can anyone give us updates for those who cannot attend

[bry]

would love daily update for anyone going? would be great. anyone have a laptop

[bry]

would love daily update for anyone going? would be great. anyone have a laptop

[Fergus Wilson]

If all goes to plan, the UOW Racing website will be updated daily during the competition, perhaps as soon as the scores are posted. We'll try to cover a general round up of the day, along with whatever scores and pictures we can get our hands on.

Cheers,

Fergus Wilson
Project Manager
UOW Racing 2003

fw01@uow.edu.au
www.uow.edu.au/eng/racing/ (http://www.uow.edu.au/eng/racing/)

[Howard]

Some very impressive cars this year.

A lot of cool stuff.

Things that stick out in my mind in no particular order:

Toronto had a very clean car that made design semi's. I believe it was 427lbs.

UNC Raleigh had an awesome monocoque again. With composite diff carriers and a really nicely fabed rear box. I was SHOCKED they didn't make semis.

UTA's car was pretty sloppy. I was very disapointed seeing it up close. They were kind of rude too.

On the flip side, I didn't get to meet Micheal Jones, but everyone I talked to on Cornell's squad including their advisor was very friendly. Their car was the only one out there I saw sporting yokohamas. And they claim they're finally running traction control.

Some pretty big wings on the cal poly car. Also on UMR's. CPP's were single element while UMR's were tripple . . . both very nice.

Purdue had an awesome machined aluminum rear box.

I believe the finish team blew their engine and put the backup in in short time as to run their runs in the autox.

I saw a couple clear diff housings.

A whole lotta wet laid carbon.

I have a couple hours of Digital video but no firewire cable out in michigan . .

And my buddy has about half a gig of pictures but we brought the wrong adaptor.

I'll upload some pictures if others don't next week.

[Scott Wordley]

Would love anymore information that anyone out there has.

If there are any pictures around we'd really appreciate if they were posted.

How are the Gong doing Fergus? Can't wait till Monday for the update, surely you can hassle Justin for some results.

Regards,

Scott Wordley & Roan Lyddy Meaney
Monash FSAE Wingmen
http://www-personal.monash.edu.au/~fsae

[MercerFSAE C. Burch]

While a large portion of my day yesterday was spent at the GM Tech Center in Detroit and the GM plant in Lansing, which are both extremely cool facilities, here's what I can tell you...

UTA's car did very well with it's full aerodynamic package yesterday, finishing around 2nd in autocross. The University of Toronto struggled with their car. Rennesselar had what I think was a caliper failure - their front left upright was broken in two, their A-arms all mangled... Last I heard they were about to embark on a 5 hour drive to make new parts (this was at 5pm yesterday). Hopefully they managed to get it fixed for endurance today. Georgia Tech was also having problems with their suspension and only managed aournd 13th place in Autocross.

Autocross was a dry event thankfully, as only 15min. into the Acceleration and Skidpad events the skies let loose on the compeition! Congratulations for those whose cars were well sorted out beforehand to get in their runs while the track was dry. (I wasn't there yet, so I don't know who those teams were). It does punctuate to me, as a first time competition goer, that it would be wise to keep an eye on the sky here in Detroit to make sure our team goes out in optimal conditions (if there is such a thing in Detroit!)

Well, that is about all for now...

Chris

Mercer University - Drive!
Coming to an Auto-X track near you, May 2004!

[Fergus Wilson]

Sorry for the lack of updates on the UOW Racing website. We've had problems getting photo's online, and most of the UOW team are flat out. Also, I can't get webserver access over the weekend.

However!!! I just spoke to Justin then, and they were lining up for the enduro. He told me that wollongong has placed:

7th in Cost,
4th in Sales
7th Skidpad
7th Autocross,
26th in Acceleration

and are in the top 4 in design, with design finals being held from sunday 7am, with results available midday (2am Monday our time).

A top 10 finish in the endurance for Wollongong will put them approx top 5-10 overall!

Anyway, i'll post results here as i know them, as well as on our website. Hopefully top 10 results for each event will also be online.

