This is Part 14 of a series written by guest writer Ricky Nietubicz on his experience on the Formula SAE team at the University of Delaware. FSAE is a competition where students design, build, and compete with small formula-style racing cars. Ricky was President of his FSAE club, and his team went to the Nationals in Detroit during the 2006-2007 season.

You’re not going to want to put your newest car, which you plan to compete with, at too much risk. If you’re a big team, you’re going to have a LOT of people who want to drive an FSAE car. Thankfully, FSAE teams who have been around for more than one competition cycle have, somewhere, older cars. Yes, these cars have seen their days of glory and are now on the downslope of life. They’ll need some work, for sure. They won’t be as fast, as powerful as your newest creation, nor will they corner as well or drive as nicely, or at least that’s the hope- that you improved upon previous cars in your current one.

It is important to budget for maintenance of these cars. Fluids and wear items need to be changed, parts that break must be repaired. Someday, one will get smashed up pretty good, to mitigate this risk, put tires around light posts and curbs wherever you can, so that the hit is cushioned at least minimally. The most expensive item to budget for is tires- they wear out quick with lots of driving and aren’t cheap. You’ll also need to budget in the form of labor for these cars- ideally a few team members, a minimal number, say, two or three, would devote their time to maintaining and repairing the cars, with a primary focus on the older cars, but also somewhat to keep up with the maintenance on the newest car.

So why go to the expense, in terms of dollars and man-hours, to keep these outdated cars on the course? Simple, they are wonderful tools. If you have one or two, even if one gets severely smashed up by a new, novice driver, or an experienced driver who simply makes a mistake, it’s not the end of the world if it’s not back out on the course soon, or if it never makes it out again. Say this happens in late March. If it happens to an older car, it’s not a big deal. If it happens to the car that you’re planning to take to competition in May, well, it’s nearly the end of the world. More than one car, given enough space, also means that you can have more than one driver going at once, and that you have a car to practice and learn with before you get the next one built. Read the rest of this entry »

This is Part 13 of a series written by guest writer Ricky Nietubicz on his experience on the Formula SAE team at the University of Delaware. FSAE is a competition where students design, build, and compete with small formula-style racing cars. Ricky was President of his FSAE club, and his team went to the Nationals in Detroit during the 2006-2007 season.

This is it. The big day(s) for the car, and for the team. A year, or two, or even more of preparation comes down to a few days and seemingly fewer events. Up to this point I have focused on preparation, but this is the big deal. You’ll need to get the team, the car, and essentially your entire shop packed up, to the competition, compete, and then make it home. This is not a cheap endeavor, nor is it one that should be taken lightly as any other roadtrip.

We used a 16’ box truck and a minivan when we finally went to Detroit. Two rode in the box truck, four in the minivan. Keeping the number of vehicles small is key to minimizing both rental fees and gas costs. Minimizing the number of people coming also helps keep all the costs down, from the number of hotel rooms needed, to the number of mouths to feed. However, if people feel excluded from competition, they aren’t very likely to show up around the shop when you need the hands. Some filter is needed, it just can’t be too fine of a filter. Read the rest of this entry »

This is Part 12 of a series written by guest writer Ricky Nietubicz on his experience on the Formula SAE team at the University of Delaware. FSAE is a competition where students design, build, and compete with small formula-style racing cars. Ricky was President of his FSAE club, and his team went to the Nationals in Detroit during the 2006-2007 season.

You’ve heard it plenty of times before, if you’ve every been around racing- “the best modification you can make to any car is to improve the loose nut behind the wheel.” Maybe not those exact words, but you know it- especially in tight autocross courses, the driver is the single most important deciding factor between a slow car and a fast car. More than likely, you don’t have a team of professional drivers, and even if there are a few really good drivers in your university, it would be hard to seek them out. Not to mention that even if Michael Schumacher himself joined your team, he could only drive in two events at competition- a rule intended to insure that the car, not the driver, is being tested more, as it is an engineering competition.

This means that any FSAE team would be better off letting everyone drive in practice- you never know where your great driver will come from. There will be members with great knowledge, academically, of vehicle dynamics, who turn the slowest lap times, and there will be other people who just know how to hop in and make the car go like crazy. The only way you’ll find out where everybody stands is to take some time and get everybody on the team to take turns behind the wheel. An “everybody who works on the car can drive the car” policy helps with recruiting as well as shaking out the best drivers- who said there was no such thing as a win-win?

