Formula SAE Australasia 2008 Competition: - Updates, Pictures, Stories, and More.

[Big Bird]

It is funny how this annual thread ends up morphing into something other than "updates pictures and stories" about the Oz event. Just an observation, and certainly something I'm to blame for as much as anyone else.

I read the various comments about "inexperience" last night, and spent a few minutes thinking of how I would respond. It seems that overnight GTS has beaten me to the punch, and always the better wordsmith than I, has pretty well nailed everything I was going to say. Cheers mate, I won't have to labour so much.

I'll throw in a few random comments though:

LEADERSHIP:
Every one of the really ground-breaking top level teams I've competed against has had a strong leadership group steering the overall direction of the project. In particular I'm thinking Wollongong around 2002, UWA around 2003-2004, Cornell when they were on that incredible winning streak. At the managerial end of each of these teams were a small group of individuals who had a well-formed vision of where the team was going, and the leadership skills to bring everyone along with them.

The world-view that these leaders had developed didn't just encompass the usual component level design skills (e.g. mass minimization processes, engine development, FEA and stiffness calcs), that most of us have learnt in our engineering educations. It included a whole vehicle level vision of how the car would integrate; where its strengths and weaknesses would lie in regard to the overall competition; which project tasks were worthwhile and which were "high-risk, low return"; how this direction could be achieved with the existing time, budget and human resources; which developments could be implemented this year and which were for longer term development; how the vehicle development would tie in with all the "non-vehicle" requirements (e.g. Static Event goals, team members meeting academic requirements); how the acquired team knowledge will be transferred to later teams, etc etc etc. I'm no fan of autocratic governance, but if you don't have some sort of core leadership and overall vision, then any success you may achieve becomes purely a matter of chance.

INEXPERIENCE:
Nothing I've seem indicates that a good team needs experience. I've seen teams of relative amateurs put up a really competitive effort, (usually because they are united in their lack of experience) and teams of "old hands" that should have done better fail miserably (often through team bickering / politics or just plain complacency).

An inexperienced team is much more likely to assess the task at hand objectively, and take the advice of others (academic staff, workshop staff, team alumni, etc). This is a very big project, so a little bit of fear of the task at hand can aid in making sure the team doesn't bite of more than it can chew. Experience on the other hand can lead to unfounded confidence. How often do you see a team put in a good honest first effort, and then go backwards the following year when they try to do too much. (We certainly learnt the hard way).

As far as the wider definition of "experience", who says we lack it here in Oz? We have been running a comp here for 9 years now, and you could near fill a football stadium with those who have some experience with this Formula. Team alumni, event staff, industry visitors and sponsors, uni staff, judges - there is a whole raft of individuals that can give good honest advice on what they have seen. (Note Pat Clarke's comments above - we have an impartial and highly experienced FSAE judge here who is willing to help us out, but hardly anyone bothers to contact him). I'd accept that a first year team like Edith Cowan Uni could argue inexperience as it usually takes a year to get to know the right people. But for the rest of us I think it a very poor excuse.

I'd suggest that a lack of willingness to accept advice is a much larger problem. Nearly every good FSAE alumni you speak to says the same thing - attempt less and get it done early. I know many alumni who are still happy to help and advise their old teams to achieve this aim. But I also know many who despair when their well-intentioned advice is ignored and the same mistakes are made over and over. Given we are returning to completion rates experienced at our very first Oz event, it is obvious that the most important lesson is just one that current participants just don't want to learn.

Cheers all, sorry for the thesis

[Pete Marsh]

Charlie and GTS have some pearls of wisdom and are pretty much spot on. But, the reality is most teams will have (or recently have had) a meeting to choose a new team shortly. At that meeting they will be looking for a team manager, who will be a volunteer. When the question gets asked, one or two hands will go up, and someone will be choosen. So what skills will they have? what is their motivation for having a go? will they know anything about group dynamics or motivation, or sponsorship, or faculty relations?

My point is that just as all the engineers are yet to find their feet, so is the managment and leadership that your suggesting will lead them. The blind leading the blind.
We have often spoken of 'understudy' possitions for all the key roles but by the time the need is realised the main players are too snowed to build a car and train the next team.

