2019 FSAE Oz (Australasia)
Should anyone still be reading this I feel compelled to make some comments about the recent 2019 FSAE-Australasia competition.
~o0o~
I didn't bother going this year, mainly because I expected more of the "same-old, same-old...". And, indeed, social media suggests it was exactly that. Monash brought two fairly vanilla-spec cars, albeit very well built and thoroughly tested, and the rest of the teams were the proverbial country mile behind. Monash's C-car (214 kg) won by ~210 points, their E-car (238 kg) by ~140 points. And, as always, roughly half the cars failed to finish Endurance.
Despite the above results, and again as ever before, there was the never-ending hype about "the amazingly high standard of all the cars", "the really tight competition", "the excellently prepared students", and other such cobblers. Huh? Read above paragraph. Google "Escher's staircase".
Truth is, with the exception of Monash, Oz-teams are going backwards.
In any race, whether technical or otherwise, if you are standing still relative to those moving forwards, then you are going backwards.
~o0o~
The most disappointing part of this competition was the Acceleration Event. There are only two possible explanations for the "amazing" results.
1. Incompetence by the Accel-Event marshals. I doubt anyone could be so stupid, but if so, the higher-ups should have corrected it.
2. "Cheating" by the officials. This to make it look as if Oz-teams are "getting much faster". Take your pick, but this one makes most sense.
To be clear, the problem was that most cars were "staged" a long way behind the start-line. This staging distance was variable, but typically ~1 metre, and in some cases much more. The winning time of ~3.75 seconds by RMIT-C came from a "flying start" closer to 2 metres, maybe more. A typical FSAE car drops its "Real 75 m Time" by ~0.4 seconds when staged 1 metre behind the start-line. Staging 2 metres back drops Real-Time by ~0.6 seconds. Cars with poor launch technique, typically the bottom-of-ladder teams, benefit most from these flying starts.
In fact, what had me smelling a rat when I first saw the Accel-times on Natsoft, before I saw any video, was the almost universal improvement of all cars by about half-a-second. By some miracle the cars that normally do ~5.0s were in the mid-4s, cars normally at mid-4s were around 4.0, and so on. Maybe a handful of teams might find such an improvement in one year, but not all of them.
In short, the official 2019-Oz-Accel-Times are meaningless. They are no indication of the real performance of the cars. For realistic times, add half-a-second. There has been no improvement in the majority of team's real Accel-times. And impossible to know if any single team really did improve its time.
~o0o~
To sum up, a bit over a year ago the Australian Cricket Team was caught cheating. This was the result of general laziness and incompetence at the top levels of the team, combined with the need to appear internationally competitive in order to keep jobs. So the team took shortcuts such as sandpaper (look it up) to get an advantage. After the cheating was made public there was a bit of a clean-out, but some of the stain will never be washed out. It is there forever. And all Australians are now tarred with that same brush.
This year a similar thing happened at FSAE-Oz. I washed my hands of FSAE-Oz last year, largely because of similar, though less obvious, nonsense in the previous years. I am now posting this to make it clear that I consider the "fixing" of the 2019-Oz-Accel-Event to be abhorrent. It is a sure sign of a rotten culture, which, unfortunately and unfairly, stains the reputation of all Australians.
As for those of you who are still part of FSAE-Oz, well, your choice...
Z