Unfortunately, time behind the wheel isn’t quite enough. Some system of driver training must be established, ideally by someone who knows their way around a race track. It is worth talking this over with local autocross clubs or performance driving schools to see if you can get an actual classroom training session in order. We instituted a policy that everyone must go through a driver training session before they could get behind the wheel after some incidents involving a curb (actually several curbs on several occasions), a very new Chevy Impala (or was it a Malibu?), a light post, and, of course, a smacked up race car, some bent A-arms, and the like. Some basic training went a long way. Read the rest of this entry »

I drove at a track day with the SCDA today at NHMS. Below is a video of me doing a few laps.

I was at Lime Rock yesterday, and spun going through the Left Hander (Esses).

What happened was, I braked late going into the Left Hander, which pushed my turn-in point farther to the right of the track than normal. I modified my line so that I would hit the apex/track out point on the left side of the track, which brought me over the the concrete patche at a different angle than in my previous laps. I was at near or maximum lateral grip, as I had done in this section throughout the day. As you can hear from my engine tone in the video, I very gently began rolling on the throttle when I saw I would make the apex. Everything was fine until my rear tires hit the rumble patch, at which point the rear slid out HARD to the right. While I was able to catch the initial slide, it slid out from under me fast enough that I got a pretty decent slip angle - past that seat-of-the-pants point when I knew that the car would snap back around HARD. Sure enough, the car snapped right back around and overshot to the left again. I caught that spin, but then the car rebounded hard enough to spin me a full 360 degrees. I caught that spin perfectly, pointing straight ahead and moving at ~20mph. I could have continued on the track, but there was a Corvette close behind me and I wanted to quickly get out of its way for safety.

So the question of course is, why did my car spin? I believe it was the result of several factors which compounded each other. The main issue was that I lost traction when the rears hit the concrete. You can tell because the squealing begins just after the concrete patch goes under my car. This in and of itself was a bit of a surprise to me - I’ve experienced those patches become slick in the wet, but have never noticed any difference between them and the pavement in the dry. I was skirting with the edges of the friction circle throughout this section, and right before I spun I was probably just at 3:30 on the friction circle. As the audio shows, I was on the gas very slightly - just rolling it on carefully to control the balance of the car. Normally, my Miata is VERY predictable and responsive at the limit - I’ve always known exactly when the rear starts to kick out, and correcting is extremely easy. As such, when I didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary as I applied power, I continued to gradually roll on the throttle. The problem was that rear went from having the perfect amount of traction to suddenly not having enough traction, which is why the rear kicked out so fast and with no warning whatsoever. Read the rest of this entry »

Here are a few laps of me chasing a Porsche GT2 at Lime Rock Park today. Either the driver was taking it easier, or I’m just extra vicious, because I actually managed to pass him on the last lap!

This is Part 11 of a series written by guest writer Ricky Nietubicz on his experience on the Formula SAE team at the University of Delaware. FSAE is a competition where students design, build, and compete with small formula-style racing cars. Ricky was President of his FSAE club, and his team went to the Nationals in Detroit during the 2006-2007 season.

Once the car is built and moving under its own power, it comes the time for testing and tuning, and the inevitable modifications required in order to get the car as competitive as possible. Things that looked good on paper won’t translate so well into three dimensions. Some machining will get flubbed. Some parts will be made to the wrong tolerances. Some things, you just plain won’t think of.

We were having shifter troubles at one point. We solved those troubles with an extra bracket to hold the cable steadier, and straighter. A few months later, we were having charging troubles. As it turns out, the bracket that solved the shifter troubles was slowly but surely vibrating against the cable taking power from the alternator to the battery. Over a bit of driving, it eventually made its way through the insulation and to the wire, where it shorted from time to time. We didn’t track it down until eventually it was smoking. We replaced the alternator and attacked the bracket with an angle grinder. Solved the problem.

Another case was when we decided, at some point, to run a wire between one of the frame tubes and the gas tank. Under certain maneuvers, this wire was squashed, until eventually the insulation wore through and it shorted against the gas tank, precipitating a total re-wiring of the car, as mentioned in previous articles. Solved the problem.