In my experience, when lack of succesion planning, recruiting and training becomes the limiting factor, the team does something about it. Then the next teams forget about it because they have a good strong team (from the work of their predecesors) and the need is not so pressing, and so the decline starts over.

Pete

[brettd]

Originally posted by GTS:
No, it involves developing and maintaining the skills and appropriate culture within and among individuals such that everyone in the team is able to 'do it'. Charlie is right.

I agree completely, in fact I said it in my first post:

Originally posted by brettd:
Personally, I think one of the biggest influences on a teams success is the culture that prevails throughout the year.

I think that the culture the team has is one of the biggest influences (if not the biggest) on how successful they will be. The part where I disagree with you guys is that management (say the elected/assigned 2,3 or 4 people who hold the positions with the titles in the team) is able to implement/enfore said cultural change:

There are a few reasons why I believe this is the case:
1. The level of commitment in FSAE teams varies massively, unlike a workplace where the employees do a similar amount of hours (give or take), there are several very different levels of involvement, each level with an different culture.

2. There is almost zero accountability, managers have little to no authority to enforce deadlines, if a particular team member has never met a deadline in his (or her) life, then there's not a lot the manager can do to make the member finish something on time (or even at all for that matter).

3. Cultural change is difficult to implement without a lot of resources backing it, there are many examples of failed cultural change in firms even with millions of dollars spent during implementation.

4. The change fights an uphill battle from the start, this is because the change will usually involve the team members giving up more of what little life/uni marks/job they have left. Cultural change in a workplace, for example much stricter safety protocols is at worst going to inconvenience a few employees but it's not going to cost them their girlfriend or another year of their degree.

I think the problem is more with team-wide inexperience and initial attitude rather than bad management.

Regardless of the degree to which people talk themselves up or however long they've been involved with the program, everyone in FSAE is inexperienced. Not dealing with the inexperience appropriately or leveraging an initial attitude to advantage is poor management.

Embrace inexperience. Because of the way FSAE is run at many universities, it's essentially an undisciplined learning environment. If you've done FSAE before you might know how to turn a screw smarter than the student next to you, it doesn't necessarily mean you know more than them about being part of an inclusive, diverse team that needs to deliver a complex project. If anything poor habits can become limiting as they set the bounds of your expectations. It's not easy being green but it's not the limitation you make it out to be either.

Comes back to being inclusive - a good manager will push to find a way to best use a team resource even when the answer isn't obvious. Any fool can avoid the challenge and delegate a task to someone more immediately favorable, but you'd agree that most teams doing this run out of resources around the time the sh*t really hits the fan. So it's not a smart way forward.

Sure, and I do appreciate what you're saying - that at the end of the year, in retrospect, the initial effort seems horribly ineffective/inefficient. But those that know better (in having been there) weren't born knowing it, and would be extremely arrogant to presume that others aren't allowed to learn from - and enjoy going through - the same processes (let alone make their own, original mistakes ).

Beyond that your point concerns a project being ill defined. You'd have studied in engineering management how to plan a design from initial abstraction, through generating a PDS, setting tasks, allocating timelines, predicting failure modes ahead of time, etc... done in industry all the time... how many FSAE teams embrace this? Very few - about as exciting as cost reporting, I'm told! Yet most students are taught this and at worst have lecturers, libraries, industry they could get advice from. So - throughout the team, looking uniformly - you have ill-defined project aims, a lack of definitive specifications, no real generation of various concepts and appraisal of their various methods, no failure mode assessment or time/resource planning before you even pull out a sketchbook or hit a CAD workstation - is it surprising that some efforts end up poorly specified or very insular in their resource allocation? I might sound anal retentive on this, but imagine if you had to fund an FSAE team out of your own pocket - you'd be keeping a very, very close eye on every aspect of project management I'd bet! You'd do everything possible to best prepare your team to make the best of their time and resources.

