The FSG Registration/Rules Quiz - Things you should know

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".

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.

Why I decided to start a blog

Back in autumn 2008, I was asked by the board (I will tell you what the board is in another post) of Formula Student Germany, if I wanted to participate in developing rules for an Electric FS class.

Some of my first thoughts were: How could I make a difference as an Official? What was missing in terms of information delivered about the reasoning behind ?

One of the answers was/is: The structure and the work of the rules committee and also the organisational structures/work of the Officials of the FS competitions always lacked transparency for me.

The rules committee (I will also write about that in the future) for example was a big grey cloud and each released rules version made me often scratch my head and think: