I thought I would post this as some positive feedback. It appears that the recent changes to the rules have improved FSAE quite a lot. I am mainly referring to the aerodynamic changes allowing sharper trailing edges, more plan area, and moving wings. A couple of main design considerations have changed:
- After removing most of the advantages for 4 cylinder engines through more points to fuel economy, aero returns some of that advantage by allowing teams with more power to take advantage of more downforce (due to being able to carry more drag). The recent changes have made it possible for cars to have too much drag relative to the power, which is a good thing. This might have a side effect of more teams trying to do custom engines.
- Aero development simply can't be ignored now. While teams may not decide to make aero packages some of their competitors will. As a result teams almost by default have to consider whether or not to run aero, rather than dismissing the possibility all together. Aero should be more prominent in design discussions. This is good as a fundamental area of mechanical engineering is in the forefront of students minds.
- for cars that go aero weight is now even more important, given that your downforce divided by your car weight will be the grip modifier.
Going over the trade-offs there are now a number of very competitive concepts that will largely depend on your competition. For example if there are no winged cars a single car can take economy points, without losing too many dynamics. A high powered, high aero car might put a decent enough points gap to nullify it, where a non aero four might not. There seems a big increase in valid approaches:
- Lightweight single aimed to reduce fuel use as much as possible with high mech. grip
- Single with high aero to maximise normalised aerodynamics, but maintain low fuel use
- High powered four with maximum downforce to go as fast as possible
- Light(ish) four to have high accel, mech. grip, and coast a little on endurance to reduce fuel use
- Custom lightweight engine to have low fuel, low weight (with or without aero)
I applaud the recent rules changes in opening up the potential concepts. I still am very critical of the ones that came before:
- Change in fuel economy scores pushing to singles and low fuel use rather than efficiency (Germany did this well though)
- Templates!! Removed one of the fundamental trade-offs in chassis design of driver comfort vs. weight/packaging
- More mandated tubes making tube chassis' more uniform and generally unnecessarily improving the relative performance of monocoques
When Carroll Smith was still around he was making noise about fundamentally changing the rules to cause a bit of a shakeup. This was in response to the convergence of US cars to a norm (i.e. 95% of teams trying to be Cornell). I would say the recent aero changes have done that and we are now in the middle of an exciting time in FSAE.
Comments? Thoughts?
Kev