I agree with this, personally I think this is a result of having thesis projects tied to the team and also the nature of what attracts students to FSAE itself. For example, if students were given the choice between designing and making a few more cool bits for the car as opposed to planning out what they are going to do next, which do you think they'll choose?

But poor planning in a team environment isn't the fault of 'inexperienced individuals' - it's systemic, fundamentally a team management issue.

Yes it is, but as Pete said, if your planners are inexperienced, then it is just the blind leading the blind, deadlines can easily be overly optimistic and I believe this is as a result of inexperience in the planning process.

There is no such thing as a professional FSAE team. There are those that better leverage their resources in what project management, human resources management and engineering/design management concepts they apply, and there are those that don't.

Sorry, when I meant professional, I meant getting paid to do it, I hope this excludes FSAE teams. :P

There is no such thing as an experienced FSAE individual either. It's a student competition. If you get to the stage where you feel you're a seasoned pro that's above feeling green and capable of telling other students how to run their time in the competition, then you need to do one of the following:

- Pull your head in, or,
- Accept you've grown beyond FSAE and give someone else the chance to have the experiences you've had.

I'm not suggesting to other teams how to run their teams in the competition, the management of FSAE teams is something that has intrigued me for a couple of years now and I just wanted to weigh in with my opinions.

[Paterson]

Havent posted on here for a while but this thread is a fantastic learning tool teams out there and hits the mark on the intention of the forums...

Great advise from all the seasoned guys here, and you look down the list of teams they have worked with and the success these teams have had and its advice that should be adhered to.

I have worked with 3 universities on formula student, 1 in australia and 2 in the UK, and the thing that strikes me everytime is the development approach to team structure, the mix of previous participants to new team members and commitment.

Big bird is spot on with his comments on this, that the novice teams seek advice, but i think the best teams i have been with have a good mix of people with a couple of years experience and guys with no experience. With this mix we found we could achieve things quickly, and had the tools available to fast-track design but still had the individuals who would seek to explore the reasoning behind decisions to better understand them for the future.

This has resulted in a team for 2009 that have flown into the design process seeemlessly and confidently, choosing leaders who have shown a desire or passion for the position and its inherent responsibilities and requirements and also an understanding of each others strengths and weeaknesses.

Personally, I look fondly at the university of adelaide's improvement in recent years, a very high completion rate, early car finishes and a simple, solid design that has developed yearly into a highly competitive vehicle, and I note that this trend has coincided with the mentoring system where previous team members have openly and actively made themselves available to provide advise, answer questions about previous cars and the reasoning behind specific compromise in the design.

I dont think the importance of this can be underestimated in a competition where you learn most from your mistakes and mistakes of your peers... The new teams do need to make the same mistakes to learn the lessons, but sometimes the benefit of a guiding hand can teach these lessons (or pose questions for the team to consider), without the costly failures and time losses which can result.

my 2 cents... fantastic thread for new and old teams alike.

[GTS]

brettd;

You're not wrong in general, and your interest in management is commendable, particularly in FSAE where it's a key - if often critically unappreciated - element.

The part where I disagree with you guys is that management (say the elected/assigned 2,3 or 4 people who hold the positions with the titles in the team) is able to implement/enfore said cultural change...

A misconception. You're right, cultural change in industry takes time, however two things are overlooked:

1 - You've a huge advantage in FSAE - you can basically reset the culture year on year. I've been an observer of one university's FSAE team for four years, and whilst there are common themes and faces, the four teams I've seen all have a unique vibe of their own (in this is pays for individuals that have become a little 'too experienced' to leave the program and let others form their own culture appropriately, lest they shape it inadvertently).

2 - Just because 2-4 people have a title it doesn't ever mean they define or uphold the culture, let alone the management effort in it's totality. Don't assume managing downwards is the only way - team members at any level can manage upwards, sideways. You can make a managerial difference without the title if (putting it colloquially) you're more interested in the end result than in having your ass kissed. It's often the most influential, dependable people in any team that aren't the most 'titled' or known outside of the team itself. What matters is that those that are aware of a better way, or a positive addition to a current process proactively effect that change. Be the courtier; there are many ways to do this.