These are the types of issues faced by an FSAE team who lacks the expertise of seasoned engineers, such as those who build real cars. This is brought about also because it just plain isn’t possible to think of everything, and you’ll need to have a car finished as soon as possible so that it can be tested, so that these kinks can be worked out. Read the rest of this entry »

New Scientist Tech reports that French company Eurovia is developing a temperature sensitive varnish for roads. The idea is that the varnish will be applied to roadways, walkways, or any other surface that can become slippery, and turn pink when the temperature gets below freezing. The varnish would turn clear again once the temperature rose above freezing. Drivers and pedestrians would then know when the road is slippery, in “real time.”

Eurovia’s plan should work fantastically as long as you make one key assumption: anytime the temperature drops below freezing, the roads become slippery. I don’t know what kind of asphalt they use in France, but at least up here in New England, the roads don’t automatically turn into a sheet of ice when we hit freezing. That would require - get ready for it - actual ice. Obviously, there is some correlation between freezing temperatures and icy roads, but turning the road pink when the temperatures get below freezing is simply crying “wolf” for half the year. When it’s 0 degrees outside (and I mean 0 degrees Fahrenheit), I don’t need Captain Obvious telling me that it’s below freezing.

Nor does the technology take into account the affects of salt or sand on driving conditions. In New England, we put down enough salt to make the Dead Sea jealous. It takes A LOT of snow around here to form any sort of slick surface on the roads - regardless of the temperature - and then I’d know it was slippery because I could just look at the snow. In fact, since the snow would be covering the pink varnish, the varnish really wouldn’t help me at all. The only time the varnish might help would be with black ice. But, even then, black ice doesn’t form just because the road is below freezing.

Ultimately, the varnish would probably cause more accidents than it would prevent. After all, how could you not stop from laughing incessantly if the road suddenly turned pink?

Jerry Seinfeld reportedly crashed near his home in East Hampton, New York when the brakes in his 1967 Fiat BTM failed. Seinfeld tried to use the emergency brake, to no avail, then swerved to avoid flying into an intersection. The Fiat rolled over and came to rest upside down, but Seinfeld was able to walk away unscathed. East Hampton Police Chief Todd Sarris said that Seinfeld’s maneuver “probably avoided a serious accident.” While the chief did not elaborate on what type of accident would be worse than one where a car comes to rest on its roof, this writer hereby vows never to drive within 100 miles of Sarris.

The crash was attributed to mechanical failure, and no citations were issued. Seinfeld was quoted as saying, “because I know there are kids out there, I want to make sure they all know that driving without braking is not something I recommend, unless you have professional clown training or a comedy background, as I do.”

When told about the incident, a Fiat spokesman expressed surprise that only two of the systems on Seinfeld’s Fiat had failed. “Cars are very complicated pieces of machinery,” he explained, “and even today, cars routinely leave the Fiat factory with far more than two issues.” While the spokesman found it “regrettable” that the two systems that failed were related and ended in a major accident, he stated that the incident “is in no way indicative of any larger quality control issues at Fiat. Fiat always has, and always will, stand behind its products 90%.”

I finished editing more of the video from our last race with AMEC. This video covers the first half of the race:

As you can see, it was a pretty fast track. I was hitting 85mph at the end of the front straight. I probably could have gone faster, but braking zones have a way of disappearing during a race so I decided to keep my braking zone liberal. Visibility was also a bit of an issue, and the last thing I wanted was to hit a car I didn’t see because the grip in that braking zone had disappeared over the previous lap. The fate were with me more than earlier in the day, which is always good.

Note that there are a variety of driving styles people used. Some cars were very sideways through every corner, others barely got any slip angle at all. I found in my Saturn that a little bit of slip angle helped the car to rotate and actually change direction, but too much scrubbed off too much speed. Far more important to being fast was knowing where to drive on the course. Traction in certain places gave a clear advantage over the line - I passed a lot of cars in the esses through the back straight because I went off line where there was more traction. In other places, like turn 1, carrying a good line let you get on the gas earlier. I was able to pass a number of cars this way, as you can see in the video.