Learn Me: Running a FSAE/FHSAE Team

This fall I will be leaving my current place of employment and heading back to school. I was accepted into an accelerated Master's Program, which should allow me to finish the last of my Bachelor's, and earn a Master's in 3 calendar years. I'm going into Information Assurance with a focus on "Big Data," in hopes to secure a career in the automotive sector. Preferably, it would be in the motorsport sector, but I understand that much more opportunity exists in the area of Autonomous Driving and V2V communication/Telematics.

The school I am attending has a FSAE Team, a Baja Team, and a Formula Hybrid Team. This is not a large school by any stretch of the imagination, and it is not particularly known for Automotive Engineering (or Engineering in general). From what I've gathered, the school is a perennial backmarker in all three competitions. Truthfully, I feel as though Hybrid has the potential to allow for the most innovation and would be most relevant in today's job market. But most importantly, I want to have fun.

In speaking with the current President of Formula Hybrid, he cited a lack of strong leadership, staffing and budget. I was told that I "could be President," if I were willing to put forth the effort. I would love to, but I have nowhere to begin. I am self-taught in many areas, and feel as though that even having a functioning team for next year would be a great challenge.

I have some resources I could tap into within the auto industry to hopefully secure some sort of sponsorship. I am waiting to hear back to know what resources are needed. I was told that our annual budget is < 20% of what a competitive team spends, so I am assuming that it is money/parts/materials that are lacking. Unfortunately, I have no idea of the cost and budgetary structure of a FSAE team.

It does not sound as though many students outside of the Engineering and Automotive programs participate. There are plenty of bright minds in the College of Business (Management, PR/Marketing, Accounting) that could be recruited to run the "back office" to to speak.

My only prior FSAE experience was two weeks spent on the team at Wayne State. I left after I realized that very few of the students actually cared about cars or racing in general, and rather thought of it strictly as a resume booster. While there is nothing wrong with that line of thinking, it is just not who I am.

So what say you GRM, am I already in over my head?

I don't know if you are over your head but you do have the power to change it for the better. You'll have a whole new batch of people to recruit from each year.

When I was on the team I gave up and left because it was a drinking team that occasionally machined some parts and were kinda anti-outsider in their attitude. By the time my brother went to the same school 6 years later the size of the team was smaller but they were getting a whole hell of a lot more done and the atmosphere was entirely different.

Go for it!

Same school as RedGT, eventually ended up running the FSAE team my senior year.

Every team is going to have a different history, budget, etc. Motivating members is difficult- their alternative is to go out and get E36 M3faced, or get laid, or play video games, and you're not paying them. Dealing with the school can be difficult- our school seemed to view the program as a bit of an annoyance, but some schools see their teams as something to be proud of.

I never got sponsorship figured out, so we built the car for about $6k when I was captain thanks to scrounging for materials. Normal "low end" budget was more like $20k other years. The reason we got E36 M3 done was typically because there were a few members who would build the whole car themselves given the chance- there was a period where I tried to do that, slept 4 hours a night, and barely attended classes. I'd do it again, I learned a lot, and I don't feel my education was worth a dime without it. That said, I also ruined a number of friendships, pissed people off, and got terrible grades in the process.

Your mileage may vary, if you have questions ask away.

RedGT wrote: I don't know if you are over your head but you do have the power to change it for the better. You'll have a whole new batch of people to recruit from each year. When I was on the team I gave up and left because it was a drinking team that occasionally machined some parts and were kinda anti-outsider in their attitude. By the time my brother went to the same school 6 years later the size of the team was smaller but they were getting a whole hell of a lot more done and the atmosphere was entirely different. Go for it!

Thanks! Any best practices that you don't mind sharing in regards to recruitment or solicitation/marketing?

I'm trying to avoid the "my drinking team has a xxx problem" philosophy. Too many years of competitive hockey ruined the fun in that.

Recruitment:
Let new members learn by doing. This guy wants to weld? Let him, but verify his work before it goes on the car. Same with machining, composites, etc.- we saw a huge increase in the number of new guys sticking around when we went away from the "noobs sit and watch for their first semester" philosophy. Our only standing rule was that you put in work on a car before you get to drive one.

Sponsorship:
Have dedicated people for this, business students if possible. Also keep your school from skimming off the top of cash sponsorships. Get sponsored materials that you need- our cars were carbon, and a free 55yd roll was the only reason we could build them as cheap as we did.

