Parker Randall

Formula SAE Car

My team and I started this car in the summer of 2019. Our predecessors had all left the team after completing their season that year, leaving only a group of underclassmen and our faculty advisor, Dr. Ron Matthews. His laissez faire approach to Formula SAE (FSAE) made our lives a lot more difficult, forcing us to build a car from scratch almost entirely on our own, but it made a world of a difference in how much we got out of FSAE.

By the beginning of the Spring semester in 2020, approximately 6 months after beginning design, the design was complete, and manufacturing was getting underway. I began control arm manufacturing, while other people worked on CNC machining and getting the frame set up in the jig and welded. With only a partially welded frame, a few welded control arms and a few machined components, Covid-19 arrived, and the school's policies restricted us from accessing our workspaces for over a year. This left us with a lot of down time and a lot of uncertainty on how we wanted to proceed.

At first, we thought it would only be a temporary closure, so we decided to wait it out. After it became apparent that was not the case, we had to decide whether we wanted to continue building the car or design a new and improved one now that we all had some design experience. Given that starting a new car would leave us with the possibility of not being done designing when school re-opened, I felt that committing to the current car would ensure the graduating students got to design and build at least one car. Committing to the current car would also ensure that we would have the chance to deeply evaluate and understand the design before starting a new one. I gave my arguments for my view, and I was able to get the majority of the team to

agree.

With this free time, we were able to refine our designs and organize manufacturing plans for when the school re-opened. In addition to this, I used this time to learn more about vehicle dynamics and modeling. With the help of some teammates, we were able to sift through tire data and generate various simple models for tire behavior. I also created a few vehicle simulations in MATLAB that incorporated suspension characteristics, tire models and a powertrain model. Since our team did not have a vehicle simulation software, I developed these for future teams to utilize in their design cycle.

Finally in May 2021, the school allowed us limited access to our machine shop and garage. Then, somehow, five weeks later, the night before we had to leave for Las Vegas Speedway, we had a finished car. Several things still had to be finished in the Las Vegas heat upon arrival, but we made it to inspection the next day and failed miserably. Our cockpit did not pass template, and we had many alterations to make to be rules compliant. The team worked overnight to mend every issue, and the next day, we made it all the way through inspection and were able to successfully lock up all four brakes in the brake test. Unfortunately, the car was plagued with fueling issues after inspection and we could not resolve them in time to compete in any dynamic events.