-extend. This years competition (regardless of the upcoming rule changes) showed very clearly that they will now need to make some pretty big changes if they want to stay on top too much longer.

When Auckland are reliable they are quick. The new rules will work towards them a little, probably enough to account for the difference this year.

If Curtin can bring their huge weight down and start to carve out a few design advantages they have the team management, build quality and development skills to do well.

UQ needs a lot of work on many areas, but their team was tight. 2 years of good development could see them fighting with the best. I reckon if the Auckland or ECU guys built the UQ car with a few on the shop floor improvements it could have placed in the top 3. This car was very impressive despite it's modest finish. The team was very tight.

Swinbourne electric look like they are on the right path. A couple of really good years on this track and they have the potential to make the IC cars pointless in a combined competition.

The ECU concept has a lot of legs, and is already competitive. Although the team will be largely a new one next year (about half of the 25 members at this years comp were 1st and 2nd years).

Personally while I was a bit gutted that ECU didn't get over the line this year I was really excited by what I saw in Australia. Reliability was high and it looks like teams are back on the innovation bandwagon. Hopefully a revival of the OZ teams on the world stage is coming. Also interesting discussions with faculty advisors and SAE-A. A show of hands for those willing to see some non-Victorian venues in the future was good to see. We were also assured that the SAE-A does not see the competition as having to stay in Melbourne. A lot of details would need to be solved such as volunteers etc, but hopefully one day we can see comps in Queensland, NSW, SA (again) and maybe even WA. Definitely the time to revitalise the competition has arrived. I hope that we can get EA involved and like GTS mentions get this comp to be more relevant to Australian engineering in the post automotive manufacturer era.

...

Lastly Pete, I have heard rumors of your graduation ... please assure me they are exaggerated and we can expect to see you as a student for the next 10 years.

Kev