Plan for Year – (Team Leader, Ed Hunt)
Hello and welcome to the first edition of our 2012 newsletter, I’d like to introduce myself as the new team leader for the coming year. Inside this edition you’ll be able to find a progress update on all of our work so far, and we are off to a flying start.
Where to go next?
Last year was on the whole a good year- bouncing back after a tough 2010 we scored our first points in the dynamic competitions, our first ever pre-event testing and our best ever result in the business event. There is still much to be done however and we must all work together to move the team to the next level.
Our biggest aim by far for this year is completion of the car much earlier in the past. For too many competitions now has FBR turned up with an, although well designed and aesthetic, an ultimately unfinished or untested car. This has severely hampered our competition performance, with many teams on the grid with similar budgets and/or time restraints being able to race because they have designed the car with these constraints in mind.
How is this to be achieved?
A review of the last few years and open and frank discussions with past team members provided us with a number of design and organisational changes to bring about change this year. Firstly we reset our targets. All designs along the rolling chassis critical path are to be finished by the end of Michaelmas term in order to assemble the car at the beginning of lent term. This gives lent term for bodywork and powertrain optimisation ready to go testing at the beginning of Easter holiday.
We have spoken in depth with the new team about the dangers of over ambition, and explained how the team has consistently finished late. As such all team members are acutely aware of the need to either finish (design) by Christmas, or change their goals if this is not going to happen.
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Inspiring people to really engage with the project is another goal, avoiding the problems caused by people phasing in and out of interest of the year. We’ve given more responsibilities to younger members of the team- ‘sub group’ leaders in their second year have enthusiastically taken to working with their own small teams on projects. Running ‘workshop days’ (where the whole team comes in to work on projects together, or whole groups) has proved a big success with large turnouts, working together on a project makes it both more enjoyable and easier to share ideas.
Bodywork in particular, we have an extremely keen group of team members some with manufacturing experience, all of whom can focus on getting it finished on time, without the intervention of the core team. In the past the final weeks leading up to the competition has diverted core team members away from other jobs they are critically needed on in order to do the bodywork- one of the most labour intensive parts of the car. This will not be a problem this year.
The results so far are promising, the size and enthusiasm of the team from first to fourth year is the best it has been since I have been involved in Formula Student, and by communicating the problems we have had in the past the team have really engaged with the ‘low hanging fruit’ approach of car design - “what are the biggest performance improvements I can make given the tight constraints?”
Fresher’s Fair
Full Blue Racing appeared at the 2011 CUSU Fresher’s fair again this year, and the day was a big success. A very windy Parker’s piece was the setting for a display of 400 societies to nearly 4,000 undergraduates. The team took a record number of signatures this year after taking down the car, posters and some examples of FBR engineering. This attracted a wide variety of interest from students, members of the public and university staff. We also had a number of technical discussions with homeless people of Cambridge who each year always seem very supportive.
Following the fair, the team ran an induction day to try and determine where they would like to work. A number of presentations were done by the individual group leaders as they competed for the interest of the new intake. With sign ups now complete, we have a big (and very keen) team for 2012, looking forward to building on last year and achieving another best year in formula student.
Learn to Win
The team travelled down to London again this year, to the IMechE headquarters for another excellent learn to win experience. Representatives from all of the different groups were there and enjoyed panel discussions on race car engineering, presentations on Formula Student and talks about team organisation. The highlight of the day was the opportunity for face to face discussions with judges over specific concerns and ideas the team have. It was also nice to see a couple of familiar faces in Hannah Wade, and David Gould who have been our sponsors for some time now. We’d like to thank the IMechE for running another excellent learn to win event.
Business Team – (Group Leader, Andrew Newbold)
It's a new year for Full Blue Racing and the business team has recruited some new members. We have expanded out into other departments in a hope to get a better breadth on the team.
As always we are looking around for new sponsors to increase our team’s spending ability and improve our performance in the competitions. However we are already looking at the business and cost events on the competition and starting to work on those. Last year was our most successful business presentation and we are hoping to build on that success this year. We are also putting the finishing touches on out sponsorship brochure, updating it to the new team and for the new year.
Over the last few years, we have not had a suitable system for storing, sharing and vaulting our CAD files. This year we hope to rectify this problem by creating a custom program to handle all our CAD files for this year, and future years. Hopefully this will make everyone's life a lot easier, so they can focus more on the design work rather than the paper work.
