2011 FSAE-A Competition Day 7 Update

Day 6 is technically day 3 of competition and consists of dynamic events skidpan, acceleration and autocross as well as cost and design finals.

6:30am Wake Up

Today the plan was to get to Victoria University as soon as the gates opened to start work on preparing our car for the dynamic events. The first car left at 7:15am and got there with plenty of time to conduct quick spanner checks etc, I arrived just after 8:00am and set about fixing up the brake bias. While the electrical guys set about checking over our electrical system.

We lined up in the Que for the practice track to scrub in our brand new set of comp slicks just after 9:30am and Penna was the driver delegated with this honourable task. Penna mainly did some circle work however he did have some issues with following directions.

After that we headed off to the skidpan track, this year has been an awesome year for FSAE-Australasia with on Friday a record 18 teams got through all components of technical inspection. This has meant that there are a lot more cars running in the event than in previous years and subsequently there are lines for this event. The two drivers for skidpan are Penna and Apples, these drivers were chosen based upon driver training conducted. The skidpan event tests consists of a track in the shape of a figure 8 and involves the drivers doing two right hand circles and two left hand circles. At the same time that skidpan is running acceleration is also running which has also seen people queuing up for.

We lined up for skidpan, with in the back of our mind knowing there may be either and engine or electrical issue as we have kept getting low oil pressure readings, however we decided to chance it by filling the oil tank up with a bit more oil. Penna was the first driver through and conducted two laps of the right hand circle before pulling in as the car was not driving that well.

Luckily we are allowed two attempts at skidpan, so we rejoined the back of the Que and took out the program that was causing the engine to cut out. Penna rolled up to the start line and took off in a hurry, he was a little slow however unfortunately he got a bit confused and ran off track, luckily the track Marshall's were nice to us and allowed us to rerun it. His second attempt went well while he was going slower he got through both circles with a time of 5.4seconds unfortunately he exited through the wrong gate and as such we had an off course and the run didn't count.

We quickly raced back to the pits and had a once over on the car and then headed straight for the acceleration track, Apples and Stockton are our two drivers, with Apples suited up and in the drivers seat he pulled two  very respectable times of 4.8s and 4.5 sec especially considering the shifter was not working at 100%. The we pulled in for a quick driver change and Stockton hoped into the drivers seat and had an awesome first run pulling and acceptable 4.5secs, however it was his second run that blew everyone one away with a 4.203second run, which put us first in the acceleration event however there was plenty of time for other cars to get in a run at acceleration.

W then headed back for the skidpan run with apples hoping in the drivers seat, he got off to a hesitant start and unfortunately got confused with the track, luckily they allowed us to have another go. Apples was very hesitant however got around both circles and exited correctly with a time of 6.2seconds this wasn't as fast as we would have like to have gone however we have still competed in  both events and scored points in both events.

While the skidpan event was on the results for the presentation event were announced with CMT coming at 17th place 39.75 pts which while we would have liked to place higher overall very happy with the amount of points that we scored.

Then we headed back to the pits to do a once over of the car, and fix the brake bias as well and do a general systems check. At the same time Matt Aldous from Altair Hyperworks stopped in for a quick chat, with tony gray on how we are going etc.

Then we headed over to autocross this year they are allowing teams to conduct 4 runs of two laps each for autocross with two sessions running one from 1:00pm to 2:30pm and from 2:30pm to 4:30pm, the line for the first session was already 12 cars deep by the time we got there. Our two drivers were Dave and Wes who after two of our best drivers. We quickly progressed towards the start line, however just as we were about to start the fuel pump wouldn't prime. Some quick fault finding by Ben and we had isolated the fault to the fuel pump itself.



16:00pm Autocross

We quickly got the car reassembled and lined up for autocross, our drivers each had two laps and were pulling quite respectable times of 65 to 62 second laps, meanwhile Pete Marsh over at UWA motorsport team was pulling 52 second laps well done guys!

After we finished we headed back to the pits and the results for Acceleration had been released we had come second with 4.2 secs and scored 49.2 pts out of 50 with UWA beating us by 0.02second to come first and ECU came third making it a  one two three finish for Western Australian Teams well done ECU and UWA.

Cost in the mean time had also been released and while we originally had a very low score of 24.8 pts to finish 21st after some enquiries it was discovered that the cost report mark had not been added on and we finished with a 17th place and 57.4 pts with 38 out of 40 for the report itself well done guys for putting in such a huge effort.

Skidpan, we ended up 18th with 3.5 pts. and autocross we ended up 13th with 19.64 pts.

Once again we left the car on site as the team left to get some well deserved shut eye!