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Thread: New Rules Changes for FSG

  1. #21
    What is the largest forces acting on the suspension coming from? (I wonder if the FSG technical commitee know this?)

    I think one good way to improve safety would be to disallow this forces, because they maybe makes the suspension fail.

    Should make for a good competition ... not!

  2. #22
    I was at a workshop, where these changes where discussed. It was a bit reading between the lines, but I think the FSG-guys try to decrease the ammount of paperwork to go through before an event, to keep the high number of starter slots up. Last year they had to read 60.000 pages of various documents prior to the event. My guess is: Adding a SES-like document for "whobble wings" would simply be too much to handle.

  3. #23
    Quote Originally Posted by TMichaels View Post
    I also know some track marshals who had close encounters with failing wings. Now imagine those wings to be at head height...
    I think we all know one marshal who likes to frequently remind us of being hit by a stray tire. Perhaps FSG should look into better and safer marshal stands and spectator areas instead?

    I know this past year at Michigan a car careened directly into the water barriers at the start/finish line where multiple marshals, students, volunteers and safety personal were gathered and absolutely nothing happened (other than they DNF'd.)

  4. #24
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    Quote Originally Posted by TMichaels View Post
    Some Aero teams might feel personally attacked, but the intention is not to ban or restrict aero. I know of only one team mounting aero to unsprung mass at FSG for example, so the effect on most of the teams will probably be minor. Although I do not know what is/was in the planning for the next season.
    The FSG Rules Committee has just made the fastest car at FSG13 illegal. Of course we feel attacked. How can you say the intention is not to restrict aero when that is EXACTLY what the FSG rules committee has done.

    And of course GFR has developed unsprung aero, our simulations show it will make our car faster. Testing will show if it will go on the car for Michigan.

    The max height rule is driven by safety. It was hard to check the TSAL visibility as defined in the rules and also missed by quite some teams. Additionally we had to check many cars prior entering the specific dynamic events. If we had done this after the run, some teams would have lost it. The rule makes this check easier and also increases visibility of the TSAL.
    There is already a rule that covers visibility of the TSAL. What was needed was a specific test method that the teams could easily duplicate.

    The second point is mechanic safety. We have seen wings fail in the past. With the "standard" mounting of the wings and them becoming higher and higher, the likeliness increases that during braking they would snap over and hit the driver by rotating around the MRH. I also know some track marshals who had close encounters with failing wings. Now imagine those wings to be at head height....
    "...during braking they would snap over and hit the driver..." Has this ever happened? No.

    As for unsprung aero, we have seen suspension failures without any aero at all, so what makes you think banning unsprung aero will be safer? Depending on the design, there could very easily be higher suspension loads with sprung aero than with unsprung.

    Regarding building higher MRH's. Yes, that will work, but also consider the minimum height and angle of the braces. Cars with a very high MRH will probably be longer and weigh more due to the additional tubing/structure in the rear to support the braces.
    The real travesty of this FSG-only rule change is the timing. If this was such a huge safety issue that it had to be addressed on the off-cycle rule change year, then why wasn't this included in the 2014 FSAE Rules released months ago? Announcing this rule change in November when the Australian cars are already built and the North American cars are very close to or past their design freeze gives an advantage to the European cars that start their year in July or August. Or was that your intention?
    Bob Paasch
    Faculty Advisor
    Global Formula Racing team/Oregon State SAE

  5. #25
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    Yeah this really sucks. We just had our design freeze, and now we get told that wings above the roll hoop are going to be illegal at Germany when we planned on going for our first time. We've ran wings above the roll hoop since 2009 and on development cars 1-2 years before 09. We've never once had a wing hit someone while braking or at anytime for that matter. The drag force is so great on a rear wing, even if it breaks during braking it is still doing to slow much faster than the car.

