Originally posted by bob.paasch:
The short answer is nothing on our car failed, it just failed to start for endurance. The long answer is somewhat more complicated. I will try to stick with the facts as I know them.
This year at the drivers meeting before endurance we were informed by the endurance captain that external batteries would not be allowed in the endurance queue.
From the 2013 SAE rules:
D8.11 Endurance Vehicle Starting/ Restarting
D8.11.1 The vehicle must be capable of starting / restarting without external assistance at all times once the
vehicle has begun the heat.
This rule expressly prohibits the use of external batteries or other forms of external assistance during driver change or in the event of a stall on course. However, like many teams, we have always interpreted this rule to allow an external battery for starting before the endurance heat begins. We have used an external battery to start our car for endurance at every competition since at least 2005, a total of 22 competitions. Our internal battery was sized to start the car on the track and in the driver change.
We've had some cold start issues with the CRF450X this year, so given this restriction, we warmed up the car to operating temperature before leaving our pit for fuel. We had insulating panels on the radiator openings and a space blanket around the engine to conserve heat. We did fuel fill when called at 2:30 and rolled the car to the endurance staging area.
As most people know by now, U Michigan had an oil leak on their first lap. They were black flagged, and endurance was stopped while the oil was cleaned up. This took about an hour. In the mean time, a cold front was moving in, bringing rain, 15mph wind and a 50deg drop in temperature about the time of the restart of the race.
We were the last car to go, at around 5:00PM. With a now cold engine we failed to start on the internal battery. We tried for a good amount of time, eventually exhausting the internal battery. We were then told by the endurance officials we could use the external battery if we rolled back to the staging area behind the queue. We did this, started the car on the external battery, and rolled to the endurance start line with the engine running. At this point a discussion took place amongst 3-4 endurance officials, including the event captain. There were apparently mixed opinions about letting us run. They decided we could run only if we restarted in the queue on the internal battery, and we were instructed to shut down the motor and attempt a restart in line. Unfortunately, the internal battery was still discharged from the previous attempts. We could not restart and received a DNF.
I had a subsequent discussion with SAE. Their position was that the procedural change for endurance starting was reasonable, and that while D8.11 doesn't disallow the use of external assistance before the heat begins, there is also no rule that explicitly allows the use of external assistance before the heat begins.
We've had driver change restart issues before with our internal battery (FSUK 11, FSG 12, and almost at FSAE-M 12). We increased the capacity of our battery 30% this year in an attempt to overcome this problem. And Mbirt is correct, we are running the larger TRX450 starter on the CRF this year as well. But we're not there yet. Obviously this is an area our engine guys will be working on before FSG and FSA.
As for me, I gave myself 24 hours to get over this. I have a BajaSAE competition starting on Wednesday.
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