There is almost zero accountability, managers have little to no authority to enforce deadlines, if a particular team member has never met a deadline in his (or her) life, then there's not a lot the manager can do to make the member finish something on time (or even at all for that matter).

I agree. This is hard, particularly given shortfalls in perceptions between team members of what's important.

To this end I think the Auckland solution is fantastic. Were I in FSAE all over again, I'd beg my funding university to string our funding to deadlines. Brave, it might seem a little suicidal even, but it'd put a real, external pressure on getting the job done (not least it'd increase the university's interest in the project significantly). This is also a relevant perspective; if you think of contracts between sponsors, drivers and professional race teams you'll appreciate that such arrangements are in essence similar - inasmuch there's sufficient motivation in money for individuals to get their job done... I really do think the Auckland solution is a positive step along the way to professionalizing FSAE efforts and preparing students for the environments the project emulates. Kudos.

Cultural change is difficult to implement without a lot of resources backing it, there are many examples of failed cultural change in firms even with millions of dollars spent during implementation.

Millions of dollars don't effect cultural change, historically a few enlightened and extremely patient individuals do.

The level of commitment in FSAE teams varies massively, unlike a workplace where the employees do a similar amount of hours (give or take), there are several very different levels of involvement, each level with an different culture.

If this is used as a basis for judging contribution, I disagree. Not least because this can set a combative precedent.

Involvement in a project isn't measured by the number of hours one puts in. It's measured by an ability to execute responsibilities, which is not the same thing. A significant part of the problem characteristic to FSAE concerns poor project definition - when do you stop designing? What are your targets/aims? Are these clearly defined - is there ambiguity? With as much, you can't expect anyone to plan their time accordingly, let alone work effectively. Effective work, not bulk attendance, gets a job done. I'd take someone who gets a good hour's work out of an hour in the office over someone that's a regular fixture but not nearly as productive. The latter person has no right to criticize the former. The people that put in a rock star effort in my year, that had bulletproof assemblies that performed brilliantly, that even had spares and other contingencies organized well before the year's end - these people weren't the people that 'put in the most time'. They were simply the most organized. And they had healthy lives outside of the team, maintained or improved their grades, one even kept up part time work.

FSAE team members are all students. You shouldn't be in the office 24/7. There are crunch times, sure (I'll admit to having slept in the office during my year on rare occasions) but on the whole you're not at university to do FSAE - and you shouldn't be. You're there to complete a degree to the best of your ability. Any co-curricular activity (FSAE or otherwise) that value adds to your career preparation is a bonus, if - and only if - you can time manage it. Those that created the competition would be mortified to think otherwise. I don't buy this at all:

The change fights an uphill battle from the start, this is because the change will usually involve the team members giving up more of what little life/uni marks/job they have left. Cultural change in a workplace, for example much stricter safety protocols is at worst going to inconvenience a few employees but it's not going to cost them their girlfriend or another year of their degree.

For every student that made an impact in their team that I've seen bring their degree to a halt, I've seen students that have been just as effective - or more - that kept their grades, partners, health, sanity whatever. FSAE is not a special case - plenty of other non-FSAE students in your degree will hold down jobs/responsibilities/hardships that differ from yours in that they don't have an end-of-season competition, and that's about it. Poor time management on your part is your problem and certainly not an excuse to despise another's effectiveness - don't let that attitude permeate your FSAE team's culture, ever. Judge people on their ability to get a job done, not on the relative differences in their methods that bear no affect on your own. If anything, where you can see someone being more productive, learn from them - it's a small thing to be a little behind this at uni, it's a massive difference to be an ineffective contributor in industry. If everyone's overworked and it's not a ridiculously small team, it's not a sign that all are equally dedicated, it's a sign that people's involvement could be better managed.

Help your team be proactive in focusing goals, specifying responsibilities as unambiguously as possible so team members know what job they need to get on with, so that they have a clear, transparent performance metric, so that delivery dates have a readily tangible set of technical deliverables and aren't just a milestone on a not-too-serious Gantt chart.

