Driver Selection

[JR @ CFS]

Hey all,

Searched through and couldnt find anything relevant. Just wondering how teams went about selecting drivers from a team of people without any competition experience? Then, once selected, what was done to improve the driving standard of the drivers?

There is of course the balance that needs to be struck between using your people power available to build a fully functioning reliable vehicle. Just want to know what other people out there did.

My opinion on holding a few kart races is not the way to do it, FS afterall is not a race against each other, it is a race against the track. I think that 2 to 3 karting sessions should be held and the people who set the CONSISTENTLY fastest laps should be the people of greatest interest. But then you have to ask, do you need someone with excellent track skills to drive the acceleration run?

All relevant feedback, thoughts and comments welcome

[JR @ CFS]

Hey all,

Searched through and couldnt find anything relevant. Just wondering how teams went about selecting drivers from a team of people without any competition experience? Then, once selected, what was done to improve the driving standard of the drivers?

There is of course the balance that needs to be struck between using your people power available to build a fully functioning reliable vehicle. Just want to know what other people out there did.

My opinion on holding a few kart races is not the way to do it, FS afterall is not a race against each other, it is a race against the track. I think that 2 to 3 karting sessions should be held and the people who set the CONSISTENTLY fastest laps should be the people of greatest interest. But then you have to ask, do you need someone with excellent track skills to drive the acceleration run?

All relevant feedback, thoughts and comments welcome

[Biggy72]

Well in my opinion unless you're talking about shifter karts or something with an incredible amount of power, you're not going to get accurate results by having people race karts. Granted it's a good way to work on driving skills, but I'm not a big fan of karts because most of the time any way a kart that you can rent to run puts a big premium on the weight of the driver, and as you get more and more power the weight of the driver becomes more and more irrelevant and the driving skill becomes more pertinent.

I think the best way to decide on drivers is to get them into the car and have them run the specific events that pertain to what they might drive at the event. It should be fairly easy to tell who is consistently better at one particular event compared to another, and it should not be that hard to weed people out.

It's pretty easy to set up an acceleration run and a skid pad course so they're pretty easy to run people through. If you have local auto crosses, they're good to take the car to and if you don't you can set up something in a parking lot of what a typical auto cross course might look like to test on. The endurance could be just like the auto cross but look much more for smooth consistent people. The car has to last for 20 minutes of driving after all.

[js10coastr]

The best idea I've heard was that everyone on the team was placed into a 3D scanner naked. All of their bodies were then loaded into a database and the results were tabulated. Using specific genetic algorithms to make precise measurements the two people with the biggest balls got to drive.

Sorry... that was a terrible joke.

[B Hise]

Here's how we do it:

Step 1: Offer the whole team a opportunity to drive the car early in the season, maybe two or three times (if you have a last year/older car working). It helps alot with motivation, even for the most dedicated people.

Step 2: The hardest workers get to drive, period. If you don't make this cut and step it up, you can get on the list. More than likely, these are the guys that will push the car hard and will learn how to drive it fast anyway.

Step 3: From the step 2 list, pick drivers that will do the best in the certain dynamic events. Hold tryouts, and see whos fast. From then on, those drivers practice and test those events only. If you have a really good driver, make them a test driver for all dynamic events, it helps you sort the car out.


Alot of people will say "we'll were out here to win" so they might be comfortable having some star shoe walk in and drive their car at comp. You might score well, but in the end, that's not what this competition is all about. For the vast majority of FSAE'ers this will be the only time you get to design, build, and drive your own car. If you go to the pros, then you can work tirelessly on a car someone else gets to drive. Not to mention driving the car and feeling your changes makes you a much better race engineer when it comes time to interpret a pro drivers comments and compare it with data. Enjoy it while you can, and have fun flogging the machine that edges out girlfriends and destroys your GPA. It will be over before you know it.

My $.02

-Bryan

[JR @ CFS]

Good point. I just had a discussion regarding this and we are reluctant to get outside people in simply for the fact that if you work hard during the year, you should be rewarded for your efforts. This doesn´t mean you will necessarily be the driver at the competition, but you will get to drive the car once the competition is over.

Currently in the process of organising a few karting days and want to get the old cars out. Problem being, our ´06 car is currently being worked on for FSAEW and its getting cold and wet and sweden, so might be hard to get old cars out!!!

[B Hise]

Cold + Wet = Perfect time to learn car control

[Chuck Maddocks]

cold + wet is better for learning car control, but not for pushing the absolute limits of the car. the best drivers will push these limits. relative to the other new kids, i think i performed better on the cold days, and worse on the warm days. probably due to my experience driving in cold weather all the time. i was far behind on the warm days, not really pushing the limits

however, it usually rains during comp anyway so you might as well learn both

[absolutepressure]

As far as improving driver skill goes, you could take a field trip to a driving (racing) school. I know the team (before I was on it) went to Skip Barber Racing School. I guess they start you out in Neons, and put you in the formula ford cars at the end of the day. That's something I'd really love to do, I just don't know if we have the money to do it. They do give discounts to bigger groups, I believe.

[Jenner Collins]

The first question is what is FSAE all about at your uni. If you are just there to learn then anyone can drive. Even I struggled with having some hotshoe driving your car who has not done anything - but I just hate losing!

But if you want to do well you need a good driver. This does not mean you have to look outside the engineering school or the team, however for the last few years we did as we had a business student driving. He had raced some Formula Renault typre stuff I think here in the UK.

We are lucky that we have a motorsport degree offered at the uni so attract a number of people who have raced are are currently racing, so have a reasonable pool of people to choose from.

Cheers,