Do lighter racecars go faster?  Does mass even matter?  Should a mass target be a key design goal?  Low mass is often taken to be a virtue in FSAE/FS racecars, and often chosen as a design strategy for improvement in performance.  But does low mass really pay off? 

• The Cost Report is a Bill of Materials detailing the costs to produce the team’s prototype vehicle using standardized cost references.

• The Cost Scenario asks for each team’s strategic response to an event outside their control.

• How to find the optimum concept for your overall racecar

• How to nail down the concept before putting effort into perfecting its systems

• How to get more design points for overall racecar design

• How to create a design process that can be handed down to succeeding teams

FMEA can capture the dangerous things cars may do when put in an unsafe state, and can help the team verify they meet and exceed safety regulations and requirements.

• Think about what other people are thinking.

• Give honest feedback without being a jerk.

• Take your own and your team’s feelings seriously.

• Materials catalog updates

• Process changes in forming, coatings, machining

• Tooling changes: 3x metal, 2x plastic/rubber, 1x PCB

• New materials for fasteners and standoffs

• Significant revamp of Electrical and Drivetrain sections

• New approach for custom PCB costing

• Most electronic modules are still cost as bought

• Engineer a strong battery lifespan

• EV Efficiency is as important as mass, downforce, drag, power, and mu.

• Create tools for drivers to manage energy

• Add regenerative braking later

• Set up business and school relationships.

• Recruit and organize a team.

• Write and raise a budget.

• THEN design and build the car.

In the time it takes to read this sentence, design finalists are capable of presenting data from the same day’s Autocross, along with analysis of which assumptions the data validates or invalidates, how it fits with all their other testing, and what the next steps are to continue improving the car and drivers. They do this for everything, all year.

Doing research, reverse engineering, setting design targets. Additional insight for teams thinking about making the EV transition.

They made a whole host of small changes that were almost imperceptible to the eye but aerodynamically significant. They also gave the car a nose-down rake by lowering the front suspension and raising the rear, both ever-so-slightly. All of the changes made the car significantly safer to drive at high speed. But the Ford Indigo was never going to be driven at high speeds as a show concept car – right?

To manage priorities, ask four questions about every design decision, in this order: 1. Is it legal or illegal? 2. How does the change affect reliability or repeatability? 3. How does the change affect overall vehicle performance over a lap? 4. What are the drivability effects?

There was one closely held secret design condition. It was secret because management would not want us to ‘overdesign’ the V12. The truth is, with clever engineering, planning for significant power increases adds very little weight and cost if you know what you are doing and if it is done up front.

Engineering is about finding the Goldilocks Solution. Cost is not separate from engineering; indeed it must go hand in hand with it. Good engineering practice goes beyond the merely technical, and encompasses knowledge of customers, supply chain, society, environmental impact etc. 

Chris Warren provides some tips for what to expect and how to approach the design event.

Instead of thinking that you have to fill up X number of pages for the design report, the mentality should be “how can we fit all of our knowledge and work into these pages?”

Stopwatches, garage beams, thermometers, cameras, chalk, zip ties, yarn, and smartphones.

Ryan Kraft, former member of the #1 world ranked University of Michigan FSAE team, discusses how to set priorities for how your team defines winning and ways to pursue them.

Simply finding the combination that gives the fastest laptime is missing the point. The point is to understand the size of each effect, and how to engineer each effect to achieve the fastest laptime.