How a Forumla SAE team does pre-season testing

It’s a Sunday morning, you’re taking a relaxing walk through Daytona Beach’s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University campus and then you hear it. Race car? Where? 

In the parking lot behind the College of Engineering, you’ll find the school’s FSAE team, ERAU Motorsports, in action.

But if the competition isn’t for another 182 days, what are they doing? Testing.

In FSAE competitions, teams face four dynamic events: Autocross, Acceleration, Endurance and Skidpad. Of these four events, the head of the dragon is the two 15-minute stints that make up Endurance.

Why? Well, it’s worth the most of any event and has quite a few aspects involved in its scoring. During competition, the Endurance portion puts a lot of strain on the cars, hence why it's done on the last day only.

Doing more than one Endurance run for pre-season testing? That’s usually when bad things happen.

But ERAU Motorsports decided to take the chance and recreate the Endurance environment to define their vehicle’s current limitations, test out part prototypes and gather data. The team planned to run three consecutive endurance cycles.

This wasn’t my first test day. Before joining GRM, I attended Embry-Riddle and served as the business operations lead and vice president for the ERAU Motorsports team.

When most people hear about these student-crafted cars, their expectations aren’t usually set too high. But don’t underestimate what these cars can do: During this year’s Tire Rack SCCA Solo National Championships, an FSAE car outpaced a new Corvette Z06 by nearly 10 seconds.

The ERAU Motorsports test day started with car setup, a team safety meeting and goals for the day. Biggest goal: Don’t blow up.

Each run went like this: 15 minutes of full speed through the course, a 2-minute driver change–during which temps, pressure and data were pulled–then another 15-minute stint with the second driver.

In between full runs, they took the car back to their shop for a cooldown, tire change and inspection of prototype components.

While in the lab, we talked with students to learn more about their plans and goals as a team and as individuals.

“I was made aware of FSAE my senior year of high school through some autocross friends who were in or past college,” shares JJ Jander, a freshman in mechanical engineering with a focus on high-performance vehicles. “I am a member of the suspension, electronics and driver systems sub-teams, but most of my time goes to electronics.”

His goal for after graduation? Work in the motorsports or extreme sports industry and eventually drive race cars professionally.

“Being able to work hands on with the formula car for test days has given me the ability to ask questions and understand the why behind design and setup choices,” JJ explains. “I have carried these concepts not only forward into testing but also out to my classes and to my own race car.”

For some students, this work in FSAE, especially during testing days, is already helping them in the motorsports industry and vice versa.

Ryan Moran, one of the current electrical leads for the team, already holds a race engineer position with Racers Edge Motorsports. The team campaigns the Acura NSX GT3 and the Honda Civic TCR.

“By being able to analyze complex data streams, troubleshooting equipment, and solving complex motorsports problems to keep our Formula SAE car running,” Ryan shares, “I have been able to become more confident and knowledgeable in the same sorts of environments that I find myself in on a day-to-day basis working on real GT3 race cars.”

Two minutes. That’s all the time Ryan had to run over and pull data, all while the hot car underwent a driver change.

“Testing days provide me with the chance to experiment with various solutions to technical issues on the car and assess their impact in real time,” Ryan explains. “In a professional-level GT3 series, it’s essential to address technical problems on the fly, and having the confidence to implement a software solution that I discovered during a Formula SAE testing day has been invaluable in my work in the race industry."

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