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Thread: How much funding/sponsorship does your University provide?

  1. #21
    Quote Originally Posted by Claude Rouelle View Post
    From my perspective it is more about " How badly do you want to learn". I have see many students coming out of FSAE / FS with so-so teams but making a brilliant beginning of an engineering career not because their car was quick but because they ask themselves the right questions and worked hard to get the right answers.
    Fair point - I would agree.

    From my perspective: if the team surrounds their actions and intrinsic motivation sprouts from the concept of the desire to win, learning is inevitable, and learning is a consequence. It forces you to search for finding better solutions. Maybe a better question is: what is your motivator (s)?
    Last edited by Steve Krug; 07-14-2015 at 02:24 AM. Reason: sp
    Steve Krug
    Wisconsin Racing

  2. #22
    Steve and all,

    You summarized in just a few words what many international FSAE / FS design judges start to notice and complain about: that is what the same judges call the motorsport virus. The "motorsport virus" that we have seen invading the FS and FSAE paddocks and student's minds is about winning at all cost...including the cost of not understanding why their car is good (or if they do, not able to explain why).

    A few years ago, I refused to have one team going to the design final at FSG because NO ONE in this team could explain what critical damping was. For example (but there were unfortunately many other examples), in their design specifications sheet it was written that their front dampers had X % of critical damping in bump at n mm/sec and Y % of critical damping in rebound at m mm/sec but no one, No One of the students could explain why or even what it meant. I think the reason was that the "knowledge" was a carry over of the previous year team. That team ended up winning the FSG because they had a good car, well manufactured, excellent reliability, well balanced (that was so obvious and I have to say beautiful to see while watching their car on the track) and definitely excellent drivers (and we how much that counts in the results).

    With the way the points attribution is structured today (IMO too much points for dynamic and not enough for static) they should have won and they did. I guess they inherited from a good previous year car, superior drivers and they pounded the race track testing until they found a good setup ... that neither their simulation was able to predict or their data analysis was able to confirm. These are not the guys my company will hire.

    At the contrary I have seen low experience low budget teams working intelligently (Reminder: Intelligence is the ability to find a solution to a problem that they never encountered before. Do nit mix intelligence with experience and/or knowledge) and learning a lot to solve problem starting by establishing a good definition of the problems they face.

    And yes I have seen team which have both the intelligence and the experience, budget, qualified and well train drivers etc... But again what will impress me will not be their results but their ability to define their problems, explain and demonstrate their solution; These are the engineers of the future.

    We focus too much on the results and not enough in the learning process and by doing so we going away from the main reason why the FSAE competitions were created.

    *********

    Some thoughts....


    “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them” Einstein


    “If I had an hour to save the world. I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute finding solutions. And I find in most organizations people are running around spending sixty minutes finding solutions to problems that don’t matter” Einstein


    “Intelligence is the ability to find a solution to a problem you never encountered before. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Einstein
    Claude Rouelle
    OptimumG president
    Vehicle Dynamics & Race Car Engineering
    Training / Consulting / Simulation Software
    FS & FSAE design judge USA / Canada / UK / Germany / Spain / Italy / China / Brazil / Australia
    [url]www.optimumg.com[/u

  3. #23
    Completely agree with that message.

    My question is referring to how to inspire/motivate students, defining the "why" of FSAE. If the message is just to learn, some students might suggest that's what the coursework is for.

    So maybe it is necessary for a team's ability to communicate:
    -FSAE teaches a student how to apply knowledge/theory
    -FSAE teaches correlating abstract theoretical models to reality to predict system behavior
    -FSAE teaches practical applications of theory
    -Working with a team

    FSAE is fun and get's you excited about engineering. When engineering is made into a competition it is a forcing function for learning. It takes advantage of one's natural desire to compete, yet also teaches valuable engineering skills/logic/analysis.
    Increasing possible points scored in the engineering design event I think would be a good idea. I did a poor job and communicating, that winning for the sake of winning is not what FSAE is about. I wanted to communicate the benefits of the "competition" nature of FSAE with regards to how it effects learning. By the way I am not pursuing a motorsports career.

    "Competition occurs naturally between living organisms which co-exist in the same environment."
    Keddy, P.A. 2001. Competition, 2nd ed., Kluwer, Dordrecht. 552 p
    Steve Krug
    Wisconsin Racing

  4. #24
    Steve,

    We are on the same wave length but not everybody is I can tell you.