Regards,

Fergus Wilson
Project Manager
UOW Racing 2003

fw01@uow.edu.au
www.uow.edu.au/eng/racing (http://www.uow.edu.au/eng/racing)

[imajerk]

26th in acceleration sounds terrible. Did you guys get caught out in the wet weather or something?

Other than that, your placings looks great.

Best Regards,

John Meszaros & Bunny
Monash FSAE NA
http://www-personal.monash.edu.au/~fsae

[Courtney Waters]

We left late Monday night, with quite a bit left to finish on the car. A lot of last minute snags held up getting the car finished on time. We had a chance of getting it together if we made it to competition, but two flats on the trailer (and no spares) in the middle of Wyoming at night cost us a good 14 hours. We arrived in Pontiac, having already missed Design and would have had to throw together a pretty lousy Presentation and Cost event, and then try to finish assembling the car, so we opted to withdraw.

It was a very difficult decision, but we have too much time in this car, and feel it is too good to try to patch it together for a mediocre performance. We'll finish it right when we get home and we'll have plenty of testing time all summer and the new team will have the option to run the car at the next comp if they don't want to build another (or they can improve on this one). I was really looking forward to competing with everyone as this will be my last comp unless we go to Australia or I go back for grad school. We still have had a good time getting to spend time in the paddocks of other teams, checking out what they did instead of spending the whole time in our trailer.

Congrats to everyone else who made it to competition. It has been interesting to watch, with rather unexpected results!

Courtney Waters
UC Davis Formula SAE

[MercerFSAE C. Burch]

Endurance was quite a show yesterday! About 35 teams completed endurance, under excellent conditions - 70 degrees ambient temp, sunny skies. Nobody was expecting so much sun so all of the FSAE people are sunburnt pretty bad today!

The top time if I remember correctly was a 60.6s by the University of Missouri-Columbia. UTA was also running very strong, around in the 61s consistently, but they had what I believe was a coolant failure and had to withdraw. To get a top 5 place in this year's enduro it required consistent cone-free laps in the 61-63s range. Many teams were fast, but clobbered way to many cones or spun out once. Auburn's drivers both drove a spectacular race, I believe only clipping two cones between them. That and running consistently in the 62-63s range probably put them in the top 5.

One thing that surprised me as a first time competition goer was what I saw as a lack of quality driving by many of the drivers. That really set some of the better teams apart. It was also a problem that almost never plagued the teams with well-designed cars. I don't really understand why teams with so much time and effort in their cars wouldn't take the time to train their drivers well. Even some teams had a great disparity between drivers - by as much as 10s on averave per lap! It really doesn't matter how well your car is designed if your drivers don't know enough about basic autocross technique to get a good lap out of the car. 3-4s per lap would easily be enough of a time gap to drop a team 20 places in finishing order! That could easily be made up with better driving.

That was my observation of yesterday.

And also - Teams that do not finish endurance, no matter how great their car really is (UTA), do not pass go and do not collect 200 dollars (or 350 points)!

Christopher D. Burch
Mercer University - Drive!
Coming to an Auto-X near you, May 2004!

[Fergus Wilson]

Design Finals are being held as I write this. I have an unconfirmed report that Wollongong won enduro by 28sec, and placed 3rd in fuel with approx 3.2L. The only news i've got said that our enduro was "drama filled", as was most of the day.

I have no more results, and haven't yet confirmed the above, however I'll be calling the guys in about 3-4 hours and will post our final results then.

Cheers,

Fergus Wilson
Project Manager
UOW Racing 2003

fw01@uow.edu.au
www.uow.edu.au/eng/racing/ (http://www.uow.edu.au/eng/racing/)

[Fergus Wilson]

I've just spoken to one of the guys in the USA.

Wollongong 1st
Missouri-columbia and
Cornell equal 2nd
Georgia Tech 4th

Combined fuel economy/enduro scores: wollongong: 385, Georgia Tech, (2nd) 340-350, unconfirmed.

Design Judging wrap up has just concluded. Final scores and placing's have not yet been anounced, and i'm not sure when they will be.

Cheers!

Fergus Wilson
Project Manager
UOW Racing 2003

fw01@uow.edu.au
www.uow.edu.au/eng/racing/ (http://www.uow.edu.au/eng/racing/)

[Santorini]

Any updates? spreadsheet?

