• 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.

• 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.

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?

The most common barrier between your team and your performance goals is reliability. These design best practices are intended to help you create strong, stiff, and light mechanical designs. Every design requires tradeoffs, and this list is not intended to be a set of absolute rules; but it will help you identify common design strategies to follow, pitfalls to avoid, and will inform your design decision making.

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?”

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.

As you move through the design process, you start with insight, then gradually trade insight for accuracy.

Defining requirements, validating models, on-car tuning, and understanding the root cause of problems. The process of developing and troubleshooting a steering system.

A highly optimized brake system properly managed by the driver allows longer wide-open throttle times, shorter brake zones, and higher average cornering speeds. This is how we reduce lap times.