I have to say the design event at FSAE-A this year was a great success and a huge improvement. Congrats to the officials and volunteers involved in the process.
I have to agree with Storbeck, every student needs to be judged completely independently of their "resume" and the teams performance. The potenial employers really need to question the student hard about their time in fsae. I have seen people from Wollongong with "members of the championship winning team" plastered on their resumes and they weren't even on the team at the time or just stopped by the workshop once or twice. You can have idiots in succuessful teams and geniuses in not very successful teams. It has to be on a case by case basis.
This is an engineering competition where you have to demonsrate your product. Its about design, sales, cost and very importantly performance. Thats why you have a points set up like you do. You can practice the design, cost, sales, acceleration, skid pan and fuel economy event at your home base as many times as you like (500 points) and set up a similar course for the auto and enduro to practice (another 500 points). Assuming your car is the best and fastest at the competition but you have well trained and low talent drivers the most you are going to lose is 2 seconds a lap in enduro and maybe 3 seconds a lap in autox. This adds up to about a 100 points lost total, so i can't see how a well organised and disiplined team with an awesome car (barring big human errors at the competition) could end up scoring less then 800 points (assuming small errors across other events) or pretty much a podium finish.
I think you could walk up and down the pit lane and take detailed photos of the top 10 cars. Then without any understanding just blindly copy their designs and just build something to a really high standard (build qualitywise). Get it running really early and then get the thing reliable by just making something that breaks heavier and doesn't lighter etc. Get yourself a good driver or two and just guess some set up changes. With 5 months or so of this i think you could get it going very fast. It would turn up at the competition and look really impressive from a distance (good build quality) and be very fast but would do really poorly in design because the students wouldn't understand anything about. The reverse would also be true if you had a really well designed and understood car that only had limited testing (1 month) and a less organised team. It would do really well in design but not so well in the dynamic events. That is why you have a spread of points, too demonstrate all aspects of an engineering project.
My comments about luck, were that all systems and parts are made by humans. Any failure, whether it was poorly designed, built, installed, maintained or driven, is the fault of a human and hence there is no luck only good prepation. Thats not to say you need to play the blame game, students make mistakes and its a great learning experience, as long as they were giving 100%. Whether a part or system is complex/simple or cheap/expensive it is still a human's creation.