FSAE Australia

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tohnloke

tohnloke

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Hey Aussies,

This weekend is FSAE Australasia, which is an international competition where students from different universities design, build, and race scaled down F1 cars. We're judged on design, cost, a business presentation, and, of course, speed. On Saturday we compete in acceleration, skid pad, and autocross (all time trials). On Sunday there are endurance runs where every car has to do 2 separate 22km races with a driver change in the middle. They run several cars at the same time, but passing is only in designated ares. *I think this is the schedule, I'll update it if that's incorrect*

Anyways, it might be cool to come out and spectate. It's held at Calder Park. I don't know if there are any admission fees or not, but I would imagine they would be minimal at best.

Here's the event website:
http://www.saea.com.au/

Here's my team's website:
https://www.facebook.com/MizzouFSAE/


Cheers,
Tony
 
Nice looking FSAE car!

I was with the UC San Diego FSAE team back in '98 and '99. We were pretty lucky just to raise enough funds to get to the competition in Detroit both years, it was a real shoestring operation for us.

Good luck at the competition! :thumbup:
 
UCSD! Their paddock was right next to ours at Lincoln (FSAE West) last summer. Really great crew.

We've been really fortunate to have a killer business team the last couple years, and we worked with the study abroad dept. at our school to help make this happen.

Thanks!
 
I'm kinda surprised UCSD even has a team again, although I guess it's been awhile. ;-) My second year not only did the school provide zero support for the team, the even went so far as to lock us out of the student machine shop where we were building the car a couple times. I put in a couple hundred hours TIG welding the tubular space frame design we used the second year. Probably a bad idea, we probably could have done ok just modifying the chassis we used the first year. The 2nd car was better, and crap load faster with a turbo charged Yamaha 600, but we pretty much finished the car in the parking lot in Detroit, so we were tuning as we went. We ended up pulling 84hp on the dyno, which was 2nd for the field, but we stuck the turbo after that and had to convert back to n/a and remap the whole fuel injection tune the night before the endurance race to even make an appearance.

It was a heck of a ride though, and I learned a ton. I still use some of the things I learned back then when I build my cars now.
 
I just graduated from Cal Poly Pomona last year. I was apart of the SAE Mini-Baja team but we shared our shop with the FSAE team.
 
Yeah, we're about middle of the road as far as University support goes, although one of the faculty who used to fight really hard for us recently resigned, so we'll see how things go in the future (I'm a junior). It seems like the Australian teams are getting pushed really hard towards doing FSAE electric instead of internal combustion. Heck, we're staying in the same dorms as a school who just got kicked off of campus by their university.

We still do a tig welded space frame. A lot of schools are going to either partial or full monocoques, but not us. We run a naturally aspirated cbr600 RR engine. A lot of guys have success with a turbocharged single (often a bored CR450F) and save a lot of weight doing so.
Did dyno runs used to be a part of the competition? I'd like to hear a little more about what they were like in your day.

MuuMuu, I wish our school's baja team was more active. They exist, but I don't think they've made it to competition since I've been at the University. The jeep owner in me would love to see it get developed more. We do have a pulling tractor team that does (I think) pretty well, and they have to use the same engines.
 
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