How To Get A Good Tech Number

Several years ago, the Formula SAE competition switched from a free-for-all tech line to an ordered queue assigned before competition - and everyone clapped. In that time, we’ve tried several different methods of organizing the queue, with various tradeoffs. The most recent method has been fairly successful, but we have started to notice some adverse effects as a result of how we have been constructing the Tech Order in the last few years and we think it’s time to make a few tweaks.

To start with a disclaimer, the Tech Order really exists to help us expedite the tech process and get as many teams through tech as soon as possible. There is very little correlation between your tech order number and competition results - there are just far too many other noise factors. While you should try to get a good tech number to help eliminate some stress at competition, if you’re preparing to engineer a system to get 1st in the Tech Order, please put that energy into something else on the car, or show me a points analysis in Design justifying it.

The description of the process below is written generically with respect to technical inspection documents. The IC competition currently uses the SES to set the tech order, and the EV competition uses the HV battery video and SES. In 2026, the SES was worth up to 12 places at the front of the EV Tech Order, and up to 25 places at the back. We do, and will, modify the list as we see fit before competition to ensure a streamlined operation of teams through tech (e.g., we try not to lump all the monocoques together since it bottlenecks the SES tech area).

With that being said, for us to expedite the tech process, we want to reward teams that:

• Submit good-quality documentation of rules-legal designs

• Work with the document reviewers quickly to resolve any issues with their submission

• Submit documents early

With those three criteria intentionally in that order. In recent years, some teams have taken the approach of submitting a rough initial document ASAP and then resubmitting very quickly after any reviewer feedback, so that they aren’t penalized while the reviewer waits for a resubmission. We have two issues with this approach:

1. The document submission process should not be a conversation. We are happy to help with issues that pop up and answer questions, and some back and forth is totally normal. But the first submission should be your team’s best attempt at what you intend to bring to competition as a rules-legal design. Not a foot-in-the-door to timestamp when your first submission was.

2. Some teams are submitting at rates that seem genuinely unhealthy. We are volunteers with other responsibilities, so many of us are providing feedback late at night. We’ve noticed many teams responding within just a few hours, oftentimes in the witching hours of the night. That isn’t behavior we want to encourage - and it also often leads to another submission rejection because something has been missed in haste. Please take care of yourselves.

With that being said, we’re making a few changes to the Tech Order process for the 2027 competitions. The largest change is that we are breaking up the tech order into a few tranches, though this will be invisible to you at competition. It will still just be a numbered list, but in the following order:

1. Teams that submitted before the deadline and were accepted with no feedback. These teams will be sorted by submission date.

2. Teams that submitted before the deadline and were accepted with some feedback/rejections. These teams will be sorted by a normalized “wait time”, which is constructed of (in no particular order):

• How long the reviewer spent waiting on the team to make a resubmission

• Where every resubmission is expected to take at least 48hrs

• When the team first submitted

• The architecture of the vehicle (monos take longer, and are scaled differently)

3. Teams that never have a document accepted before competition. No team should be in this category.

The key change here is that the normalized wait time in (2) will assume every rejection takes 2 days (48hrs), regardless of how long it actually takes the team to respond. So please take some time to review the feedback, put together a response, and get back to us. It is no longer in your best interest to rush. Make sure every item is fixed, and write a comment with description of every fix and where to find the information in the SES. Anything past 2 days will add to the clock, rounded up to the next whole day. You can still resubmit quickly if your timeline requires it, and we will still respond to you quickly, but it is not in your best interest for the tech order.

For context, in the 2026 IC field there were only 3 teams that had an SES accepted with no rejections. We are hoping to see that number grow in 2027. Most of our rejections are the result of missing information - it is key to provide and organize images that make it easy to check every SES dimension, and make it easy to see the context of the car around them.

We understand some teams will have their document accepted and then later resubmit due to a change - that is still acceptable. There is no penalty for resubmitting because of a small change like a fastener size after approval. We need the document to match the car in Tech Inspection.

Since there is a large wave of submissions at the deadline every year, we are still encouraging teams to submit their documents as soon as they believe they are done - the SES submission window will open a week after registration this year, just like it has in the past few years. It is in your best interest to submit as complete of a document as possible, as soon as possible (in that order).

Jimmy Meyers joined the SES and Tech Inspection team in 2020.
He is one of only seven who have reviewed over 100 total SES documents.
He has been a design judge since 2024.