Motorsport or Design?

[Kevin Hayward]

Julian has a good point about copying to get the best points return.

I think that sharing cost reports (and every other static event materials) between teams is a good thing. All teams and members can learn by observing best practice, it will also make it much less likely that we will see the most common form of cheating in the cost report, which is leaving parts out. It is much too likely that other teams will spot it.

In order to alleviate Julian's concern of reducing the value of the cost event, it would probably be worthwhile to review a couple of other potential changes:

- Make the overall cost worth less of the event and make it more about report quality and the manufacturing cases
- Make the costs much more linked to design decisions. There has been a great improvement in this area with the simplification of the cost report some years ago.
- Make sure that the full cost score is still spread over the entire field. Smaller design decisions might become more important if there is a big points incentive between $11k and $11.2k

...

When I first started in FSAE the cost event was an absolute shambles. It was very easy to cheat, and I was flat out told by the teams doing well exactly how they cheated. It was a massive effort to produce each year, and had students scouring the internet for the cheapest rod ends etc. that they didn't use to make their cost as low as possible. It has never reflected the true cost of cars.

The simplification of the cost event has made it much more manageable for teams and something that can be used in the design process. For teams that haven't gone through the exercise go and find out how many points $1000 on the final design is actually worth at comp. You might be surprised at how hard this is to make up on track. Then go through the report and figure out how you could change your design to reduce your cost without sacrificing performance. It is a real eye opener.

Less parts = lower cost
Simple parts substitution without losing performance = lower cost
Not all areas are valued equally
Less material needed (either waste or on car) = lower cost

Great lessons for jobs in design and manufacturing. As long as the cost of the car reflects the actual design there is no disadvantage to sharing the reports. Although maybe we only need to share the cost summaries.

Kev

[Charlie]

Originally posted by coleasterling:
Not that it is close to "top level(F1?)," but Jordon Musser, one of our (A&M) former drivers, raced professionally in Grand Am.

From what I understand he raced in a Grand Am feeder series. No offense t Jordon, but the driver talent in that series is dubious (not that there are no good drivers there, I'm sure there can be).

A top level driver to me is someone that is competitive in a top series.

[Kevin Hayward]

Following some discussion with Charlie Ping here are the scores from Michigan 2013 including design, but not efficiency and endurance:

1 - Oregon State Univ (530.8)
2 - Universitat Stuttgart (504)
3 - Tallinn University of Technology (483.9)
4 - Ecole De Technologie Superieure (483.6)
5 - Auburn Univ (456.1)
6 - Univ of Michigan - Ann Arbor (452.7)
7 - Universite Laval (452.2)
8 - Missouri University of Science and Tech (448.7)
9 - Univ of Akron (439.8)
10 - Univ of Wisconsin - Madison (439.1)
11 - Graz Univ of Technology (438.2)

This list takes the top 11 to get all the design finalists in the list, only two of the top 11 are non-finalists (ETS 100 pts and Missouri 80pts) and the top three were the top three in design. For Missouri to win the comp they would have had to equal the best endurance time and win efficiency at the same time, or dominate endurance by around 30-40 points. 92 points separates 1 from 11, but the design score range on these teams is 70 points. More than 70%, even excluding the 80 from Missouri we see more than half the difference of the potential 600 points that these teams could have scored has come from design.

If we take out the design scores the list looks like this:

1 - Ecole De Technologie Superieure
2 - Oregon State Univ
3 - Universitat Stuttgart
4 - Missouri University of Science and Tech
5 - Auburn Univ
6 - Univ of Michigan - Ann Arbor
7 - Tallinn University of Technology
8 - Universite Laval
9 - Univ of Kansas - Lawrence
10 - Univ of Akron
11 - Cornell Univ
12 - Univ of Western Ontario
13 - Graz Univ of Technology
14 - Univ of Illinois - Urbana Champaign
15 - Univ of Wisconsin - Madison

We now need 15 teams to cover the design finalists and we also see very clearly how much the design scores affect the teams with a chance to do well. Interestingly the difference between Stuttgart (the eventual winners) and ten places behind them on this list is 46 points.

Kev

[Kevin Hayward]

I will add, as per the Michigan thread, that I am not trying to create conspiracy theories here. In fact the 9 finalists came from a list of the top 15 before endurance in Michigan 2013. The design judges are largely taking the best cars / teams into the finals.

What I am trying to clearly show is that the design event has a massive effect on the ordering of the top teams. This effect is much larger than you would think without looking at the numbers. I personally believe that the design finals points effect is too great at the moment, but appreciate that this is a matter of opinion.

I would love to post the pages and pages of graphs I put together on the scores before making my original comments, but this forum is not really suitable, nor do I want to put the time in to clean them up to "print" standard.

Instead I encourage others to have a look at the previous scores in events and make their own conclusions.

Kev

[Charlie]

Kevin-

Apologies for my very poor and misleading comment! I had some bad information and a few minutes after I posted I realized my mistake. I deleted my post thinking it hadn't been read yet, otherwise I would have just corrected it.

Anyway it doesn't hurt that you added the new info. I have some other thoughts on the subject, but no proper time to put them into words today.

[Mbirt]

What do you guys think about this fairly even distribution from 50-150 points at Formula North: http://formulanorth.com/wp-con...gn-Event-Results.pdf

Teams that did well but were too numerous to make a tidy design finals lineup were not normalized down to 100 points. Earning 125 points in design made it much easier to compete with design finalists by snagging some points back in the cost event due to lack of bling.

