Formula Student UK 2010 Silverstone: The Last Of It

After the acceleration and skid-pan events in the morning, the afternoon was reserved for the Sprint event. Basically a one-lap sprint of the main course set out, standard 4 attempts, 2 drivers.

We made our way to the course and the first driver got ready. As we began to start the car it started to develop a screeching noise. A quick diagnostic by the engine team and it was clear that the one-way bearing for the starter was slipping. Major pain, we rushed back to the pits to regroup.

Formula Student UK 2010 Silverstone: Dynamic

On Friday we had all the design and cost judging which is actually quite a large portion of the score and is vital for those hoping to do well. A couple of presentations later and scrutineering over we got the car ready for Saturday, the start of all the actual dynamic events…

Formula Student UK 2010 Silverstone: Prep

I’m back from Silverstone for Formula Student and let me tell you, it exceeded all of my expectations. Prepare for a shit load of content coming of this incredible event. Let me start from the beginning…

FSAE 2010 CR: Last Test Day

The Formula Student event at Silverstone is this weekend, so Monday was our last day testing the car out as we’re going up on Wednesday. The plan was to do an endurance test, unfortunately we only got to half way, more on that later…

FSAE 2010 CR – Radiator Intake How-To

Nearly everyone involved in the program works on the car and naturally we all get our own little projects to do. I really want to have experience in composites, so I immediately shotgunned this job when it needed to be done. What I’ve been working on is an intake for the radiator which is placed in one of the side pods. This intake covers most the parts of the radiator not used for cooling and directs the air in to those that do. Naturally the material of choice was carbon fibre.

So I’m doing this little write so that I remember how to do it for future work and for those who are interested in making some small carbon fibre pieces.

I started out with some hard modelling foam, which looked like this:

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FSAE 2010 CR: Routine

I’m overloading with the Formula Student posts. In a perfect world I’d like to be talking about my next project car now that the Celica is gone, but to be honest I haven’t event started looking for one. I’m dying for a new car but I’ve got other things to do right now; one of them is of course to concentrate on Formula Student, secondly to relax this summer and then back to Uni. I really don’t need to use a car here and having one just for the odd months I’m home in Italy seems a bit pointless. But regardless of this I do plan on starting to look for one this winter and see how things go from there, probably just keep “this next car” at home in Italy uninsured until I feel like it’s good enough to rock.

In the mean time, back to Formula Student.

FSAE 2010 CR: Llandow Shakedown

Today we headed down to Llandow to continue testing the car. Instead of using the actual race track which is really just an oval with a chicane, we used the go-kart track they have there. After sorting out the usual problems of getting the car running, I hopped into the car.

FSAE 2010 CR – Update 4: Running Time

With the car now essentially done it was time to start it up and begin testing. The first thing is getting the engine running, which we can do in the Uni by pointing the car outside. We encountered problems sooner than we thought in the form of electrical miss-wiring.

FSAE 2010 CR – Update 3

The car should be good to run by tomorrow, fingers crossed. Just a small set back today; the car was put on the floor on it’s own wheels, a quick suspension travel check which consisted of jumping on it and bam! A rod end popped out of a link. Simple fix as a the rod end was LH metric while the link was LH imperial (silly design to use two different units).