This year it was my privilege to serve as one of the design judges at the California competition.
I did not have the opportunity to participate in FSAE in college but I do have the experience of designing, building and testing a complete car from scratch so I can closely relate to the many challenges faced by the teams.  Having now been a part of the judging process and having talked to and evaluated a number of teams I thought it might be helpful to provide some general feedback and input regarding the design portion of the competition, from my perspective, to all FSAE competitors.

It seems quite a few teams believe that showing up with a car which conforms to the rules and has some technically interesting bits and pieces is enough.  While that of course is a prerequisite, it is important to keep in mind that what you bring to the competition is not only the car but the entire team, the depth of team members' understanding of the design issues and process and the clarity of the design goals.  The car is a measure of how successful and consistent your design effort is at achieving those goals.

What you will see repeated several times in the following paragraphs is design justification.  The ability to show why and how a particular choice is made is very important both in the presentation and in creating a better car in the first place.

Based on what I saw in California, below are some of the key areas that I would advise each team to consider as you design and build your car and prepare for competition.

Author: Alexandra Stoppler, Rennteam Universität Stuttgart

Having completed a very successful season with three overall wins and one almost-win in fife competitions the question we hear a lot is: How did you do that. To make one thing clear from the very beginning: There are many ways to approach this complex task of building a racecar with limited resources such as time, money and workforce. Here is our way:

We believe that not only our engineering skills made us designing a great racecar, moreover the project management is one of the very important key factors to manage this project.

First of all it is important to decide how the team should be organised in general. We preferred being organised as a non-profit organisation, so we are independent from the university. Being active in motorsport makes it often necessary to decide things very quickly. If you have to go the university’s administrative channel it might take a very long time to set up a decision and it can be too late for it.We have the advantage to make a decision very fast.

As a non-profit organisation we support “the advancement of science, research and the education of students” and for that we have the possibility to certificate contribution receipts and we have advantages as regards taxes. We do not only support engineering students, but in having an independent administration we also encourage students of every other course type.

The organisation itself gives every team the goals to base all decisions on. This year we had three goals.

VI-grade, a global leader in providing simulation tools to the racing and production automotive markets, launched the VI-grade Virtual Formula to assist students in developing their designs, but also inject fun and competition using the virtual world!

The challenge:

• Optimize the performance of a virtual race car and minimize the lap time on a given autocross track.
• Competition will be won by the team able to provide back to VI-grade the vehicle with the shortest laptime on the given circuit.
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Author: Anthony Pluck, Oxford Brookes Racing

1 - Why lap time simulation?

Lap time simulation has proved to be a valuable tool for OBR (Oxford Brookes Racing) as it saves the team a lot of time and money in both the design and the testing stage of our car build and testing process. Figure 1 shows how lap time simulation is incorporated in the design process in the OBR team.

During the design process OBUSim can be used to monitor the progress of weight and any other performance targets. Once the car has been built and testing has commenced, the lap time simulation team can investigate and validate any proposed set up changes, see figure 2.

Author: Clenn Giebenhain, DART Racing, TU Darmstadt

If you take a closer look at the development of motorsport in general over the last decade one can observe the triumphal procession of composite materials. Back in the 90’s Michael Schumachers championship winning Benetton B195 featured steel wishbones, a casted engine block and an aluminium steering wheel which can found in any better tuned streetcar.

Today carbon fibre wishbones with integrated flexijoints, metal matrix composite (MMC) engine housings, sophisticated aerodynamic devices and amazingly save carbon monocoques seem to be common in F1.

Composite materials became a state of the art technology which also changed the appearance of FSAE. Its unrestricted regulations compared to other racing categories saw the upcoming of a new breed of racecars which not only adopted F1’s technology in many fields but also made an approach to completely new areas. Recently the most hyped of them all is the carbon fibre wheel.

A short excerpt of history: 1984 saw Honda introducing the first carbon rim on their NSR500 GP machinery but the new device failed catastrophically at high speeds during first qualifying. In 1987 Lancia brought a closed carbon rim prototype on its group B monster which regrettably never raced.

Left: First ever introduced carbon disc rim for autoracing purposes by Lancia in 1987.  Right: modern FSAE carbon spoke rim from DART Racing, Darmstadt in 2008.