Gator Motorsports Forum

The run order for Endurance shows them as 6th in the morning session.

Unfortunately, it appears the team received a DNF for the endurance event because they were not able to restart the car during the driver change. It sounds like there was a problem with a loose ground cable connection on the starter motor. I'm sure they will post more details soon.

After a not so strong showing in Autocross, we placed 36th, meaning we were 6th to start in the morning session of the endurance. This didn't worry us because the Endurance course was much closer to what we test on, a smaller tighter course than Autocross requiring each driver to do 14 laps.

During Autocross, Jeff S. drove the first stint posting a 78.6 and then bringing that down to a 76.6. He explained that the steering response was a little sluggish through the tighter sections and through the slalom so we put the front bar back onto the car and then I went out. I posted a 74.6 and then a 73.4 I believe on the second pass. So our car was not as fast as we had hoped it would be as the fast times were in the high 60's.

For Endurance we ran the setup I ran in Autocross. Jeff went out first again, allowing me to bring it home if anything didn't quite go right. When he pulled into the driver change we were able to change pedals and get me belted in after swapping arm restraints in just shy of 2 minutes giving us plenty of time. However when the starter was pushed a relay sounder without the whirrr of the 600RR following it, after a frantic minute of trying to check everything we could we declared that the car could not be restarted as Fred noticed that the power strap to the starter had somehow come disconnected from the starter as the nut holding it on had apparently loosened while Jeff was driving. This caused us to be the first car to not complete the Endurance for this competition.

Although we did not complete the Endurance we went and had the fuel checked showing that Jeff used on 1360g of fuel which is just 0.5 gallons.

We had a strong showing in multiple events and shouldn't let a DNF pull us down. This car is a great baseline and with a little more grip from the tires we could easily emerge back into the top 10 if not podium in the next year especially since we have a bunch of great designs that merely need some tweaking before the car becomes the fastest, lightest formula car ever presented from UF.

As anything in racing, there is a little bit of luck to get across the checkered flag. Good strong showing, hopefully this failure will drive the next generation of UF SAE just like the previous one led to four years of enurance finishes and three top 10 finishes. Here's a little clip to highlight how you can turn failure around (no, it's not an advert, but full disclosure, it is a honda film.) I work with quite a few of the people in this documentary and can tell you first hand how driven they were after failure, especially the first bald guy.

Failure, The Secret to Success
dreams.honda.com/videos/failure-the-secret-to-success/

Luther, you and the team should feel proud that you designed, manufactured, assembled, tested and presented another formula car at competition this year. As each of us knows, this is no easy task. It took hard work and sacrifice from all the core team members to get a completed car to competition. As we all know, Luther, you worked the hardest of everyone on the team and for that I commend you.

As the team's advisor, I think the team needs thorough and honest feedback about how it did this year. I have started a new thread on the 2010 FSAE competition analysis. The team really needs everyone's input if we want to improve, so please post anything pertinent while it's fresh on your mind.

---

In addition, I want to ask everyone who participated on the team this year to do the following before leaving for the summer or getting busy with other stuff. An important part of being a team member is helping leave it in better shape than you found it. That can only happen when we take the time to document what we've done each season so next year's system leader doesn't have to start over. Please do the following:

1. Complete the documentation for your system(s). This should have been done before comp, but much of it wasn't. Either finish documenting your work in a system thread like the one for cooling or oiling this season or put all of your thoughts in a Word document placed in a notebook with all your supporting paperwork. If you don't do this, you are hurting next year's team. You should have done this in parallel with your work last season. If you didn't, then do it now like you promised you would. Try organizing your system design document/thread with the following sections:

• Goals
• Design & Analysis
• Manufacturing & Assembly
• Testing & Validation
• Conclusion / Ideas for Future Work

2. Organize all of your SAE files for this season. Consolidate files off the SAE workstations, Mike's office PC's, your laptops (or in Eddie's case, his floptop), home workstations and USB keys. Update your CAD models so your assemblies are complete and properly constrained (have a little pride in what you leave the team). Please delete old versions of files (if you don't know which is the final one, no one else will). Do not keep old archives "archived" under your folder, as this just gets out of control. When done, you need to copy your final files into the SAE archive on the main workstation so we can back everything up by next Friday (5/28). I spent over 70 hours organizing archive files last year after competition and cannot do that again. Please do your part to help with this; if we each organize our files before dumping them into the archive, the team will benefit from our work in the future.

Mike

Great video, thanks for posting that, Dan.

Can we, the alumni, get some pictures from competition/MSU testing put up on the website, please?