The team I was on for about a year recruited people from the business school to handle sponsorship. They got the same crack at testing and seeing if they were a candidate for driver. In fact we had our designated acceleration driver out of if. As I recall she was about 5'2 and well under 100lbs.

Mazda787b wrote: Thanks! Any best practices that you don't mind sharing in regards to recruitment or solicitation/marketing? I'm trying to avoid the "my drinking team has a xxx problem" philosophy. Too many years of competitive hockey ruined the fun in that.

Yeah, listen to Mr. Shrugging Guy for that kind of stuff. I don't have much to offer...I tried to participate as a freshman and gave up for good about a month into soph year. He on the other hand stuck with it and got E36 M3 done. Different timeframes, but still.

If you really want to get in over your head, try starting a club dedicated to building cars for the GRM $20XX Challenge. Georgia Tech somehow convinced school admins and student government to fund a scrappy group of gearheads to build a V8 Miata out of junkyard parts and JB weld. Though we weren't FSAE, my experience was very similar to Mr. Shrugging Guy.

10% of the members will do 90% of the work, but it really helps to teach skills to the newbs before they wise up and go out drinking instead of grinding away for hours in the shop. And I'll echo the sponsorship advice too. Dedicate a single member to it. Make it a fluffy resume-friendly title like "FSAE Sponsorship Coordinator and CEO of Business Affairs and Whatnot". Suddenly it's a desired position among the business students.

SAE-FH is not a solved problem. There has only ever been one fast Hybrid car, and it was just good enough to hold up and win dominantly. There has only ever been one good Hybrid car, and it was just fast enough to win dominantly. They were not the same car. Every other car built for that competition has not reached any reasonable standard of reliability or speed.

FSAE, on the other hand... here come some racing secrets that should never have been secret.

1) This is a project management competition, with the overall time left before competition and how much time your dedicated few can put in and save their grades as the scarce resources to track.

2) Money only dictates how complicated your car and hardware can be and how much "replace-on-schedule" equipment you can tolerate. There is always more money available somewhere but there is no way to get the green flag moved back the two weeks you need.

3) Arriving at the event with a car allows you to beat 1/3 of the teams in the competition. Passing tech moves you up into the top 1/2. A good Baja car or LO206 kart, were they legal, would be in the top fifteen. If your car is as fast as a shifter kart, and your drivers as good as good shifter drivers, you can be top five.

4) Building a mini-F1 car puts you up against 50000-student state universities with good funding, steady team member development, a nice shop, successful past cars to look at, and an advisor who knows what he's doing. If you want to build a program, build towards that. If you want to learn about automotive engineering and go testing enough for it not to all be theoretical, build something else.

5) Count your schedule backwards from the competition. Two months of testing, one month of shakedown and rework, two weeks for paint and assembly, two months of fabrication and sourcing, one month of drawing and materials sourcing, a month of detail part design, a month of system design, a month of deciding what to do and why.

6) You need 8 people, dedicated and experienced and capable and free, to get that done in that time. You need to recruit more than that because you don't know who your 8 are and they don't either. An early-September quick design and build exercise will get a LOT of people to dig in and start working, get used to each other, and weed out the flakes. This project needs to be cheap, have some chance of success, and need several people working at once to do it. Build a shed, change a clutch or engine in a street car, build some wings for last year's car...

7) The best machinist, the best fabricator of sheetmetal-tube-wood-glass-carbon, the best part designer, the best engine tuner, and the best mechanic must be five different people. If that's not the case, your team needs to teach each other their skills and trust each other more outside their own area.

8) Your brakes need to work. They need to work every time, have 1.25 g with enough adjustment to get all four to lock about the same time, not fade during a 25-minute endurance event, and not leak. This should not be a surprise, but there are a LOT of cars at each competition which will not outstop a stock Miata.

9) Your electrical system needs to work. Every wire on the car needs to match exactly with the wire on the schematic. Every wire on the schematic must tolerate the current it needs to flow. Every connection on the car, crimped or soldered, must be perfect. Every ground must be to clean unrusted bare metal and then shielded against corrosion. Every sensor has wiring it needs to return the correct signal, and both its high and low voltage inputs need to be correct. One person MUST have responsibility for the whole system both on paper and in copper. Both the schematic and the car also need to be checked by someone knowledgeable.