    Yes, designing, building a race car and running it is for sure more exciting than participating to a sewing machine competition. And that is why FSAE / FS is what it is. Let's not forget that FSAE was born from the initiative a few gentlemen (Dr. Bob Woods -UTA - being one of them, if my information is correct) who were responding to the concern of the big three management that freshly graduated engineers could solve differential equations but could not solve automotive engineering problems. And yes students are driven by the competition, and competition is a good thing as it helps to improve products and services quality in the industry.

    Put a mediocre car with a super good driver and you can still get some pretty good results. But again that is the visible part and to me the less important of the iceberg. Unless a team can explain WHY and HOW they went through the work organization as well as the concept, simulation, design, manufacturing, testing, development and data analysis of a quick, safe, reliable and relatively cheap car, I am really less interested in the results.

    Claude

  5. #25
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    This thread has gone a little off-topic, but I feel obliged to support Steve here. (Apologies to OP, and I am sure the topic will return to "funding" ... soon enough. )

    My opinion is that any students NOT aiming for an Outright Win, at least in the long term (eg. setting the Team a "5 year plan to win outright"), will never be good Engineers. In fact, and sadly, the majority of students seem happy to plod along building third-rate (= slow!) cars while pretending that they are "all about learning". I am quite certain that these students will never amount to anything more than third-rate Engineers. And, of course, this is just a reflection of the "bell curve" nature of things, where there is only a thin tail of outstandingly good students.

    Claude gave the example of the FSG winning Team that he kept out of Design Finals because he thought they lacked some arcane knowledge. Claude penalised these students because he thought that their blind copying of some small parts of the previous year's car meant they would ultimately become bad engineers.

    I, however, think that those students' ability to know WHAT to copy (and what to change), in order to build a genuinely fast car, even if they did NOT fully understand some of the little details, meant they would potentially become really good engineers. In short, no Team "accidentally" builds a really fast car.

    If, to build a really fast car, a Team must simply copy last year's winning car (after having taken photos of it, etc.), then we should expect all cars in any year to be as fast as the last year's winning car. BUT THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN! It does not happen because most students stupidly copy a lot of useless junk, and their cars are slower than last year's...

    Think about how many students blindly copy the stupid-slow-standard-cars (yes, with Push/Pull-Rods&Rockers, +++), and then also show Claude their 59 different damper calculations, and then manage 4.5 seconds in Acc, 5.9 seconds in SP, and are slow as a wet weekend in AutoX and Enduro. These students will never be good engineers, because they show no "ingenuity" whatsoever.

    Yet Claude rewards them, and, indeed, encourages their quest for mediocrity, by putting them in Design Finals! "Yes, all 59 damper calculations are here, and all to 8 decimal places. Very good!"

    To be a good engineer you have to show some ingenuity. "Ingenuity" is the etymological core of "engineer"! In FS/FSAE terms this simply means building a faster car than any other Team has ever built before. Or a car as fast as the fastest, but only half the cost, etc...
    ~o0o~

    Claude,

    What I am particularly disappointed with in your above posts is your hypocrisy.

    ...what will impress me will be the [students] ability to define their problems, explain and demonstrate their solution...
    ...
    We focus ... not enough in the learning process...
    Many times on this Forum you have expressed opinions on technical aspects of these cars. But when challenged, at least by myself, to better "define the problem", or to "explain and demonstrate its solution", you have steadfastly REFUSED to do so! The only conclusion I can draw from this is that you are NOT "focussed on the learning process". Why?

    So, instead of you spending so much time telling newbies that they must properly introduce themselves before they can engage in this "learning process", I wonder if you could spend more time explaining the technicalities behind some of the rather sweeping statements you make. That is, can you please spend more time "defining the problem, and explaining and demonstrating its solution", for the betterment of all the students' education?

    You might start with your so far unsubstantiated claim that Pitch and Roll damping calculations require the use of the Parallel Axis Theorem to calculate MoIs about the Pitch and Roll "IC"s (<- however you wish to "define" these "IC"s?).

    Or is there a double standard here, where students must "explain and demonstrate", but DJs can say what they want (such as above example), and must be blindly believed?

