Formula Student
What common issues did you see with teams at Silverstone this year?
Probably the most common in scrutineering was teams treating the limits in the rules as design targets, without any allowance for manufacturing tolerances in their designs.
This becomes evident to us as scrutineers when the tests for cockpit templates, the 95th percentile template and wing sizes are not passed.
There is little to no performance loss from allowing an extra few centimetres here and there to make sure you breeze through scrutineering and minimise time spent back in your garage fixing issues.
What areas are still being overlooked?
We check the SES and IAD submissions in the order that they are received, here are some interesting stats on when we received last year’s SES submissions:
- 2 teams submitted more than 30days before the deadline
- 2 teams submitted more than 1week before the deadline
- 27 teams submitted in the week before the deadline
- 50 teams submitted on the day of the deadline before the 5pm cut-off, 22 of which were in the last hour
- The rest were late and incurred penalties.
All teams should know that incurring penalties for lateness is not a good idea, but the rest of the above shows that submitting more than a week before the deadline is pretty much guaranteed to get you at the top of the checking list.
The sooner we can spot any issues with your design the less likely your build is to be interrupted to address those issues.
What can teams expect at Learn to Win this year?
A new venue, at the MTC near Coventry. It’s a great venue and more centrally located in the UK so hopefully you’ll see a broader range of teams attending.
As well as the usual advice and insight from the Senior Judges and Event Captains there’s the opportunity to meet potential future employers and network with other teams.
There’ll be more details of FSUK’s autonomous vehicle competition and the chance to attend workshops and drop-in sessions covering 8 different areas of the competition.
How important is Learn to Win for a team’s strategy?
For rookie teams its invaluable, but it’s still of use to experienced teams as well. You won’t get the opportunity to have face to face access to such a broad range of FS experience and knowledge again before the 2018 competition.
Make sure you plan your time so you get to quiz the judges from each of the relevant areas for your team.
What are you excited about for Formula Student 2018?
Like most engineers I’m always interested in new developments so I always look forward to seeing any new ideas that teams bring to the event.
What should teams be doing in the run up to Christmas?
Posting pictures of your finished chassis on your teams and the FS social media channels, demonstrating to your rivals how far ahead you are!
Joking aside, completing the chassis is a very small part of getting an entire running car. If it’s not far from being finished by Christmas then 208 is going to be very busy for you.
Hopefully you had a plan before you started your build, it’s a good opportunity to review this plan to take stock of where you are and what you need to do to recover any items which are running late.
Any other advice for teams this year?
Panic early! It’s much easier to recover lost time when there’s still months until the competition, there comes a point where it becomes physically impossible!
Don’t forget the reason you’re at University in the first place, it’s no good having eons of FS experience if your degree classification isn’t great.