(FWIW, I've never seen safety protocols inconvenience anyone in a workplace unless they're not followed, and then the inconvenience can last a long time at best and be tragic at worst. Get it right in your team's efforts. If you're not sure, grab the OH&S head at your uni early in the year, have them review how the car is made and how the office runs. Have a mandatory inauguration done. Let the OH&S people do the work they're paid to do. It might be their head that rolls should something happen to one of your team as a result of your FSAE activities, but it's the affected person that lives with the consequences. Do students really need to see the aftermath of a workplace incident or hazardous working conditions before they realise OH&S is a win-win? It's not as though best-practice industry conditions are any more relaxed.)

Goal specification is crucial:

For example, if students were given the choice between designing and making a few more cool bits for the car as opposed to planning out what they are going to do next, which do you think they'll choose?

When the team's technical direction is ambiguous, an individual team member's contribution is similarly so. You can't expect anyone at this point to go for anything but some form of personal glory - doesn't everyone want to have fun and be remembered? We could well rephrase your question: "if students were given the choice between designing and making a few more cool bits for the car as opposed to taking responsibility for increasing performance in an area that's been understood to make the car markedly more competitive to a target value that's been researched, which do you think they'll choose?" Even as a green ugrad many moons ago I'd go for the God role and take on the responsibility. I'd gladly let someone else take on the CarbonUnobtaniumCompletelyUselessFeature. I'd know whatever cool bits I designed were a function of a goal that made the project more competitive, and anyone in future wondering how it was done could reference my - MY - work (also explains why recruiting people do only handle marketing/treasury/web design/cost report/<insert non-exciting role anyone else wouldn't be caught dead doing> never works?)

You may well say that's the point you're making, but I'd add that bending a student's enthusiasm into a very productive end requires much less effort than you might have considered - it's very easy to get excited about a responsibility when you've 'seen the point' of it all. Good leaders in FSAE would do well to lock the team up in a room for a week, ban CAD, crack out the whiteboard markers, sit at a round table and have a rigorous, structured look at what performance parameters the car needs to have. Geoff makes a great point - if you had no experience in FSAE, what's the first thing you'd do? Very likely you'd make an effort to structure some targets. Use last year as a starting point, read the rules carefully to weight parameters, have an honest look at where the competition mauled the team the last time around. Start putting some numbers that define a PDS together. To be honest it's not bloody hard - the SAE gives you a rulebook that states pretty clearly how the competition runs, it's not as if competitiveness is a vague concept you need to spend a small eternity defining (note: this is another departure from 'real' motorsport, where FSAE is easier - yet I've witnessed/worked with/partaken in six FSAE teams and I've never seen one assess last year's results - of all teams - in detail, nor run any rigourous simulations aimed at maximising points in competition).

Then management needs to be (or needs to be convinced to be) totally unemotional (the hard part): having given a specification to a person or people to be delegated, management needs to accept what they hand back should it meet that specification, e.g. if the chassis is specified to weigh to much, have given stiffness parameters, have pickups and clearances in certain locations, have certain lead times in manufacturing, needs cost so much with relevant manufacturing resource implications, has certain risk factors, whatever - and then your chassis team hands back a design that meets all that but is made of mung beans and banana peels when others (who's responsibility it isn't) perceived it to be a steel spaceframe, so be it. Don't bitch about it, just throw rocks at it fairly and if it's still standing as a concept, run with it. Be unemotional in delegation, let others take responsibility for their work. It's not you that has to defend or deconstruct it for the design judges in the end, is it.

I've worked with many student teams on many different projects - I can attest that properly lead - and that means with an appropriately defined project brief and the resources required to complete as much, not necessarily with an all-capable figurehead leading the ship - even the most unlikely students can achieve remarkable things in remarkably short time periods. Accept your managers won't be perfect, manage upwards if you need to, and get your team to define their work efforts early on.

While this is definately not the case for professional teams where team members will stay for more than a few seasons...