    Z
    Last edited by Z; 07-15-2015 at 12:46 AM. Reason: typos...

  6. #26
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    Far out Z, just start a new topic! Call it "Fundamentals of mechanical design" or something and use that space to bash others over the head / educate. It could be like a column, so that all of your (very valuable) technical inputs can be viewed in one place.


    Funding:
    As mentioned previously, UoW got/gets quite a bit of money upfront, but the team generally doesn't 'see' it (as in, it never felt like we had cash to spare), but we found that a big part of our sponsor support was because we would innovate and get people interested. Also, once upon a time, there was a great engineering industry in Wollongong that quickly absorbed graduates, so those companies would then lend a hand as well. Personally I would like to see our team take a few steps back and develop something much lighter and simpler, but I sometimes wonder if that would hurt the sponsorship side, or if the uni would see less value in it because it's not 'engineery' enough. Just my 2c
    Jay

    UoW FSAE '07-'09

  7. #27
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    Quote Originally Posted by Claude Rouelle View Post
    A few years ago, I refused to have one team going to the design final at FSG because NO ONE in this team could explain what critical damping was. For example (but there were unfortunately many other examples), in their design specifications sheet it was written that their front dampers had X % of critical damping in bump at n mm/sec and Y % of critical damping in rebound at m mm/sec but no one, No One of the students could explain why or even what it meant. I think the reason was that the "knowledge" was a carry over of the previous year team. That team ended up winning the FSG because they had a good car, well manufactured, excellent reliability, well balanced (that was so obvious and I have to say beautiful to see while watching their car on the track) and definitely excellent drivers (and we how much that counts in the results).
    Uuh, I think I know which team you are talking about - as I was one of the team captains
    Rennteam Uni Stuttgart
    2008: Seat and Bodywork
    2009: Team captain

    GreenTeam Uni Stuttgart
    2010: Seat and Bodywork / Lamination whore

    Formula Student Austria
    2012: Operative Team

  8. #28
    Quote Originally Posted by Bemo View Post
    Uuh, I think I know which team you are talking about - as I was one of the team captains
    I would have guessed a German-American team in 2013
    -------------------------------------------
    Alumnus
    AMZ Racing
    ETH Zürich

    2010-2011: Suspension
    2012: Aerodynamics
    2013: Technical Lead

    2014: FSA Engineering Design Judge

  9. #29
    Bemo,

    So several years later, what is your perspective on that episode?

    ****

    JulianH,

    Nope, I did not judge that car that year.. I am not guilty of all charges.....

    Claude

  10. #30
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    Claude,

    First of all I have to say that you are correct, that it was our major goal to win the event. All other decisions made during the year were derived from that goal. And to be honest, I still believe you learn quite a lot if you go down that road and do it properly.

    Since I entered the professional world, I experience that quite often people don't realize the necessity of setting proper goals (a proper goal is realistic for example, coming up with bullshit like "the car must get 20% lighter, 20% cheaper and must have 38 fancy new features and you have four weeks to achieve that" is not helpful as you won't be able to achieve itand doesn't give you an indication what the priorities are. I sit in "lessons learned" meetings at the end of projects in which people come up with points like "this part should be able to withstand/ deliver this number because there was trouble with it during the project. They don't realize that the real lessons learned should be "we have to recognize what our customers need and from there derive the requirements for part xy.

    It was ok, to not let us enter design finals for the reasons you mentioned. But entering design final was not our major goal (of course we would have liked to enter it) and was not necessary to get the overall winner.

    I still believe that the way we did it, helps you to learn a lot of things which make you a better engineer. You just learn different things. You gain less experience regarding technical details, but you learn way more about project manag3ment and how you set and reach goals. And this is what engineers miss very often. To my experience it is not a problem to find an expert for some technical issue who knows about it in impressive detail. But projects suffer from people who don't have any idea how a project should be run. That's why I still believe that participating in Formula Student with the major goal to be overall winner, helps you to learn a lot which can make you a better engineer.

    Man, this went off-topic...
    Rennteam Uni Stuttgart
    2008: Seat and Bodywork
    2009: Team captain

    GreenTeam Uni Stuttgart
    2010: Seat and Bodywork / Lamination whore

    Formula Student Austria
    2012: Operative Team

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