FS UNITED KINGDOM THURSDAY, JULY 4, 2013, ISSUE 2 WWW.DUTRACING.NL
Wednesday 03-07-13
Arival & setling inn
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Besides setting up the campsite we also prepared our pit which would serve as a basis for the event. All the preparations went very well; we only missed one essential part, the DUT13. A lot of students on the competition know our team quite well and were really curious about our new car, which had not arrived yet. The team members who were still in Delft were busy our spot we started setting up all testing our new car. They left tents and preparing everything late in the evening right after for the next few days here in the testing. UK.
To quote him “a 2 day cruise, fantastic ride in a beautiful big truck and visiting the best race n Tuesday at exactly event in England. That’s what I 23:57 the Delft Truck left the get from the DUT Racing team Hok. Two other cars left a few for my 53rd birthday”. hours later. Both cars and the truck met on the ferry and The next morning, after several the first team members could hours of driving and a two hour congratulate our truck driver, boat trip, the first team members who had no problem driving for arrived on the campsite of us on his birthday. Silverstone. When we found
Thursday 04-07-13
Scrutineering
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t 6:30AM, with the tunes of ‘Disco Pogo’ we and our campsite neighbors woke up. With a nice surprise: together with ten team members, the DUT13 arrived in Silverstone! In the morning we worked on
the car to prepare it for scrutineering which we entered later that day. During scrutineering the car is checked to ensure that it is compliant with the Formula Student rules. In our case most of the technical and electrical
aspects were judged to be rule compliant, but it still took us quite some time to get though all the details as well. Scrutineering closed before we were ready, so we had to go back the next day.
Friday 05-07-13
Statics Day at Silverstone
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tatics Day at Silverstone, there were points to be scored in Design, Cost and the Business presentation. The morning started with design judging. Eight of our engineers had to explain the car and talk about our special features with professionals from worldwide engineering companies. The main idea was that it went quite well.
After that it was time for the cost judging. In this presentation we had to verify all the costs of our car and we had to do a presentation about how to produce a brake caliper more cost efficient. In the afternoon two of us had to suit up in order to do the business presentation. Once this was finished we still made some little changes to the car and pushed it to scrutineering. Again it took quite some time but we passed for many aspects, but there were still some small
details that were not yet good enough for the scrutineers. Then we prepared the car for the rain test. During the rain test, water is sprayed over the car for a certain amount of time. After this little shower, the car should be able to still work properly. As we have an electric car, you can imagine that this is not an easy task. All the team members were quite tensed, but everything went very well. We passed the rain test!
Saturday 06-07-13
Dynamic Day
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he dynamic events started. Skid pad and acceleration in the morning and autocross in the afternoon. But we still had to finish scrutineering, do the tilt test and the brake test. Luckily all of this went very fast so we still had some time left to get everything ready for acceleration and skid pad. After some minutes of practice we did our first two acceleration runs. Our times were just below 4 seconds, which was good news! After this we headed towards skidpad. During the first run the car looked very unstable, although the time was not bad. In the second run, after some setup changes, the car looked better and we ended up with a time just above 5 seconds. Because we had some time left, we went back to acceleration to get two more runs with another driver. We made some changes to the car and it paid off! An improvement of 2 tenths of a
second, so a final best time of 3.76 seconds. Then we had some time to prepare our car for autocross. The queue was quite long so it took some time till we finally got to drive our car. Our first driver was doing a very good job but unfortunately towards the end of the lap he braked too late for a chicane, hit a cone at high speed causing the front wing to break off the car. Because there was no time left to repair the damage we decided to run again without the front wings. We had to wait a long time in the queue again. The autocross event was going to close at 6 o’clock and we were not sure whether we would make it. But just in time, we made it to the start. Our other driver got into the car and drove two super laps. Some minutes later we got to heared that we were first for the autocross event! A big relief for the team. For the acceleration we ended up second and we got eleventh place for skidpad.
More good news. In the evening we heard that we were in the Design finals. We ended up second, right behind our colleagues from ZĂźrich. At the end of the day we were overall on place one. But the margins are still very small, there are over 10 teams within 20 points. This means that the endurance will be decisive, since there are 400 points to be scored that day (for both efficiency and speed on a 22 km lap).
Sunday 07-07-13
Endurance Day
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he day of the endurance. This is the most important day of the competition with 40% of all the points to be won. With the known problems from earlier days we started testing before our run to make sure it was all working. It was so warm we were even cooling our motors with ice prior to the race. The endurance was very hard for
a lot of teams, and it proved to be too hard for us as well. Unfortunately we were not able to finish and watched the car from ETH Zürich drive to the win. Naturally a bit disappointed because of our endurance run, we knew we did well on the other events and that our car has the potential to win. At the award ceremony we collected two awards. Firstly the award for the winner of the sprint (autocross) event. Secondly the runner up award for Design.
After the ceremony it was time for a BBQ provided by the FSUK organization, many teams forgot to bring beer but we were more than happy to share. After the official party there were many parties on the campground where all the teams were sharing their up’s and down’s of the event.
Monday 08-07-13
Packing & Leaving The campsite was broken down after the bacon and eggs breakfast we enjoyed. Wich again was made by our loyal cook Stefan AKA Henk, and his sous-chef Alex van Koppen. It was the last opportunity to say goodbye to the other teams and swap t-shirts. The truck was packed again and the first team members left the circuit. We can look back at a pretty good event, but we will work hard in order to do better in Germany. How we will do at the next race you can follow from the 30th of July when we will compete in Hockenheim Germany.
Sponsors - Faculty of Aerospace Engineering - Faculty of Applied Sciences - Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering - Faculty of Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering - Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management - Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics & Computer Science
a d va n c e d
lightweight engineering
FS UNITED KINGDOM THURSDAY, JULY 4, 2013, ISSUE 2 WWW.DUTRACING.NL
See you in
Hockenheim!