Seems like a good group, considering I'm way more than twice their age. The Advisor made a point to say hello to me so it'll be interesting.
I wish my circumstances with the potentially soon-to-be-ex Mrs. Stroker and the two kids wasn't such a berkleyed-up mess so I could make a more firm commitment to the group.
I did wonder, however, if you were going to draft a theoretical skill set for a typical FSAE team member, what items would be on that list, what order of importance they'd have and how you'd rank them in terms of learning sequence.
Plenty of time to pitch in. Just gotta organize and commit to being there on a regular basis...
I would put not having your head firmly in your ass or in a textbook would be a good start. Hope you enjoy it more then I did. Too many chiefs not enough.. something.
I loved FSAE. It was by far the best thing that I did in college. Get Carroll Smith books and Racecar Vehicle Dynamics.by Milliken.
My 11-year old decided he HAD to go to college when I showed him the FSAE program at the University of Texas. He's spent the last 6 months talking about it and "designing" cars/motors/suspensions, etc.
Stoker, are you a volunteer or are you attending the university?
-Rob
Outstanding articles on this program internationally in the latest issue of Racecar Engineering.
In reply to rob_lewis:
I'm an alum of Mizzou but I'm not currently enrolled. That might change in January depending on domestic circumstances.
I was bent on fielding a car at in FSAE when I was an ME senior in 2001. My school had not fielded a car in 5 years at that point, and there was no 'FSAE' or really much 'SAE' organization to speak of. Our "faculty advisor" didn't even show up for the meetings nor the event itself. But we made a showing and finished midpack nevertheless- because we had about 5 guys irrationally determined to make it happen.
Theoretical skill set for a typical FSAE team member (IMO):
1) Willing to let go of their own ego, or, if necessary, sell a girlfriend, wife, mother, or kidney for the success of the project.
2) Actual racing experience. Most of the guys on my FSAE team (myself included) got most of their racing experience from video games. Having someone on the team with a few years experience in karting, sprint cars, even autocrossing is super valuable.
My experience was that FSAE is not F1. The simple yet moderately light weight approach is probably the right one. We spent too much time putting a bunch of pricey, complicated stuff on our car that added whiz-bang appeal, but didn't practically make it go faster, the judges didn't much care, didn't boost our grades any, and took time away from getting seat time and actually tuning the thing, or working out the bugs. The member who recognizes and acts on this will lead you in the right direction. The guy wanting to custom machine a 650cc V8 block from scratch using unobtainium alloy can take that on for an independent study, and best left off the core team.
Paul_VR6 wrote:
I would put not having your head firmly in your ass or in a textbook would be a good start. Hope you enjoy it more then I did. Too many chiefs not enough.. something.
This. Our FSAE program was run by a few guys who loved to wave their carbon fiber dicks around, but their car sucked. Every time I looked at it I saw something that was "wrong" that just common sense would tell you wasn't the right way to do something if you had any experience at all with automobiles, equipment, electronics, anything. I went to one meeting, asked a lot of questions, got a lot of blank looks, and never went back. Instead, we started our own "FSAE" group with real cars, drag racing, beer drinking, and so on.
Similar experience but I tried more at first. Being the only EE in a room full of ME's didn't help, especially when I was trying to help with some of those "common sense" things that maybe weren't so common to them.
There's good and bad in everything, just hope the team up there is solid.
The main ingredients are knowledge of what it takes to end up with a useful race car part, and the ability to put in the time and effort needed to actually do that in time.
