FSAE is slowly turning into a spec series

[DougMilliken]

Worst of all are those who are pretty green and raw like that, but are stubbornly confident that they actually know their shit and are right about X, Y, or Z.

Hey, I'm happy to have Z around to stir the pot, but who are X and Y? I'm not sure I want to see posts from them too...!<grin>

[Z]

This is a very big pot, so I will have to find my really big stirring spoon... (ie. it's about chaotic dynamics, strange attractors, Homo Mimicus, fear of change, and ... I'll have to put together a much longer rant ... ).

Z

[jlangholzj]

Anyway, yes, certainly knowledge continuity is a huge differentiating factor among top organizations be they professional or student, racing or otherwise. And yes there are many student teams who have little fundamental knowledge of their design decisions, and around the shop if you were to ask, "Well why are we doing it this way?" a common answer might be, "That's how we've always done it." Some iterations then become bland / uninteresting / not well thought out. Where I disagree with your assessment is that this is a new thing or some new direction. I can say from personal experience that sort of thing was rampant 10 years ago, and I'm sure well before that. It's one of many bad practices / habits that I feel like most FSAE kids bring out of college and industry. Lot of them are highly motivated and confident and good at "getting it done" but many don't know much about truly sound engineering practice and fundamentals and are really quite green.

this is one thing that gets a bit hard to overcome when you've got a turnover rate of 2-3 years in team members. That's not an excuse...just an observation. HOWEVER, it is one thing that we've fallen into at times and one thing that I made a real big push for this year was for all the team members to pick 2-3 parts out and re-design everything. Not only to look at alternative options but simply for the "greener" members to understand why it was made the way it was...and oftentimes they'll find out something we haven't looked at before. At the same time if you don't have a clue of what you're doing...thats hard to accomplish. The leads for this years team spent last year manufacturing previous designs and they are much more confident and capable to make new parts this year.

my 0.02

[exFSAE]

From my own personal experience I think some of that is mitigated by having better or more involved faculty advising to coach better engineering practice. It's something I would have liked.

[bob.paasch]

In the 4 years since the establishment of our partnership between Oregon State University and DHBW Ravensburg, GFR has had 9 first place finishes. In those same 4 years, Rennteam Stuttgart has had 6 first place overall finishes, and 8 first place combustion finishes. Anyone trying to prove anything about the superiority of a particular vehicle concept based on those results is on a fools errand.

I would invite everyone to reread "Reasoning your way through the FSAE design process." Rennteam and GFR have achieved those wins not because they run a 600/4 or 450/1, 10s or 13s, aero or not. They have achieved those wins because they both have an excellent organization, great project management, and focused design processes. It is the team concept that wins, not the vehicle concept.

[exFSAE]

Rennteam and GFR have achieved those wins not because they run a 600/4 or 450/1, 10s or 13s, aero or not. They have achieved those wins because they both have an excellent organization, great project management, and focused design processes. It is the team concept that wins, not the vehicle concept.

Couldn't agree more, Bob. My experience has been that this is how it works at every level (professional or otherwise) and I wish more people took note of it. There was a time in this student series where Cornell was the "it team." Or you could probably say similarly about UTA or UWA. At that point when I was a dumb shit 19 or 20 year old my first thought was, "Oh they must have a ton more money or sponsors or have these super trick widgets on their car." And I feel like many students get caught up in what new whiz-bang gizmo they're going to bolt on the car and set the world on fire. But really, in all these examples the success starts with good fundamentals - good documentation, knowledge transfer, etc.

IMO that should really be the prime focus of faculty, getting students to really grasp that - without it you're sunk and with it everything downstream falls into place much easier.

[JT A.]

When the "formula" remains relatively unchanged for so long, it's only natural that teams' solutions will start to converge. The question is, is this a good thing or a bad thing?

I see two sides to it.-

On one hand, it is good for multiple different vehicle concepts to be capable of winning major competitions. It allows some flexibility to teams with different budgets, gives the competition some variety, etc.

On the other hand, you can make the argument that from an engineering standpoint, it is a good thing that not all vehicle concepts have equal performance. The fact that a "best" solution exists, gives teams the challenge to find that "best" solution. If the rules were perfectly balanced so that there was no advantage to aero vs non aero, carbon fiber vs spaceframe chassis, 4 cyl vs 2 cyl vs 1 cyl engines, 10" vs 13" wheels, etc, then effectively the "big picture" concept choices we make don't matter. If every vehicle concept performs equally, it negates a really important part of the competition (the top level design decisions), teams will just keep running whatever concept they have a history with, and the project just becomes an exercise in refining parts at the individual component level from year to year. Personally, I think we get enough education in individual component design from the rest of our classes at school, but hardly any experience with top level decision making.