Electrical failures are the #1 cause of DNFs and lost test days.

10) Geometry as shown on a SolidWorks screen matters little compared to the geometry seen when the car is at 1.25x design load on the runway. Wheel rims, bearings and bolted joints are the play and deflection you don't see.

Bonus) The machinery needed to build decent parts out of carbon fiber or wood is light and cheap compared to the machinery needed to build decent parts out of metal. The opposite goes for the analysis needed to determine the correct geometry for either.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ wrote: The reason we got E36 M3 done was typically because there were a few members who would build the whole car themselves given the chance- there was a period where I tried to do that, slept 4 hours a night, and barely attended classes. I'd do it again, I learned a lot, and I don't feel my education was worth a dime without it.

Did Formula Hybrid for my first 3 years in college (had to give it up after that so I could actually graduate) and this pretty well sums up the experience.

I joined the team the first year in which they actually built a "car" and brought it to competition. One of my best friends in college and I showed up to a meeting one day and the president goes "You guys like cars? Great! You're in charge of the braking system!" By year three, my friend was president and I was the VP.

That first year we had no budget, like literally $0. We used whatever parts we could scrounge up, like a crappy Honda ATV engine, a heavy ass forklift motor, and numerous components (including our brakes) from a wrecked e30, and paid out of our own pockets for the rest just to get a car mostly together and to the competition just to prove to the school we were serious and they should sponsor us. We made it there at least and did a large portion of final assembly at the competition, but never had the car even remotely functional, let alone able to pass tech inspection.

Side note on passing tech: I don't know how stringent FSAE is in comparison, but Formula Hybrid are complete Nazis in terms of safety, particularly on the electrical side. Passing electrical tech was a perennial bugaboo for not only us, but most other teams at competition. Some years it was well under 50% of the cars that were able to actually run. While I understand the concern over student designed race cars, particularly when very high voltages are involved, there were a number of instances (none of which I can seem to specifically remember) in which our systems were pretty much fundamentally safe, but failed tech because they did not meet the very specific letter of the law. That hippy bastard Charlie Sullivan has no god damned common sense.

Nonetheless, we were successful in securing our funding for the next year. I think our budget was somewhere in the $16-18k range the next two years, which was still relatively low end. Car 2.0 was a quantum leap from the first, which was necessary as car 1.0 was in no way a competitive design, just kind of cobbled together around what we had. Again, though, we never had the car 100% functional and never passed tech. Car 3.0 was somewhat more evolutionary, though in hindsight we still tried to change WAY too much in a year and again were unable to pass tech and run at the competition. The team members who were living locally did manage to get it out to an auto x the following summer, though, so there was some degree of improvement.

As others have mentioned, recruitment is a big issue. These teams are a HUGE time commitment and it takes a special breed of crazy to want to take that on for no credit or pay in addition to a full time engineering course load. Every single year we would start out with about 50 people at the first meeting or two, which would soon dwindle to about 20 who had at least some participation in the design process, which dropped to about 10 of us who actually ended up building the car once crunch time hit from February through April. Way too much work for way too few people, which resulted in us always only completing the car at the last possible second, then still having to work on it at competition. You need time to test because you will have bugs.

Another good piece of advice is not to undertake too many design changes in a given year. I don't know where your prospective team's car is in terms of its development, but our team knew we were very sub-optimal even going into year 3. Our mistake, in hindsight, was trying to fix EVERYTHING at once and basically redesign the whole car in a single year. If I were to do it again, I'd focus on a few specific subsystems and really try to get those functioning well to use as a building block going forward, then move on to the next-weakest points.

I could keep rambling on for quite a while, but I'll stop for now.

chaparral wrote: Electrical failures are the #1 cause of DNFs and lost test days.

This made me laugh. Our local school has a very small FSAE program - their car was in our shop on the cornerweight scales last week. Last year, they lost a test day when the used sportbike engine spat a rod and associated bits all over the track the first time it ran. From the looks of it, it had been cracked for a while and it was just dumb bad luck for them. But it sure wasn't electrical!

A secret for getting a jump on the schedule- design the entire car over the summer. That buys you months of work with the full team once they show up in September.

Thanks for all the info guys, it's really appreciated. I feel as though the Hybrid opportunity speaks to me moreso than anything else.

Sine making the original post, I've learned that there were 20 members at the beginning of last season. 10 of those were "regulars" with 3-5 only putting in any real work. This sounds like a great opportunity to start nearly from scratch and go from there.

