Formula SAE (student formula)

what nsx_23 said. Monash seem to have everything sorted, and keeping the chassis to a simple spaceframe helps with time management. I was track marshalling endurance on Sunday morning and they looked very quick on track even in the rain. Apparently they were a little dicey in teh arvo session, it was stupendously windy and at points they were driving on two wheels - some of the marshalls were talking about bringing them in because it was getting too dangerous, but they finished both sessions. Edith Cowan University were the only other team with a wing car, and they also did very well at comp.

Overall it was a great competition and most of the teams looked really strong from a completion viewpoint - we had 18 cars finish endurance this year, and most of the non-finishers still managed to crank out most of the laps, meaning we had cars on track from 9am till after 5pm with only a 15 minute break for lunch - pretty exhausting for the volunteers who had to be there the whole day! I managed to escape to the refuelling station in the afternoon.

This was also the first time that an Indian team finished endurance (Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee). They are an inspiration to everybody. It's well documented how hard resources are to come by in India (the only FSAE compliant engine available over there is a Royal Enfield), and these guys still managed to build a car which ran on track (albeit very, very slowly - the fastest lap times were somewhere in the low 60-second mark, and IIT were lapping at about 1:40-2:40 depending on the driver). Their first driver had never even driven any type of car before so it was overall a stellar effort. Also, they only used 1.08kg of fuel for the whole of their endurance run...if the Fuel Economy event in Australia wasn't time-restricted to 125% of the fastest lap these guys would have killed it!

In 2011 another Indian team was present in Germany. The team from Mumbai. The car was really slow in all dynamic events and DNF in the edurance but they made the best they could with their means.

So the wind from the side caused the 2 wheel drives or a relatively high center of gravity? Because normally the wing should give extra downforce which would it make harder to bring the car on 2 wheels.
 
I'll most likely be joining my schools team this coming fall when I finally transfer over to main campus. Any advice from some of you experienced FSAE'ers? :)
 
You mean other than "Have fun, and try not to neglect things like studying and sleeping completely." ?
 
You mean other than "Have fun, and try not to neglect things like studying and sleeping completely." ?

Well my intention is to have fun! :D I've been wanting to be on a FSAE team since I was a junior in high school so yeah I'm excited. I'm just asking for some wisdom.
 
YOu will have fun but only after some 'little' work. ;)
 
Just became lead aerodynamicist for the team, not bad for a guy that didn't participate at all last year :p
 
We went out testing and ran the car without the wings for a couple of laps. Then after we put the wing on, complete with white party ribbons to see separation and ran a few laps. But the exhaust was too close to the fuel/oil lines and the heat shield was missing, so the car started smoking. So much for an aero test.. But we did notice that seperation increased as the speed increased too. Need to add some vanes to have better flow over the tires.
 
All you need is one of these:

wind-tunnel.jpg


:p
 
Sure... Like we make a car like that!

By the way, how do you communicate between your team members? Email doesn't work because it tends to get spammed and doesn't allow live updates. MSN chat stuff just doesn't seem suitable as well..
 
There's this brilliant thing called the pub :p
 
e-mail works for us. Gladly no spam.
 
Monash's pretty good. It's won the Australian SAE competition 3 years in a row now. But, sadly, they have a certain smugness in their team as well that gets kinda annoying.
 
The karlsruhe team isn't so bad either. they're a fun bunch of people as well... at least many people from my team get along great with them.
 
I'm just trying to gauge whether I want to actually do the study aboard route so all of you insight is appreciated.
 
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