    Here's a list of bigger issues we have with the safety rules currently:
    NUMBER 1: The biggest thing that FSAE has yet to do is having an onboard fire suppression systems as a standard part. More people have gotten hurt from fire related accidents than any other type of accident if I had to guess. Like others have said, even the Chump Car/Lemons series require fire suppression systems! Why aren't these mandated yet?! The lack of this rule is ridiculous and shows a complete lack of direction in terms of making FSAE/FStudent safer.

    2: Why aren't we required to wears Hans Devices yet? We have to have dozens of "unintended acceleration" devices on Ecars, and Ccars can't run fly by wire because of that. So clearly we're worried about crashes and preventing them. But why aren't we concerned about protecting a driver when they do crash? There are water barriers as part of the track limits at some competitions, and at Michigan you're not that far away from the wall. Yet again we are the only series to not require such devices.

    The two easiest solutions to making a car/driver safety are completely ignored while a single competition (Germany) is going to claim that rear wings are the single biggest threat to the health of individuals at FSAE events? I have to agree with Bob. This seems like a direct attack on teams that are utilizing aerodynamics to make their cars faster. In order to make the packaging work with the new rules we would have to completely redesign our aerodynamic package for a single event! And so far I have yet to hear reasonable decisions as to why this rule is changing. Claiming that something needs to be changed to increase the safety of those at competitions while other larger and more dangerous systems are still allowed to go unchecked shows to me that there are other reasons why this change is happening.

    My views do not reflect those of Jayhawk Motorsports or the University of Kansas.
    Trent Strunk
    University of Kansas
    Jayhawk Motorsports
    2010-2014

    Now in NASCAR land. Boogity.
    Opinions Are My Own

  6. #26
    I agree with the previously expressed statements that these rules do a poor job addressing the real safety concerns of FS/FSAE and artificially restrict vehicle design in unnecessary ways.

    What is additionally bothersome is that FSG was not very clear in communicating this to teams around the world. If you go to the Formula Student Germany webpage: https://www.formulastudent.de/ or the 2014 Formula Student Electric rules: https://www.formulastudent.de/upload...014_v1.0.0.pdf (Combustion rules are not released yet) there is no indication of these changes. Google searching "2014 Formula Student Germany rules" or "2014 FSG rules" brings up no mention of these changes either. At GFR we only heard about this because we had teammembers at the workshop, and we can see Tobias Michaels has been nice enough to post the changes to Twitter. What was the official plan here to release these changes? Any team planning to attend FSG that was not at this workshop in Germany would have no idea of these major changes unless they had been posted to the world here on the FSAE.com forums. How can the organization hold students to rules which are not even announced officially? Is it expected that every team competing at FSG use the informal social media channels to get up to date info which directly influences major vehicle design choices?

    We are always told as students that FSAE is a project management competition. IMO it really ruins the lesson when changes are made this late. This is very much "Do as I say, not as I do". Ultimately I'm just very disappointed, FSG has worked very hard in the past to make their competition the best run in the world moves like this really invalidate that effort.
    Trevor
    Oregon State Formula '08-'09
    Global Formula Racing '10 - present

  7. #27
    Food for thought, here's two cars that have the highest wing mounting that I know of.

    Monash


    GFR



    Looking at both cars, and correct me if I'm wrong, but the leading edge of the lower elements on both cars look to be lower than the top of the MHR. And with the mountings extending from the roll hoop back to the wing, in the case of the other mounts breaking wouldn't these links cause the wing to have a moment rotating the wing backwards away from the driver?

  8. #28
    Quote Originally Posted by TMichaels View Post
    .The second point is mechanic safety. We have seen wings fail in the past. With the "standard" mounting of the wings and them becoming higher and higher, the likeliness increases that during braking they would snap over and hit the driver by rotating around the MRH.
    So you're saying that there is no force from the air acting in the reward direction preventing the wing from rotating forward? Maybe if there was a gale force tail wind and the car was stationary, then you might be right.