Every once in a while I spend some time wondering how you get the best of both worlds- keep some equality & variety in the competition but still encourage & reward the search for the concept that maximizes performance within the rule set. I think a cycle of massive rules changes every 3 years or so would shake the competition up a bit, and we'd see a lot of new concepts and variety at the beginning of each cycle. By year 2 or 3 a couple superior concepts would emerge and teams would start to gravitate towards those, but the next cycle of rules changes would ensure that no single concept can dominate for too long. I think you'd see some interesting things: the first year of each cycle would tell you which teams can adapt the fastest, then the 2nd and 3rd years will tell you who's the best at developing/refining a concept over time.

I think the tricky thing would be coming up with new rules that are different enough to make teams re-think their approach to the project, without simply "forcing" teams into a new "spec" to be competitive. You'd have to get more creative than stuff like "no wings for 3 years" and then "unlimited wings for 3 years". Maybe shifting around points allocation between events, setting a maximum cost cap, maybe change the event layouts (50 ft radius skidpad & 400 ft accel strip would be interesting- obviously you'd want more downforce for the faster skidpad but at the same time you can't have too much of a drag penalty since the accel event will reward a high top speed). Perhaps for a 3 year cycle you could allow 2nd and3rd year cars. Then teams with low budgets or low membership have a better chance to show what they can do when their resources aren't stretched so thin, and the bigger teams can spend more time on deeper analysis or new innovations. Or even change the structure of the whole competition. Get rid of skidpad and accel, and have a couple days of practice time where teams are allowed to run the endurance course, log data, and refine their vehicle setup. Then Autocross just becomes a qualifying event, and endurance/fuel efficiency is where all the dynamic points come from. Maybe separate design event into 2 branches- 1 where you only discuss the design methods that went into building your car, and a 2nd one where you discuss all the testing, DAQ analysis, and refinement that you've done after the car was built (including the testing days at competition).

I think we're at the point in the current rules set where a clear "best" concept has emerged. When fuel was only 50 points and wings were more limited in size, I think there was a lot more equality. But now when a winged 1cyl on 10's can win autocross, endurance, and fuel efficiency at the same time, and be close to the top in skidpad too, it's pretty difficult to compete with that. Accel is only 75 points and 4 cyl's don't have that much of an advantage in accel anyways. I think the only reason other concepts besides the "450 with wings and 10's" can still be successful is the reliability factor. Sure, Stuttgart has won 6 events, but how many of those were head-to-head against GFR where both teams finished all events? I don't know if this is still the case, but about a year ago I went through results and saw that GFR won every event in which they completed endurance. In other words, they control their own fate. I'm sure the vehicle concept isn't the only reason GFR is winning (otherwise RIT, Akron, Wisconsin, & other similar cars would be winning an equal share of events), and a huge part of it is the team structure & organization. But when you put the best concept and really good team structure & organization together, barring an endurance failue, everyone else is just competing for 2nd place.

[jpusb]

Rennteam and GFR have achieved those wins not because they run a 600/4 or 450/1, 10s or 13s, aero or not. They have achieved those wins because they both have an excellent organization, great project management, and focused design processes. It is the team concept that wins, not the vehicle concept.

I couldn't agree more. I think this is an infinitely valuable statement, and to people who haven't realized that this is true, note that the statement is coming from the faculty advisor of GFR. At my time, as exFSAE said, I thought it was all about the car, drivers, knowledge, accelerations, blabla. Sooner or later you get to understand that the management part is the real deal (agreeing again with exFSAE, in EVERYTHING you do this is true), and they don't teach you that at the university, most of the times. This phenomena of the teams not knowing this fact is what I think usually leads teams to "try to win FSAE in SolidWorks" (I used that phrase many times to try to make my team understand this after I left), and I think is the most common mistake FSAE teams make, they try to win it by re-designing the car instead of thinking about the whole project which is way more determinant to the final team performance.
Regarding the ruleset and the original thread, I do agree that it is not cool when rules drive the design trends in FSAE, but as others said I don't see that trend so clear, at least until this day. To make my point I will take the Missouri S&T team, whose cars I have always been a huge fan of, in part because I like them but also because I like the concept of a normal, not super fancy car that is as fast as the F1-looking super tidy cars. They are always blindly fast in AutoX, so I think performance-wise they don't lack BIG things when compared to single-cyl, 10" cars. If they scored well in all static events and ran a good endurance I am sure they would be right up there, and if they are not, it is not because of the car's design tendencies being wrong.

my 0.01 since 0.02 is too much money