Drivers height

[wrcRS]

Erin, I would think that we could make you some foam so you fit the car right. Just like they do for the endurance cars.

[Urvina]

Clinton? is that you?

get off the forum, no one wants you here!

haha

[mtg]

Foam inserts for short drivers definitely work well. UMR's current team leader is 4'11", and she has a thick foam insert for a few of the cars that works pretty well.

[Rob.C]

in response to dennys post, aston had to do exactly the same thing this year, purely becausee the guy that designed their intake didnt read the rules properly!

getting back on topic, it is always a struggle to get the roll hoop height right, sometimes you get a judge who is clearly over the 95th percentile trying to get in your car and then moans when he doesnt fit, and the responce that it was designed for 95th percentile doesnt seem to calm him, or provide a reasonable explanation!

what can we do!?

what about in the tech and design tents, having a 95th percentile dummy that they put in the car, and then measure roll hoop height legality from that??

[Deano]

With respect to the driver template that is specified in the rules, I've not seen this used in tech spec at Formula Student. All they do is run a stick from the rear to front hoop and measure the distance to the tallest driver's helmet.

We've not had any problems meeting this reg - and I guess neither should any team with a reasonably accurate CAD model of the actual driver.

Using the template specced in the rules would, I suppose, require a taller roll hoop than if it were designed around a more realistic driver model - i.e. one that accounts for the fact that the driver's back doesn't have to be straight.

If they're not going to bother using the template, then they might as well just scrap that rule and leave it as "50mm clearance to the tallest driver"�. I'd be interested to hear whether the other comps use the template.

Wrt scrutineering, at least in the UK, they don't actually check who the tallest driver is anyway, not to mention whether you have all the seat padding in etc. In fact the whole driver registration system this year seemed to be a bit haphazard. First off, they only seem to register drivers for insurance purposes. They have no idea which is your tallest driver for tech spec and, as far as I could tell, they had no way of knowing which driver had done which event. I'm pretty certain we could have used the same driver in every heat of every event (save one stint the endurance!).

There's too much room for teams to push the rules – you don't mind meeting the regs word for word if everyone has to do it, but it would be annoying having done this only to find others are getting away with their own interpretations...

Cheers,

[Bart Smith]

The rules are reasonably explicit in what they regard as to what the 95th percentile is. If you design around that size, you should be fine.

You will just have to use an adjustable pedalbox, seat inserts, or have all your drivers at roughly the same size!

On a side note, yes, I have seen cars that clearly do not meet the 95th percentile range, where their drivers are nothing over 5 6", and the scrutineers have not checked for compliance of such rules. Any driver that would be about 6ft tall would not even fit in the car...

I have heard whispers that there will be a dummy at the FSAE-A competition in December..

[BStoney]

As Michael Royce and the rules committee noted after FSAE East, "Perci", or the wooden 95th percentile male, will be used and his dimensions enforced at competition in 2007....Looks like some cars may be cut in half and a new roll hoop welded in. I guess we should bring our tube bender and some 1" .095 to help out others, if need be.

[Bart Smith]

We designed our car this year using the measurements provided in the rule book.

As this is one of the few parameters we can't change (dimension wise) we started here. Once we had our pseudo dummy in place, that set where our pedal box would be, and effectively the front bulkhead support.

Even our tallest drivers (and they are big hefty 100kg lads)fits inside this zone