I know that they did come close to fielding a physical car, but only ended up doing the design presentation and the project management portion. Luckily, I have some contacts as the College of Business. They can provide the resources (people, experience) to market with their PR student organization.

Fortunately, the previous President (graduated last week) has some good ideas on recruitment that he is willing to share.

While I don't know much about the development cycle of these things, I am more than willing to learn. I will be working through July, and moving to school in early August. This isn't ideal from a time standpoint, but I feel that making it to the competition in any capacity is more than the team has done in past years.

The rulebook is quite interesting. I'm only 1/4 of the way through it, but it looks as though there are some pretty good places to innovate.

I wrote this 20 years ago to address the common issues I saw with FSAE teams at the time. It needs some updating. The core problems of recruiting, motivation and project management have not changed.

You might try asking some your questions here: http://www.fsae.com/forums/forum.php

I'm a bit surprised the hybrid thing is executed so poorly. Is the rule set unrealistic or are the competitors inexperienced?

787b, you're in Michigan? You know FSAE competition is right now right? Get your ass to the track!

I'm the advisor for Hope College's team and we are at the competition right now. Visit us if you can.

https://www.facebook.com/HopeCollegeFormulaSAE/?fref=ts

Ive followed FH for a while, and volunteered at the event the last 3 years. Wish I could have competed when I was in school, but I've found my outlet for wrenching on a sporty hybrid elsewhere now.

I'm constantly impressed with the variety of race cars built and the design work done by the students.

Every post above about project management, timelines, and baking debug/test/tune weeks into your schedule are accurate. If you show up and plan to finish building your car at the track, then you probably won't be driving the car on the track. I'm not sure why teams still do this.

As to the tech inspection, this has evolved over the last ten years. It started with more of a pass/fail, go figure out what is wrong. Nowdays the inspectors work with you to understand the problem and how to fix it, inspectors are on site the day before competition starts for teams that arrive early with a fully assembled car, and industry experts are available as mentors to the teams to help catch issues before the fab work even starts on the car.

I'd encourage you to sign up for the event and contribute as much as you can. Enjoy the experience. Bring a stack of resumes to competition and market yourself.

Some good stuff going on in this thread. I've got a document I wrote when I was president of the Baja team at Purdue with some watchouts; I'll have to see if I still have that somewhere.

All three would look great on a resume, but all of them have a reputation. I'm not as familiar with FH, but Baja tends to be a little more practical and laid back, where FSAE is usually much more analytical, computer models, that kind of thing. If you want to get into engine tuning, FSAE is going to be a better bet since Baja uses a sealed engine.

Don't overthink it. Everyone learns along the way; I knew very little going into it and it worked out great. I ended up on the Baja team freshman year after accidentally going to their callout instead of Formula's, and happened to stick with it. Did it for all 4 years I was there, and was probably the high point of school for me. Great group of people, great way to apply what you're learning, and not in the least a great thing to have on your resume. You'll always get a few who just want it on their resume. That's just how it is, and how life in general is.

A really good FSAE car could be simpler than a Mini-Baja to build. Plywood and paper honeycomb half-tub covered in carbon and a UV-cure epoxy allowed to dry in the sun, 3-link live axle rear end with all attachments to the back of the tub, front end using a bunch of ATV parts, Briggs 305 breathing through a 19 mm Dell'Orto slide carb with dual Mikuni vacuum fuel pumps to get rid of that single point of failure. Get your center of gravity really low and your weight way down and your power and aero grip disadvantages fade...

Definitely machine-design intensive this way, but that's the fun part to learn.

Thanks for the info guys. Multiquoting everyone would be a complete pain in the ass, but I appreciate all the knowledge you've shared with me.

I've decided that Hybrid would be more in line with my degree program (Information Security and Intelligence, concentrating on Data Mining). My "dream" goal would be working in the Motorsport field focusing on telemetry/data acquisition, or passenger V2V telematics/Autonomous driving. I feel as though simply having a running vehicle at the competition would be a big step forward for the program. Luckily, I have three years to make it happen.

I've spent a large chunk of time over the past few days researching various construction methods, and my head is absolutely spinning. I'm going to wait until I get to school and evaluate things based upon the resources that are available to us.

Most importantly, I plan to update everyone here @ GRM on our progress.