    As someone who had be in the driver seat while rear wing mounting has failed, I can tell you that the wing just kinda flops around and makes the car handle funny for a few corners until someone realizes the problem and tells you to stop. And yes, this was a circumstance where the ream mounts had failed and the wing was free to potentially rotate forward and clunk me in the head, however it did not. You sound like a university Health and safety official coming up with a ridiculous 1 in 90,000,000 situation and trying to make it sound like a real danger.

    And for the other point of not allowing aero mounted to the suspension; if that were in fact a case of trying to protect track workers, why not make every car run the same solid wheel center and hub as to reduce the possibility of a wheel flying off due to failure? While your'e at it why not ban carbon a-amrs and push/pull rods? I'm sure in the past 5 years of F-SAE/Student there have been over 100 instances where those have failed and led to the driver losing control (3 on my team, and we haven't used carbon suspension since May 2010). Is that not a danger to track workers? Again, as someone who has been driving a car when carbon suspension has failed, I would say that this scenario is much more likely to happen or has happened. So why is there no ban coming on that? And hell, why not tell TU Graz they are never allowed to use flex-plates for inboard suspension mounting? Those have broken too!!
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  9. #29
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    Monash is a good example as they have run suspension mounted big wings since 2002. In one of the comps they have had a rear wing failure, it changed the balance of the car, which was still capable of driving. They have also caught on fire at comp. In that case the driver was in serious danger and drove for quite a distance before being stopped.

    From other cars I have seen numerous suspension failures and lots of fires, none of which had anything to do with aero. I have seen wheels fly off towards the crowd (more than once), and even seen a FSAE vehicle roll over at comp despite passing the tilt test. These rule changes would have done nothing.

    The rules allow quite a lot of unsafe practices, and due to the high focus on weight in the design tent I would go as far to say they encourage them. Put a decent firewall and a fair bit of space between exhaust and the fuel tank and you recieve a design points hit for higher mass, and a slight performance decrease. What about the weight of ferrous suspension components over carbon? In the case of accidents and side intrusion most monocoque teams are okay, but the spaceframe teams with low side intrusion bars have easily penetrated sides. Course design leads to teams building towards low track and wheelbase, increasing instability and the chance of rollover. The latter much more important in recent years. Why do we allow feet forward of the front axle line. This was something I remember Carroll Smith saying would likely change as far back as 2000. To suggest that the primary reason behind these rules are safety based, when more legitimate concerns are raised and not dealt with appropriately, is disingenuous.

    When the Aero rules were changed to what they have been for the last couple of years a number of people spoke out and said what it would mean for conceptual design and the large performance advantage winged teams were getting. These comments were ignored, and ridiculed by a number of teams. Now the proof has come out this is a definite attempt to reduce this performance.

    I don't see any reason why the performance shouldn't be reduced, or better yet that it shouldn't have been increased in the first place. Capping speed is one of the best ways to improve safety, and it is not the only place in the rules where limitations are made to speed. With Aero the height rule is one way, we could also go back to less area for the wings. The unsprung aero change is not well justified. It has a small affect on performance, but as mentioned previously all the loads whether unsprung or sprung go through some parts of the suspension.

    Mainly what I think annoys the people of this community is that these changes are made rapidly and not uniformly between competitions. Then bullshit reasons are given to why they have implemented. It was crap when Australia kept doing it, and it is still crap if Germany does it.

    Kev

  10. #30
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    Other competitions are waiting take your registration fees, gentlemen!

    We'd love to have you attend FSAE-Lincoln at the world's best autocross facility in June if you're looking for a great international competition, but have big wings, suspension-mounted aero, or a fuel-efficient combustion powertrain and would rather not deal with combined combustion-electric scoring
    -----------------------------------
    Matt Birt
    Engine Calibration and Performance Engineer, Enovation Controls
    Former Powertrain Lead, Kettering University CSC/FSAE team
    1st place Fuel Efficiency 2013 FSAE, FSAE West, Formula North
    1st place overall 2014 Clean Snowmobile Challenge

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