[FSAE.com]

Partial Results Posted under RESULTS. (http://fsae.com/results.html)

Congratulations to University of Wollongong!!!

[woollymoof]

Well done Wollongong, well done.

[Scott Wordley]

Great work 'Gongers!

Good to see the little Aussies get up.
Party hard and we'll see some of you at least in Adelaide.

Does this mean the Aussie comp is now the World Championship?

More info/pics/results from everyone please!

Regards,

Scott Wordley & Roan Lyddy Meaney
Monash FSAE Wingmen
http://www-personal.monash.edu.au/~fsae

[Dave Riley]

Bloody well done, Woolongong!

Only wish we were there to push you a bit harder!

Consider this a challenge to all of the American teams to come to Australia in December for more of the same!

Regards

Project Manager
UWA Motorsport 03

[Fergus Wilson]

On behalf of the UOW Racing, thanks to everyone for your support. Without the university, our sponors, and supporters it would not have happened. Thanks to the other teams who have helped along the way, or sent emails and messages of support and encouragement.

Our website has been updated but i don't have all the scores yet.

Wollongong scored: 150 design, 385 for Enduro and Fuel economy, and 85.5 in cost.

I'm Looking forward to the 2003 competition, but it's going to be a hard act to follow!

Cheers,

Fergus Wilson
Project Manager
UOW Racing 2003

fw01@uow.edu.au
www.uow.edu.au/eng/racing/ (http://www.uow.edu.au/eng/racing/)

[mtg]

So close...
We were doing pretty well (design semis, good presentation, pretty good autocross) and had high hopes for endurance. When I started endurance, I experienced an engine problem we had never seen before. After a few laps, the engine wouldn't pull the car anymore. I let it idle for a couple minutes while shooing off the golf cart with tow rope. Then, all the sudden, the engine started running perfect. I tore back out onto the track and passed someone and then proceded to simultaneously break BOTH half shalfs within a half lap. That last half lap was mad fast. Upon inspection, the heat treat on our halfshafts was done wrong.
I still had a good time and learned alot. I didn't run into anyone from any team that wasn't nice, but teams that were especially friendly to me were Missouri-Columbia (our northern neighbors), UTA, Cornell, Cal Poly Pomona, and GA Tech.


Matt
University of Missouri - Rolla #26

[Denny Trimble]

... to the Wollongong team. Good show!

Here's the story from the University of Washington perspective http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

1st in Business Presentation
5th in Design (semifinal tie)
mid-pack in Cost
4th in Accel
20th or so in Skidpad (damp)
6th or 7th in Autocross

Running with the top teams in endurance (trading places with UMC), we spun on some bumps, and the cones broke a sidepod bracket. Continued for two more laps, then the driver change, then 8 more laps, with bodywork sailing alongside the car... and we were meatballed with 3 laps to go. That's racing.

Our spirits were lifted when we heard we were in the Road and Track challenge (top 5 Friday events), along with two other teams who didn't complete endurance. And UMC must have done some very precise fatigue calculations to break their halfshaft _THE_ very next time they ran the car after endurance!

We're scheming and planning to make the trip downunder in December... along with probably 30 other teams from the USA I'd imagine http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

I'll start another post later on this topic, but any teams that want to combine shipping from Seattle to AUS, send me an email.

Viva la Formula SAE! http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif

University of Washington Formula SAE ('98, '99, '03)

[Michael Jones]

Just returned...10 hours of blurry Red Bull fueled truck driving.

Also extend my congrats to Wollongong and all the other schools who competed. It was a fun show as always...

We're a bit disapponted but not all that suprised with our 9th place show - shows the value of reliability and testing, which we unfortuantely never had the time to complete. Both our piss poor 30th place in auto-x and nailbiting 13th in endurance (the car stalled on every hard left turn...electrical issue, most likely, but perhaps running too lean...) are things that should have been prevented. Ah, well, live and learn.

I'll post pictures of the crash we had two weeks ago soon. A major contributing factor to the testing time issue - we kind of had to rebuild whole bits of the car after a 20mph run in with a curb. Oops. While it certainly fired up the team, it made us very dependent on good luck.

