2015 Formula Student Germany

[BeunMan]

Livestream: http://formulastudent.tv/

And for those not in Germany, you can use youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNWBTZdD9EI and thus chromecast

[Pennyman]

Caught a glimpse of that Delft skidpad run on the livestream. Unreal.

[BeunMan]

Acceleration is on! (finally, after 1:30h of no cars ...). Still very quiet at 10:21, 2:39h left to go.

[BeunMan]

Zurich did 3x 3.30 and 1x 3.35. That car was so incredibly fast :x almost no wheel spin at the start! Also consistency.

[JT A.]

Seems like lots of teams are getting DNF's for scraping the track in AutoX

[mech5496]

Well, way more than expected! Was it a real issue, or overly strict judges?

[BeunMan]

Well, way more than expected! Was it a real issue, or overly strict judges?

Insufficient ride height.

[MegaDeath]

If that is actually the case, and officials were DNF'ing cars for hitting the track. THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!

The first time I went to FSG in 2011 they made a very bold statement during the drivers meeting for endurance that if your car hit the track in the same spot more than once, they would DQ you for the event. Hearing that, we raised our ride height a significant amount to be sure that we would not have to worry about it. We took the sacrifice in performance to increase our chances of finishing. Then endurance rolled around and there were many fast cars who were dragging under-trays all over the track and no penalties were issued.

So in 2012 there were a few teams that stood up in the drivers meeting after they made the same statement about DQ'ing cars who drag the track and asked if the rule would actually be enforced because it was not the previous year. The officials said that "Yes we let it go last year, but we will enforce it this year". So once again we raised the car up to be sure we didnt drag the track. Lo and behold, endurance rolls around and there were top teams dragging all over the track (GFR and Michigan Ann Arbor were the two biggest offenders) and once again, no action was taken against them.

2013 rolls around and once again they make the statement that "If the car drags on the track, you'll get DQ'ed" so we finally called their bluff and left the car low and let the under-tray drag over the bumps. And once again, no action was taken against any of the teams who dragged the race track.

I'm not sure what was done last year because I wasn't there. But I'm assuming it was probably the same thing that had happened the 3 previous years. If that's the case then it took 4 years for them to actually enforce this rule.

In my opinion, if the officials take time to blatantly spell out in the drivers meeting that "If you drag the car on the race track, you will be DQ'ed" Then that's what they should do!!!

That's the rule, the teams were made aware of it. If they didn't follow the rule, then they should get the penalty that they were told they would get!!

[BeunMan]

As far as I know (wasn't at the driver briefing this morning due to setting up acceleration timing) they told them a DNF was issued for everyone scraping the floor except for one place (the bump-trench-bump) but if you set your car up for the other bumps, it won't scrape the floor there either. That way the get the chance to increase their ride height an do at least one run. Due to the finish being moved, the drivers didn't have to take the last bump full throttle/brake on top, so it should have been safer anyway but the rule was maintained.

About rules: The last few days we saw some (in my opinion a lot) of drivers being late in the briefing or leaving before it was over. Until now no penalties have been applied but they will: see http://www.formulastudent.de/fsg/pr/...out-penalties/ where debriefing is leaving before the briefing is over.

Another weird thing was the unclear end time of events in the past: The time is now shown on the website in news messages if changed during the event as well as on a board at the entrance of the event (e.g. the autoX was extended by 7 minutes because both fire trucks had to go to the testing area but one came back quickly after it all seemed ok). The exception is when the starting/end time is changed way before and shown at the briefing.

[JT A.]

I thought i remembered hearing somewhere that the FSG autocross course is always the same layout, or was it the endurance course? Or both maybe?