It is already that time of the year: The European registration season is approaching quickly, starting with the FSC and FSE early registration in about a week. The registration procedures differ from competition to competition so I thought it would be good to shed some light on FSG's way of doing it and the associated background information aka "Why it is done this way".
Friday 3 January 2014
Saturday 14 December 2013
The FSG Workshops - An (unknown) source of knowledge
On 2nd of November this year the 14th FSG Workshop was held in Abstatt at Bosch Engineering. One to two of these workshops are held annually, bringing the teams and officials closer together and spreading knowledge among the participants.
Tuesday 22 October 2013
What we can (not) learn from F1: Driver-Car-Interfacing - Part2: Changing Mechatronic Parameters
This is the second part of the Driver-Car-Interfacing post, this time about changing mechatronic parameters. Part 1 about visualisation can be found here.
PLEASE NOTE: These are my personal findings. Acting according to these posts does not gain you any points in the design event or guarantee a trouble free season/event etc. It is just built on my experience as former participant and current official.
The posts subject line says "mechatronic parameters", so we should start with thinking about possible mechatronic parameters that have be changed on an FS car. There are none...that might sound a bit pragmatic, but technically (and assuming a perfect world) there is no need to change any mechatronic parameter during a dynamic event. However, in order to optimise the total points gained or just to survive Endurance there are many arguments to change mechatronic parameters while driving.
PLEASE NOTE: These are my personal findings. Acting according to these posts does not gain you any points in the design event or guarantee a trouble free season/event etc. It is just built on my experience as former participant and current official.
The posts subject line says "mechatronic parameters", so we should start with thinking about possible mechatronic parameters that have be changed on an FS car. There are none...that might sound a bit pragmatic, but technically (and assuming a perfect world) there is no need to change any mechatronic parameter during a dynamic event. However, in order to optimise the total points gained or just to survive Endurance there are many arguments to change mechatronic parameters while driving.
Friday 4 October 2013
What we can (not) learn from F1: Driver-Car-Interfacing - Part1: Visualisation
Many teams get inspiration for parts of their car from F1 or other racing series. I am not saying that this is a bad thing in general, but whenever you are thinking of copying or carrying over ideas from somewhere else, you still have to question why it has been designed the way it is. These "What we can (not) learn from.." posts will critically and hopefully objectively assess things done in other engineering areas and evaluate whether it is good or bad to just take over the respective parts/ideas or whether FS needs a different approach.
PLEASE NOTE: These are my personal findings. Acting according to these posts does not gain you any points in the design event or guarantee a trouble free season/event etc. It is just build on my experience as former participant and current official.
This post is about Driver-Car-Interfacing. It is not about ergonomics, but about the driver exchanging information with the car and vice-versa. Back in the days there were mechanical gauges showing the current coolant temperature to the driver and the driver may have been able to open and close valves to change some kind of vehicle behaviour. Nowadays this usually goes electronically via displays, lights, buttons and switches. Therefore I will focus on dashboard and steering wheel design with respect to information transfer in this post.
PLEASE NOTE: These are my personal findings. Acting according to these posts does not gain you any points in the design event or guarantee a trouble free season/event etc. It is just build on my experience as former participant and current official.
This post is about Driver-Car-Interfacing. It is not about ergonomics, but about the driver exchanging information with the car and vice-versa. Back in the days there were mechanical gauges showing the current coolant temperature to the driver and the driver may have been able to open and close valves to change some kind of vehicle behaviour. Nowadays this usually goes electronically via displays, lights, buttons and switches. Therefore I will focus on dashboard and steering wheel design with respect to information transfer in this post.
Sunday 22 September 2013
Statistics, Statistics, Statistics: FSG Acceleration through the years
The Acceleration event is probably the dynamic event which is most comparable over the years at FSG. It has been conducted on the exact same part of the Hockenheimring since 2007 and we also did not change the surroundings like we did for WetPad for example. Thus I figured that it is worth to take a closer look at the results of the Acceleration event from 2007 to now. Just to see, if there are any surprising conclusions from doing that.
A word about this kind of posts (statistics involved): All shown data has of course been pre-processed in some way by me and/or others. I do my best to always tell you, what I have done with the data, but nobody is perfect. So always take the provided data with a grain of salt. And there is one more thing about statistics, which is well covered by my favourite statistics (and probably nerdiest ever) joke:
A word about this kind of posts (statistics involved): All shown data has of course been pre-processed in some way by me and/or others. I do my best to always tell you, what I have done with the data, but nobody is perfect. So always take the provided data with a grain of salt. And there is one more thing about statistics, which is well covered by my favourite statistics (and probably nerdiest ever) joke:
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