Whilst professional teams do have employees with more developed skill sets than your own, noone's asking you to turn out a competitive Formula 1 car either, and the basic engineering principles don't change anyway. The biggest difference I've observed don't concern individual skill or familiarity with a project, it concerns goal setting. Professional operations put time into working out exactly where they need to go. Then functional groups go away and generate concepts to suit those goals, then the rest is just your average engineering donkey work on a race to see a completed, functional project. The stuff FSAE teams don't tend to carry over and develop year-on-year which they should - procedures, processes for developing goals and concepts, procedures for testing, etc - far outweighs the net worth of the themes that are (the "these SuperCarbonAssys are great as we had them last year").

(I've actually never understood why there's not been a collaborative effort on these forums to get that sort of stuff knocked out in at least a preliminary context - would be far more useful than a CAD repository).

...most teams will have (or recently have had) a meeting to choose a new team shortly. At that meeting they will be looking for a team manager, who will be a volunteer. When the question gets asked, one or two hands will go up, and someone will be choosen. So what skills will they have? what is their motivation for having a go? will they know anything about group dynamics or motivation, or sponsorship, or faculty relations?

I would suggest you'll want someone with an open mind, that is patient with diverse people, that can take criticism as well as they can give it - or those that know better will need to quietly impart these values along the course of the year to the chosen figurehead. I would also admit this doesn't always happen in any organisation, so managing upwards is a good skill to practice.

Having prior FSAE experience doesn't make for good management skill. The rest of what's cited in this list can be learnt, so long as - as Geoff rightly, critically points out - there's a culture where people are willing to learn, willing to take advice. I'd rather leadership that exemplifies as much in a student project as opposed to leadership that exemplifies a quantity of knowledge that sets cultural bounds not only defining a project technically, but defining what's technically possible and how - with all the social implications that brings. If you're fortunate enough to find individuals that blend open minds with some knowledge that they're both happy to share and have questioned, you're very fortunate; it's a head start but not the only way of building the 'round table' atmosphere you want.

Hell... unfamiliar challenges? Limited resources? Short timescales? Team cultural issues? Managerial challenges? FSAE might seem an ultimate nightmare, though some other alumni might agree with me when I suggest that if you're fortunate enough to carve yourself out an engaging engineering career, you're going to be thrown in this kind of deep end for a long time yet.

There are entire professional industries dedicated to improving project management if you're lost and require inspiration - the same assistance industry uses isn't far away. Be positive, proactive, focus on making the most of this kind of environment rather than lamenting the challenges. Learn to take the sh*t with a smile and mean it, lest your muck become someone else's brass (think about that one!)

(This post is too long.)

[L B0MB]

Hi all

I am interested to learn how much fuel each team used in the endurance event at the comp and what engine they were running

This is in light of the new fuel economy weighting in the 2009 rules...

[Tim.Wright]

Yo L-Bomb

The results for the US comps all show fuel used in gallons on their spreadsheets.

http://students.sae.org/compet...rmulaseries/results/

T-Section
Suspension & Vehicle Dynamics
Curtin University
'Complulsory Life Member'

[Taffy]

Originally posted by RiNaZ:
will we be seeing the RMIT car at F-Hybrid next year?

I do not believe it will be unless plans have changed.
They are building a new electric SAE car this year with many upgrades from ours though it is still in planning stages.

The reliability problems that we had were from a washer (i blame kai! :-P, hows things btw? ) floating around inside our low voltage box. When we pulled a left turn it would create a short and blow the LV fuse which shut down the car.

Was alot of fun to have on track and alot quicker then we thought it would be. Seemed that we had set the controller up for a good power range to run on such a tight track.

[Kai69i]

Hi Taffy!
Yes what a ripper idea the old washer in the low voltage box was!

I tried to re-wire the car on the Friday night before comp so it would only run in reverse, but I found this was not as simple as just reversing the polarity of the electric motor! Actually the car didn’t run at all in that configuration! LOL. So after completely earthing out our FSAE car the week before, I thought why not try it on the E-bomb? LOL.

The infamous washer aside, from what I have heard in the last week this style of vehicle looks to have a big future in the FSAE competition. As they say… watch this space!

Kai

P.S. Taffy, was Facebook not an appropriate means to ask how I was going? LOL