[Kevin Hayward]

Looks good. I steered away from looking at the smaller comps (including Australia) simply because as the numbers get smaller statistical approaches become less valid.

How did people feel about the design results:

- Was the design event still important?
- Was there still a competitive advantage to winning design?
- Was there good feedback to teams? (right from top to bottom)
- Did the results of design correlate with performance in the other events?

Kev

[Mbirt]

Originally posted by Kevin Hayward:
Looks good. I steered away from looking at the smaller comps (including Australia) simply because as the numbers get smaller statistical approaches become less valid.

How did people feel about the design results:

- Was the design event still important?
- Was there still a competitive advantage to winning design?
- Was there good feedback to teams? (right from top to bottom)
- Did the results of design correlate with performance in the other events?

Kev

From what I saw, the design event was still important and was taken seriously by all in attendance. Claude was the roaming chief judge, so we were kept on our toes.

The three design finalists were top 4 in static events (we crashed their party with strong cost and presentation scores) and two design finalists were 1-2 in dynamic events. The third finalist would have finished around 5th in dynamics if they had finished endurance. I would say there was an advantage to winning design and the design event results correlated to strong performance in dynamic events at the very least.

Good feedback from judges was readily available, but I'm not sure what mechanisms were used to reach out to teams that did not actively seek feedback. The close proximity of our indoor paddocks to the tech inspection and design judging areas that shared the floor of the arena with us allowed for lots of interaction with the judges. We had one traditional feedback session with a group of judges in our pit and many more helpful discussions with individual judges until the end of the competition. This is probably an experience unique to a small competition.

Another notable point about FN2013 is that it was the first competition of the season for only 3 teams. Of the 24 who attempted, 18 finished endurance. I can see why the small competitions are difficult to use as data points.

[Big Bird]

Greetings all,

I’ve been following this thread from the start, just haven’t responded yet as I thought it best for the initial fervour to die down a little.

Firstly, in regard to the original question – FSAE is Motorsport AND Design. That is the foundation of its success. The motorsport / competition flavour reels in the students, AND while they are having fun designing and building a competition vehicle they happen to learn a whole heap about technical design and project management and dealing with people and politics and academia and manufacturing and cultural differences and….

The OP raised this topic in response to some arguments that were put forth after FSAE Oz last year, that some teams were treating this too much like a competition and not enough like a learning opportunity. My primary concern with the argument was its “adversarial” framing – that somehow if your focus is on competing, then you are getting a lesser educational outcome. I believe you can have both. I also believe we would be opening a Pandora’s Box if the judging process were to include assessment of not only what you have learnt, but a judgement of what motives you had as you learnt it. And I share the OP’s concerns about running a competition where competitors are potentially criticized for being competitive.

I also agree that a team can get itself in trouble if it doesn’t have the smarts to know when to trim back the “motorsport angle”, especially when seeking sponsors or talking to uni hierarchy.

This event is about making us better engineers. Good engineering design can be, for example:
1. Refining component and system designs to increase stiffness, reduce mass, etc.
2. Redefining component and system design goals to achieve objectives such as reduced cost, or ease of manufacture
These two definitions can be contradictory. In the second case, for example, your engineering calculations may indicate that mass or stiffness has negligible effect on the functional operation of your product – and therefore you can use a lower spec material or cheaper manufacturing technique. In fact, I think it often requires greater understanding of your design problem and greater mental flexibility to investigate relaxing your mass target, for instance, than doggedly sticking to the lighter is always better mantra.

A good engineer is one who can adapt their approach to the problem being solved. It is about following a sound design process, and understanding the problem itself – and recognizing that “universal truths” such as greater stiffness / lighter weight / more power aren’t always the desired outcome.

I absolutely, 100% oppose any philosophy that defines success only in terms of the basic vehicle specifications. I am impressed by some of the light cars being built, but I do not believe that a heavier car is a lesser one necessarily. Evidence of good engineering is in understanding what the designer was trying to achieve, and how they went about achieving those goals.

I also see a sad end to our competition if success becomes defined by how much money your team can raise. Is raising sponsorship a good skill to gain? Most definitely, I would never argue against that. And I am in awe of some of the high tech and high spec cars we see each year, and the high quality technical engineering that goes into them. But I sincerely worry about the sustainability of FSAE if we have 600 teams around the globe each defining success by how much money they can raise and how close they can get their car to F1 spec.

The success of this competition is that, because of all the competing objectives written into or implied in the competition rules (such as the competing objectives of high power and low fuel usage, or low weight versus low cost, etc.), teams can come into this competition with any level of resources or technical ambitions and still be competitive. If your team and university want a carbon wonder car, then you can build one and be successful. But if your budget or resource base don’t allow this, there are alternative paths to success written into the points distribution awaiting your discovery. The low-cost special. The low-power fuel miser. The simple, quick-to-build car designed to allow more testing time. A combination of all the above.

This world needs all kinds of engineers, because we have all kinds of problems to solve. Some of us will be called upon to solve technical problems in our later careers, some will end up managing people and driving strategy and simplifying processes and who knows what else. FSAE is just about the only thing I experienced in my uni career that can prepare us for all these possibilities.

Cheers all

[Michael Royce]

Geoff,
Amen!!!

Michael Royce