Formula Student UK - A few photos

[ArosaMike]

A couple of weekends ago we had Formula Student UK at Silverstone (the first time it's been there after being held at Bruntingthorpe for the past 8 years. Overall our team finished 30th out of 70. The competition is quite complicated due it being heavily based on vehicle design as well as actual dynamic racing events, but we won the Cost event (basically our car was the most economically made but also not rediculously so). We had issues in the dynamic events as we had not tested as much as we would have wanted which meant we were still setting the car up during the weekend when we should have been fine tuning it. I drove for the Sprint and Endurance parts of the event and managed to drag the car into 22nd for the sprint. As so many racing teams say though.....the car is capable of much more and I was struggling massively with understeer and a missifire. Not to worry too much though as I'd managed to get the car into the fastest of the 3 groups. Needless to say...driving round (an admittedly very coned off) Luffield at Silverstone the weekend after Hamilton slid his McLaren round it was pretty cool.

Anyway...enough waffle.....time for pictures:

Some of our car:





Just after we delivered it to our pit garage on Weds evening:


Performing the tilt test as part of scrutineering:


Rolling the car back after some testing:


Circling for another attempt at the brake test:


Now for some of the other teams cars:

Helsinki Finland have been going for 4 years now and have a reputation for making pretty well made steel space frames with composite bodies. They run the same Yamaha R6 engine as us, but do a lot more testing! They also had a really wierd diffuser this year. It's questionable how well aero works on the cars due to the low average speeds the tracks have (30-40mph). It's becoming increasingly accepted though that diffusers to seem to help to a degree.



Lining up for their brake test:


And again!:


Mmm fancy steering wheel!:


Wierd winged diffuser. "Apparently" it gives and extra 150% more downforce!:


Now for TU Graz. Kind of the Ferrari of Formula Student! They allegedly get 1million Euros a year from Red Bull and have practically everything you could think of. A full carbon monocoque, carbon wishbones, carbon wheels, traction control, launch control, pneumatic paddle shift, full telemetry and a very low weight for a 4cyl car.





Crazy carbon!


Telemetry aerials:


F1 style shark fin radiator extractors:


Sensor for their TC:


Even fancier Carbon steering wheel with massive telemtry screen:


Carbon wheels:


Now a few of the other cars:

Cincinatti:


Cardiff:


TU Munich:


TU Delft - The 2nd lightest car at 152kg fully wet:


Madrid:


Eventual winners RMIT from Melbourne. Theirs was the lightest car at 150kg.



Chalmers from Sweden - Very nice spaceframe car running a Yamaha Fazer engine running E85 Ethanol and a supercharger



ETS from Canada. Another light single cylinder car:



A couple of the photos were stolen off the Hesinki website because due to being a driver, I wasn't able to take many photos when I was actually in the car and missed out on general overview pictures! :p

Finally....an onboard video of the sprint track taken by Hertfordshire. It annoys me because my apex speed was virtually the same. Our engine troubles cost us about 4 seconds!

+ YouTube Video

[Karoug]

cool!!

[DarkReaper]

Yay, my team TU Munich:

Unfortunately I couldn't be in FSUK, but I will be with my team in Hockenheim for FSG in August. Hopefully without any electrical problems.

Here's some more carbon porn. Everything that is black in the picture is carbon, excluding tyres,the grill in the sidepods and the seatbelts

[ArosaMike]

FS Hockenheim is gonna be awesome. We're busy readying our B-Spec car Made a massive amount of changes, so hopefully will be on the pace now

Where do you guys get your carbon from?! Seems you and a lot of the German teams have massive amounts of the stuff when we struggle to afford even the smallest bit.

[DarkReaper]

We get some of the expired carbon prepregs from a leading DTM and Audi supplier.
Can't say any more, sorry, but rumors spread like wildfire in FS, as seen with all the alleged million dollar budgets flying around.

[ArosaMike]

Yeah, well that's relating to Graz I hear mainly. Seems they do a lot of the work themselves though, so respect to them. We don't have an aeronautical dept at our uni which makes it hard for us to get it (I know that's where Delft get theirs from), and we don't have the experience to make a monocoque. I guess all it takes is for one person to be brave and know their stuff, but a few years ago, when they did try, they ran out of time and then found it would have been too weak anyway! LOL

I still believe a space frame can be competitive (the other Graz team illustrated that and Bath did well with their car). We're in talks with a company here to get some out of date carbon though, so with a bit of luck we may have some trick bodywork that's stupidly light weight next year. Now we have our Kaiser wheels from the States our car will be around the 220kg mark. There are areas we can take a fair bit off next year too, so aiming for at the most 210 next year maybe 200 but we'll see. I think once we get there, we'll be happy as Graz was 190kg with a monocoque. It shows though that weight isn't everything. I honestly think we'll see some more interesting engine development over the next few years. Have you seen the proposed changes to restrictor placement? Not sure whether it's got the green light yet, but they were on about moving the throttle to site behind it.....which means hello massive air boxes, crazy anti lag turbos and silly power. You'd be able to bleed the wastegate to a place after the restrictor too.

