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So why go to the expense, in terms of dollars and man-hours, to keep these outdated cars on the course?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.

This is not to say that a car will be serviceable forever. All good things eventually come to an end, and FSAE cars most definitely have finite lives. At some point, the cost of keeping the car going will outweigh the benefit from having it around and functional. At this point, it would be a good idea to cut your losses, salvage what you can from the car, as many parts will likely be good enough to re-use on other cars or to put up for sale to recoup some funds, and then either scrap the frame or sell it.

While the benefits for driver training are obvious, there are other benefits to keeping old cars on the road- it can also help you to stress more components to their failure points, test new setups, and teach you plenty about fixing things that break. If you only run an FSAE car for a few months, there may be a multitude of items ready to break that don’t. Maybe it’s luck, maybe you just barely got it right. If you run the car another year, or two, or more, these components will fail. An analysis of these failures can really help along the evolution to the next car.

Along the same lines, the car can provide a test bed for new equipment- new spring rates, shock setups, alignment settings, tires, brakes, engines, you name it, you can try it if you have a spare car to hack up. This is more valuable when you have a system of evolutionary cars rather than revolutionary cars, when each car is improves upon the previous car, every single part can see days or months of use before a final iteration actually makes it on to the newest car, saving the trouble of testing everything as a whole, you can test things as they are produced. Anyone can see the savings in time that this will provide, and how much better it will make each subsequent car.

In the area of maintenance, the team will learn more than it ever wanted to know. Things will break, and obviously previous generations of cars will not be your first budgetary priority, so there will be times you need to be creative. We had a car that we used primarily for driver training, that ran fuel injection in its original form. However, somewhere along the lines, the intake manifold was destroyed and the computer decided to go south. Fixing the fuel injection was an expensive proposition, even if the only problem was the intake manifold, not to mention a time-consuming one. Some online searching scored some Suzuki 650 carbs for $28 shipped, and a trip to Sears hardware scored us some rubber hose to connect them to the Yamaha R6 engine, some scrap metal and some machining later, and we had the motor fired up. It didn’t run as well as it did before, with the fuel injection, and the power delivery was nothing until about 9000rpm and then full power from there to redline, about a hundred ponies. But it was running, and could still be driven.

These quick, cheap on the fly creative fixes will likely prove to be invaluable sometime, likely at competition. When things go south, despite the best engineering and manufacturing efforts, you need people who are comfortable just making things work, and these are skills that can be built on these older cars, rather than rigging together the car destined for current competition.

Sometimes you will need to cannibalize parts from prior cars, but try to avoid it at all costs. When you do decide a car has become ready for the boneyard, take everything from it to keep other cars running, as it is better to have one running older car than 3 non-running piles of junk with pieces missing here and there. Through a system of cannibalization, it is possible to have one or two older practice cars as test beds, in fantastic condition, and just constantly cycle out the oldest- this is ideal. Also in theory, the cars will also have many prototype parts that will be on the newest car, so they may be just as fast. Always something to think about.