Formula Student

[angel]

As some of you are aware, this past year at Uni Tom has been helping to build a race car as part of his last year project, which is due to be shown at Formula Student.

Teams from all over the world attend over 4 days and compete against each other.

Its being held today until Sunday at Silverstone. Public days are on Saturday and Sunday so i'm sure he'd love to see anyone who can get down there and give their support. Its free admittance.

http://www.formulastudent.com/

Good luck Lancs Uni Team

 

[dave]

aww to late notice we could have had a mini meet there
could maybe still get a mini mini meet together, post it up in events, there a few local to there

 

[angel]

Thread now in events if anyone fancies coming along?

 

[faster4_tec]

is it uclan uni (fake lancs) or REAL lancs' uni as in the real one in lancaster

our team competed several years, but appauling team management and serious budget cuts thanks to uni directors 'cost cutting' and spending the money making thier offices look nice (they get remoddledd every year for funks sake).


anyway its sunderland team, had brand new engines last year with the aim of supercharging them! each of the two engines (one for dyno one for car) is equiped with DTA ecu's and about £1,500 worth of injection/ecu kit on them. but alas, the technition who knew how to work the two dyno's was laid off for early retirement a few years early and we have no one that can operate them/track down all the parts to work them, so alas, the whole project (3yrs of work, 5,000man hours (free!) and about £60k is all down the shtter
another fantastic sunderland university storey. and one of the reasons I left the department, and bloody glad of it


edit.... just noticed they (sunderland) have entered again this year, and probably like last year the uni will deny us any transport OR any money to get down there, which is the reason nothing happened last year with the car, believe they only got there on the saturday courtesy of a random student with a big enough car/van for the engine on its test cell and the info boards.

 

[angel]

is it uclan uni (fake lancs) or REAL lancs' uni as in the real one in lancaster

its the real one in Lancaster, that Tom will be graduating from next week

They have put some time and effort into it, looks very good what i've seen on video clips i've been sent.

Apparently its rather busy and manic at Silverstone with all the teams having to sign in etc.

Looking forward to seeing the car in real life lol

 

[faster4_tec]

ah real lancs is a gem of a uni, twas my 2nd choice, but alas my a level maths was dyre thanks to them teaching us the WRONG cylabus

otherwise I'd be there now or edinburgh. from what I saw in 2004 the lancs car back then was very very good.

do they still have the big wave machine?

 

[jug]

i challenge faster4_tec to say something nice (just once) about an educational establishment he has studied at in the past.

 

[faster4_tec]

erm, let me think for a while

 

[angel]

jug does he get a prize if he can?

 

[angel]

do they still have the big wave machine?

yes apparently they do still have it!

 

[custard]

i challenge faster4_tec to say something nice (just once) about an educational establishment he has studied at in the past.

just glad he never got to edinburgh

 

[faster4_tec]

edinburgh heriott watt is great, only downside is the 50min busride to town and £15 taxi fair at night and apparently riding a bike whilst drunk can affect your driving license

any downsides there however are seriously outweighed by the higher class of tottie on offer, same at lanc's, much more upper class/less braindead ladies there. wheras sunderland, theres maybe less than 2% of total student population are even worth looking in the general direction of have to go to newcastle to find anything with an iq higher than 10 :yuck:

 

[angel]

Just thought you'd like to see a pic of the car.

Rain held off and the event was quite busy.

No doubt Tom will fill in all the details as its still going on now!

 

[faster4_tec]

never knew angel was 10yrs old?


changed a bit since i last saw the lancs car, beautiful cast uprights though! and outboard shocks is a new one on me

for our uprights we ended up fabricating them ourselves, then getting an outside company to weld them up, they're made from sheet metal and a few cnc'd joints. not nice to look at but CA simulations showed them to be uber stiff/for the weight.

who won the class 1 overall?

 

[Emm]

Just thought you'd like to see a pic of the car.

Rain held off and the event was quite busy.

No doubt Tom will fill in all the details as its still going on now!

wow great to see a pic of the car!! cant wait to hear how they got on with it

 

[arseofbox]

otherwise I'd be there now or edinburgh. from what I saw in 2004 the lancs car back then was very very good.

do they still have the big wave machine?

Yep LR04 was brill IIRC although it looked like it was made from biscuit tins. The 2005 entry was better .

Wave tank exists unfortunatly...we were contemplating leaving a few 'gifts' in it for the supervisor. once we returned from the event.

FYI the uprights are actually 3 axis CNC milled, by a local aerospace supply company. I absolutely love the engineering that went into those, cos theres all possibility that theyre too strong for the purpose! (KTH had something similar although about half the weight!)

As for the event itself, it was a bit poor really. Dynamically the car did mid table (4.7s for acceleration - LC was fooked!, mid table for skidpad and autocross), but we equally only did mid table in terms of static performance. We placed high (top 15 IIRC) for the presentation, but low as expected for design and we feel the cost event was a bit of a letdown.

Oh, and it stopped terminally 100m from the end of the endurance as it had boiled its fuel and was starving itself. The IMechE somehow managed to make their course 140m per lap longer than specified in the rules, so were happy that it covered the 22km required. The buggers wont uphold our complaint mind. Grrr.:bang:

 

[faster4_tec]

boiling its fuel, unusual!!

when the sunderland car used to run on yamaha/kawa bike engines it was a upright twin 600, but in order to go with the rules adn the single restrictor thing, we had to put a single aftermarket carb onit,and a lengty inlet mani, which then froze up beautifully within about 15sec of running

in th end solved with a 12ltre carbon plenum and a water jacket
which was then a waste of time as we went to the KTM/suzuki 404cc single cylinders (wanted teh 600, but cost for two of them was unholy massive).

did you see the sunderland car atall? i'd be surprised even they even made it down there TBH. :bang: