Neil Roberts - Industrial Lecturer

[Lane Gniewek]

Hey Guys,

An extremely experienced race car engineer / Formula SAE West design judge has recently published Think Fast: The Racer's Why-To Guide to Winning. While I haven't read the book myself, many on the FSAE forum are giving it great reviews, listing it as a sort of updated C. Smith book.

You'll also notice that he's listed as an SAE Industrial Lecturer.

Can I recommend that the team buy this book? First, because it can't hurt to have another good book on vehicle dynamics, and secondly, if the book seems solid it would be worth inviting Mr. Roberts to visit. He welcomed visits to FSAE teams in the forum thread I linked and getting the opinion of a second design judge (Mr. Steve Fox visited us last year for those not around) would be invaluable. If this were to take place, I'd like the team to have a pre-meeting brainstorming session about what topics should be discussed in the short time we'd be given.

Hope you'll take this into consideration.

Lane

[Luther Lloyd III]

I bought the book Think Fast, last week and just finished reading it.
The book is definitely a good book, I think it is one of the more useful books a member on the team can read. This being said you must read Tune to Win first and probably some other more introductory books because this book does not give any intro or cover any basics. Mr. Roberts jumps right into why he prefers "this" design and thinks "that" design is junk. The book has two main things that I completely agree with: 1) "Everything depends on everything else" 2) "Consistency and Controlabilty make speed".
I agree with both of these and have been designing the suspension based on these for the past few years.

Bottom Line:
Read the book, it offers good insight into race car engineering but you need to have some background to get the most out of it. A simple analogy for this book would Your engineering degree : Your FSAE experience :: Milliken's RCVD : Robert's Think Fast you need both to succeed.

I think that inviting Neil Roberts down would be great experience for the team as he has done SAE, competed and won in national Formula Ford series and is currently working with Swift Engineering (a chassis builder for the Formula Atlantic series and more).