News

Dear all,

The UWA Motorsport team has successfully landed in Victoria!

After touching down today (Sunday 23^rd Nov) at 6am (Melbourne time) we were welcomed by typical local weather; rain, wind and a piercing cold that not many of us are used to. Thankfully we prepared well with all of us packing anoraks and jumpers in anticipation of the conditions. But the weather isn’t dampening our spirits as we make our way to the UWAM headquarters for the next 9 days…Carter Cottage in Werribee. Thanks to the kind owners of Carter, we were allowed to go straight to our base well before the official check-in time to unload our gear and get a nutritious MacDonald’s breakfast (the mothers of 20-odd UWAM members just cringed at the lack of nutritional goodness in such a meal!). I assure all mothers that all the meals from here on in will healthy and delicious!

The first official task was to assign people to a day or night shift so that sleeping patterns may be adjusted. This means that those who will be doing night shifts begin to sleep during the day while day-shift people assume normal sleeping patterns. This system is based around an 8 hour break in which people are able to get adequate sleep whether they work during the day or night.

Since we are picking up the car tomorrow morning from the transport depot, we are currently digesting dinner and planning for the days ahead. After having practiced our technical knowledge for the static design event as a group, those who are working on Monday are sleeping while the night shift stay awake, waiting for morning to go to sleep.

The team is extremely motivated and personally I feel a great sense of comradery from everyone on the team. We are all looking forward to competing and wish all the other teams the best of luck in the coming days.

Further updates will be sent out after each day so stay tuned!

Cheers,

Michael Talikowski

Hello UWAM supporters!

Day number 2 of our stay in Werribee is nearly over and it has been jam-packed.

We picked up the car at around midday today with the hope that everything arrived in the way we had packed it. Thankfully all was in place and nothing was damaged inside the crate during transit. As soon as the crate arrived at Carter Cottage, it was game-on and a swarm of activity has constantly surrounded the car since then.

For now, the team is working around the clock to get the car onto a track and conduct further testing. The undercover area has been converted into a mechanic’s workshop and is now the area of focus as the clock ticks down to day 1 of comp on Friday.

The crate trailer that the car is transported in is a fully contained and custom designed unit that is basically a mobile workshop that we take with us to competitions. Our workshop away from home that we have established in the pictures attached contains bench grinders, vices, basic workshop tools, work benches, high-beam lighting and a car stand. We have also taken with us all the necessary items that we require from WA in tubs which keeps the number of things that we need to purchase to a minimum. We have a system of procurement such that our crate manager, Ray Hyland, has a sub-ordinate Alex Li who purchases any necessary tools or items that are required. Alex is always on call with access to a vehicle for his purchasing requirements.

The specialty of the day for the troops was home-made gourmet pizza with dessert consisting of jelly, fruit and ice-cream. Simone, our UWAM Iron Chef for 2008 arrives tomorrow and will take over from me.

Stay tuned!!

Michael Talikowski

Hello all,

The days are flying by and there's only 2 days left until Friday, the first day of competition. The excitement is growing as we work around the clock to have the car race-ready.

We’ve had to iron out a few bugs which have hampered testing efforts here in Werribee but the car is very close to its local full track test tomorrow (Wednesday).

We have also been placing a heavy emphasis on practicing for the static events including cost, design and presentation to ensure we can obtain maximum points in these areas which don’t involve the car running. We would like to thank the UWA Motorsport Alumni Club for their help in conducting a mock design event. Thanks to their extensive knowledge and experience in the FSAE competitions, they were able to give us a real taste of what the design event requires from us.

Today’s menu consisted of Tacos and Nachos, giving the team a taste of South American cuisine! Only the best for the girls and boys at UWAM.

Unfortunately today’s update is a short one but keep a lookout for Wednesday’s email with more action from Victoria.

Hello all,

Day 4 of our stay in Werribee has been very successful with a full testing session having been conducted without any major hiccups.

Ever since the car arrived on Monday, it has been worked on day and night to prepare for the challenge ahead; its first ever competition! Today at approximately 5pm the team went out along with the car to our night-time testing venue to put the car through its paces and essentially give it a solid shake-down. All systems in the car performed very well with only a few minor glitches that are being rectified. The drivers are very happy with the performance of the car ‘out of the box’, meaning it is a good package that doesn’t require huge amounts of tuning to be usable. It was a full team outing while the car was being put through its paces with everyone watching on in anticipation as the beast we’ve been working all year on thrashes around the tarmac. It is not in full race guise yet because during this testing period the sponsor stickers and proper fairings are subject to premature damage. Thursday will see the car ‘dressed’ in all its glory. Look out for the first ever pictures of the car with its war paint!

Thanks to Simone flying over from Perth to take over cooking duties, the team was treated today to a fantastic roast with vegetables and gravy. One thing is certain and that is that we’re being fed very well!

That’s all for now. It’s time to get back to work on the car with time ticking down to Friday, with Thursday being team and driver registration. 

Watch for update number 5!!

Hello our valued UWAM supporters!