And it was nice to finally meet some of you in person, apoplogies for those I missed. Was a hectic week by all meansures.

Congrats to Wollongong again - great car, great team, totally deserving of the honor.

...oh, and sorry for the little dents in the back of the trophy. We were kind of hoping to get it back to get those hammered out and lacquered over better. Don't feel obligated to do so...we'll be happy to take care of that next year. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

---
Cornell Racing
http://fsae.mae.cornell.edu

[Santorini]

I would appreciate if someone could post/scan the complete results here. SAE will probably take a couple of days...

Regards

[Eddie Martin]

Hi Everybody

These are the results we were given.

Uni of Wollongong 895 pts
Uni of Missouri-Columbia 882 pts
Michigan State 875 pts
GT 810 pts
Auburn Uni 765 pts

I'm sure the full results will be out soon.

I'd like to thank all our sponsors and supporters for there help over the last year and a half.

We will all get back to OZ in a week or so and we will see everybody soon.

Regards
Eddie Martin
Vice Captain and Chassis Team Leader
2002 OZ and 2003 US Competitions.
UOW Racing
www.uow.edu.au/eng/racing (http://www.uow.edu.au/eng/racing)

[Dominic Venieri]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by MercerFSAE C. Burch:
Rennesselar had what I think was a caliper failure - their front left upright was broken in two, their A-arms all mangled... Last I heard they were about to embark on a 5 hour drive to make new parts (this was at 5pm yesterday). Hopefully they managed to get it fixed for endurance today. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Yes, our front upright did snap in two - we'll have pictures up on our site sometime soon. We had some guys spend a while over at GM powertrain making new front a-arms. Meanwhile, I was on the phone for a few hours along with one of my teammates fathers, working out a solution to our upright problem. We managed to get a couple guys back in Troy to get into our shop, tear the front upright assemblies off our 2002 car, box them up, get them to a FedEx drop-off center by 8 PM. Myself and another guy on the team were in Detroit at 8 AM waiting while FedEx opened the doors to their pickup center, only to learn that severe weather had delayed all flights from Memphis (apparently our package went Albany NY -&gt; Memphis TN -&gt; Detroit) and that our package was still in transit - nothing else known. After calling the tracking hotline every half hour, we finally had our parts by 10 AM and made an expedited trip back from Detroit to the Dome. Thanks to the hard work of my team we managed to get our car back together, through Tech, fueled and onto the endurance grid by about 1 PM, only to be black flagged after 2 laps when one of our body panels started flapping around.

Needless to say, it was a nailbiting experience, but one thing is for sure, it has renewed any faith I might have lost in FedEx. I'm very proud of everyone on my team for even getting our car back together to start endurance after all the problems we had all week. Thanks guys.

Thanks also go out to the guys at Auburn who lent us a trigger wheel for our TEC, without that we'd never have run at all. And to the guys at Ohio state who loaned us a battery when ours fritzed.

And of course, congrats to Wollongong. A well deserved victory for an excellent car and a great group of guys.

www.formularpi.com (http://www.formularpi.com)

[Tim]

g'day all

i would`like to thank everyone from the comp, it was a fantastic experience and something i will never forget, it was great fun and its a shame we didnt get a game of cricket happening.

i would also like to thank everyone from oakland uni, for leting us stay with them, great bunch of people and everyone from kettering uni for use of their test track.

hope to see u all next year, and in december if u come down under. if u r coming down keep us posted on ur progress

[Charlie]

Hi All-

Auburn had a great year. We had trouble in the skidpad and acceleration events because of the rain. I'll take the blame for not having us ready early enough. Every other driving event went well, and our endurance event was incredible, the car never tried to falter, it was as strong as ever. I am sure the course workers made a mistake with our 6 cones as we have good video of the whole event, and many people wtching us, and I clipped 2 with my rear tire. A protest would not have increased our finishing position though (although we'd be 3rd in endurance).

Making Design semis for the first time in 5 years was great too (ended up in the 4 way tie for 5th in Design).

A great year for our team, which has come a long way the last 3 years. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif To have never seen a top 10 finish before, we were more than happy to skip it and go to a top 5.

-Charlie Ping
Auburn University FSAE 1999-present