Anyway. I'll have to drop in and say hi when we get there. You know of any decent pubs in Heidelberg?

[DarkReaper]

Well, FSG07 is over now. The constant rain was quite annoying but atleast it cleared up for all the dynamic events.
It's great that our team won the Design Finals and the Bosch electronics award but the brake line rupture in the endurance event costed us a top 10 overall points position.

Anyway, here is a vid of our car performing the german national anthem using only it's engine. Somewhat like Renault in F1, difference is that we don't play with the throttle to match the notes but instead pin the throttle open and play with the ignition timing to create the notes. The result isn't as good, but throttle by wire is still a long way off.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnfJSxL9jXU

See you next year in FSUK08.

[ArosaMike]

Mate....you're engine song was awesome! Can't believe they pulled you out of the endurance. Had a quick look at the car as it went past and could only really see a bit of oil splashed on the bodywork.

Don't suppose you know of anyone that has a picture of our engine letting go do you? Seems the big end bearing on cyl 1 made a bid for freedom caused by oil problems!

Oh....and our car was faster than yours LOL Only poking fun....well done on a good event and an awesome car. We'll be back next year to build on our form. We managed 25th in the end.

[DarkReaper]

Yeah, we needed 13 tries and 2 days of non stop bleeding and swapping untill we passed the brake test, so the final failure of our contraption in the endurance is just the icing on the cake. Durability always has been a problem of our designs, I don't think we finished an endurance in the last 2 years. We are sort of a Ferrari I guess, beautiful to look at, fast, but break down at every second corner. TU Graz seems to be the Porsche of the Formula Student.

[ArosaMike]

I know exactly how you feel. Our team is 10 years old this year (joint oldest European team with Leeds as a matter of fact) and we have only finished endurance 4 times in about 15 competitions! Our biggest problem like so many UK teams is that we have such a small group of people. This year about 10 of us have completely designed, built, run and driven the car! We therefore so often run out of time to test extensively. Brookes are one of the few in the UK that have a fairly large team and it shows, but Loughborough struggle too and we enjoyed racing them at comp (a big step up for us compared to previous years). We're on the verge of some decent sponsorship for a change for next year which will hopefully mean we can outsource more of our parts. Whilst it's a bit of a shame as we all enjoy making the car so much it's fairly necessary as we need to spend more time designing and testing than making!

Have faith though. Delft struggled for years and have finally had a few good results. A real shame for them what happened at Hockenheim though!

[KaJuN]

I know someone on another forum who is involved with the Cincinnati team. I'll let them know they now have some international recognition. This stuff looks like tons of fun and I wish my school did it so I could join in.

[ArosaMike]

Originally Posted by KaJuN

I know someone on another forum who is involved with the Cincinnati team. I'll let them know they now have some international recognition. This stuff looks like tons of fun and I wish my school did it so I could join in.

Awesome. The Cinncinnati guys are awesome. We played Corn Ball with them whilst waiting for stuff to happen Say hi from UBRacing when you next see them

[Bombaer]

Funny to see all this stuff...again.

I've been one of the first members of the FS-Team in Aachen, Germany. Our car had some minor fatal design flaws *cough* due to the huge number of team-members we had - four. (Don't ever place the turbo lower than the engine - the oil for the bearing needs gravity to flow back from the turbo into the engine and not to be sucked into the airduct...)

Somehow, I feel like there is a typical german over-sophisticatedness in the FS-cars. Durability is a major problem as every generation of young engineer tries to make something new.

*sigh*

[ArosaMike]

I know the feeling Bombaer. The thing is in this country is that you get too many people doing final year projects for their degree on the car, hence you end up with too much trying to be achieved (like turbo chargers!). We're developing a supercharger for next year, but we have a back up in case. Next years car should finally have some sort of auto shift on it too now that it's been developed over the past 2 years.

[Bombaer]

Originally Posted by ArosaMike

I know the feeling Bombaer. The thing is in this country is that you get too many people doing final year projects for their degree on the car, hence you end up with too much trying to be achieved (like turbo chargers!). We're developing a supercharger for next year, but we have a back up in case. Next years car should finally have some sort of auto shift on it too now that it's been developed over the past 2 years.

This all sounds so similar to me...

After all, our first team didn't really participate in any event - but we were able to present us at the IAA 2001 in Frankfurt (invited by our main sponsor back then) and this gave the opportunity to show Mahle the concept - what started the three-cylinder FS- engine.

I had to quit shortly after that, 'cause of a lack of time. But the guys in the next team started with the new engine - AND a CVT that I would have never chosen for a racecar...

After all - two of us (including me) got finally a job at the F1.8)

[screwdriver]

Originally Posted by ArosaMike

Don't suppose you know of anyone that has a picture of our engine letting go do you? Seems the big end bearing on cyl 1 made a bid for freedom caused by oil problems!

The FSG Gallery has one.


To my surprise they also feature one of our thermal melt-down, and was used to extinguish it.

(from now on we'll mount two bottles of apple juice on our quick-jack)

[Spazatao]

Nice!! There's some action on this Formula thing down at my Uni, I might give it a try in the future!