Promotions Team – (Group Leader, Tafara Makuni)
This year has seen the previously known “Sponsorship and Promotions Team” split into the Business Team and the Promotions Team. The main reason for this was to split the shorter term stuff (newsletters, events, posters, stash and etc.) from the longer term commitments (the business plan, sponsorship and etc.) – so far this has been working well.
The Promotions Team have been working on some new ideas for more PR events. For example, one idea we currently for increasing exposure to the general public is perhaps to collaborate with CUED’s outreach program (geared towards introducing school kids to the many cool things engineers can do) for a session or two, in order to give kids a flavour of the types of things you could get involved with in motorsport. This is just one of the ideas - we’ll keep you posted with the development!
Powertrain – (Group Leader, Adam Sharpe)
With the final drive troubles at the end of last season, the previous car was not in a fit state to test at the start of the year. Work has been completed both through the summer and by the incoming Powertrain team to fit a new steel spool and sprocket in place of the broken aluminium versions fitted last year. A couple of final modifications are still required to get the car suitable for rolling road testing, but those alterations should be made very soon.
This will leave the new team with the task of re-mapping the engine, ensuring we go into the new season with an engine that has the potential to see us running in the competition.
In parallel with the testing of the previous set-up, a new intake and exhaust are to be designed for FBR12. Separate sub-groups focused on these two elements have been created, and research has been started. The exhaust will be running along the sidepod to help minimise ambient noise during the noise check, but will probably remain relatively unchanged. The intake of the previous car has been criticised due to the complex shape, preventing an easy method of manufacture; ensuring the new design can be made in bulk will be a key focus for the intake this year. In addition, a new throttle body is to be purchased, hopefully giving a more even throttle response.
A study of the cooling system is also to be undertaken this year. During testing it has been observed that engine temperatures have been higher than expected, we suspect this may be due to an inadequate cooling system, as the engine is mounted behind a solid seat and may not experience as much air flow as may be expected on the bike from which it originates. A model of the system, confirmed by testing should give us a good idea of the key parameters and what can be changed for FBR12 or future cars.
With these modifications made to the engine, we will need to re-map again, but this time making only small modifications to the solid baseline to be obtained in the first round of testing.
Last year was exciting for FBR, scoring dynamic points, and a weak area previously has always been the engine. By getting prepared early, and doing a lot of the legwork on the previous chassis, we hope to be in a much stronger position come the competitions in the summer.
Vehicle Dynamics – (Group Leader, Ruth Buscombe)
Development on the suspension for the FBR12 began back in August in order to ensure that the hard points were finalised and the chassis group were able to start work on this year’s chassis design.
As Vehicle Dynamics is the focus of much of this year’s development on the FBR12, with reducing unsprung mass a key design criteria, the group has grown considerably to provide the necessary skills and man power to do this. The Vehicle Dynamics group now has over twenty members, split into seven different sub-groups each focused on their own area of development.
The brakes sub team led by third year Luca Bortolotti along with fresher's Tom Scrivener and Rachel Salter have been working closely with the Business team to update this year's car with two outboard rear brakes and replace the existing brakes system with a lighter alternative that still meets the required braking criteria.
The Vehicle Dynamics group has also benefited from the addition of several third and fourth year students to the team (including the brother of last year’s Vehicle Dynamics group leader!) who have spent the first weeks of term getting up to speed with Formula Student suspension and are working on the upright and wishbone design for the FBR12 which will should prove to be a lighter and more flexible design for future suspension setup changes than the current solution. Our simulation sub team has also been hard at work with the Simulink software looking into furthering our vehicle dynamics modelling for this and future year’s development.
Second year Priyan Rayatt and his fabrication sub team, with new members Yemi Ogunyemi, Phil Griggs and Anant Kapoor have spent the beginning of term designing a new quick jack for the FBR12 in addition to using the engineering department’s structures lab rig to test the shocks from last year's car to help the design of this year's rocker/damper system.
The Anti Roll Bar subgroup have been working to integrate the ARB design started last year with this year’s chassis and suspension. After working through how the calculations for the kinematics and geometry relate to altering roll rates and stiffness they are now at the point of discussing potential materials for manufacture and the feasibility of several manufacturing options.
Front ARB