There is only one more sleep until the first day of events on Friday. As I write this, the boys and girls are out testing and running-in UWAM08 (a.k.a ALF-008). We had decided to not scrutineer today and instead achieve as much testing as we can to ensure we have a reliable race-car. It appears that this car is quite promising although we do not want to say too much too soon. The new innovative features on the car are working well and hopefully hold out long enough to last out the endurance event on Sunday.

Team registration happened today with myself, Steven Mok, Dominique Morgan and Alex Li heading down to the venue to check out our pit tent and register the team. It was great to see the other team’s entries for those that were present, including many of the foreign teams that travelled long distances to compete. After driver and team briefing, FSAE-A put on a dinner for all team members with introductions to the main sponsors, GM Holden.

After returning from the registration, we found out the guys with the car were continuing with testing at the venue, asking if we could bring along some dinner, jumpers, drinks and other items for track. Thanks to strong team work, we put together some dinner for the guys at track along with a bunch of jumpers, drinks and tuning tools.

The guys just got back from testing and it sounds like most things seem in order. This running session seemed to uncover a few small issues that could really have hurt us in Endurance event, showing how easy it is to lose huge amounts of points from a silly mistake.

Tomorrow’s events include scrutineering (tilt test, brake test and noise) and also static events (Cost, presentation and design events). It will be an action-packed day and we’re all looking forward to the competition.

Cheers!

Click here for the latest pictures!!

Hello everyone,

Wow what a day it has been!! Today was the first day of real competition with yesterday being merely a registration day. Overall, the day went very smoothly while having to cram a number of events, scrutineering tests and practice sessions all into one day. Please read below for some more details:

Scrutineering – Technical inspection: This involves checking the car to see whether it abides by the rules set by FSAE. We arrived at the venue at 7am to ensure we get a position in the line that waits to get scrutineered. Sometimes if the line is huge, then this wait can be long, but thankfully, our pit tent is next door to the scrutineering tent and we got underway very quickly. The scrutineering took a bit longer than planned as they were training up some new people. This became a problem once the clock hit 10:30 as this was when we had our fist event… Cost! We had to stop scrutineering and rush over to the enormous shed up the road to do the cost event, after which we had to line up again and finish scrutineering later on.

Cost event: after rushing off from scrutineering, we arrived just in time to a number of waiting judges eager to talk to us about our cost report which we had submitted a couple of months ago. Our finance manager Alex Li along with Pete Marsh and Denis Streltsov were quizzed about the financial aspects of the car’s construction and our finance system. Thanks to a number of very cost-effective and efficient processes UWAM has developed in recent years, we were able to present a very cost-conscious argument to the judges which hopefully will result in a good score (results will be announced tomorrow)

Driver registration: this is where all the drivers are registered including Pete Marsh, Ray Hyland, Denis Streltsov, Dylan St Jack and Stuart Saare. Stu, being the tallest driver is given a wrist band that indicates that he must be the driver sitting in the car for both the tilt test and driver egress. The tilt test (see pictures) checks for leaks under the car under simulated lateral loads while driver egress is a check to see whether the tallest driver on the team (Stu) can exit the car in under 5 seconds in the event of a fire. Stu was able to exit in 4.8 seconds. The egress test was also conducted during scrutineering.

Presentation: A big thank you goes to Gurkaran Bansal and Fred Goh for doing the presentation event which consists of presenting a business proposition to a pretend panel of investors. We believe it went very well even though they quizzed us with some challenging questions at the end!

Fuel fill: Our fuel tanks gets filled to the top with a control fuel (98 Octane unleaded) after which we head off to test the car for leaks at the tilt table.

Tilt table: the was tilted to 60 degrees to the horizontal and no leaks were found which is great news!

Brake Test: this tests to see whether the car can lock all four wheels up under heavy braking. The driver is asked to accelerate and then slam the brakes in an attempt to lock the wheels. This proves the integrity of the car’s braking system. It only took us one go at this to prove that UWAM’s braking system is extremely effective.

All of these checks are required before a car is deemed eligible to  race. Thanks to everything going well we passed every test with flying colours!

Finally, there was the design event at 4:20pm. This is the most challenging of the static events in that it really tests the student’s knowledge about the car and the systems that the student designed. The guys looked great while talking to the judges, who are all experts in their respective fields. We are all very happy with how the event went and hope that it was enough to get us into the design finals which are held on Saturday afternoon.

After such a good day, spirits are high even though we are all beginning to feel the long hours taking their toll. With Saturday’s events being all dynamic, it will certainly be an even more exciting day as UWAM attempts to defend its crown!

Keep an eye out for Saturday’s update!

Dear all,

I apologise for this very brief update but due to sheer exhaustion yesterday after returning from track I didn’t write an update. We are about to head off to the last and most vital day of the competition. Sunday represents a lot of points due to the running of the endurance event (350 points) and the fuel economy event (50 points).

Yesterday we were one of three teams that got into design finals which is a huge achievement for the boys! We also believe that we won the autocross event thanks to Pete’s awesome abilities. Other events haven’t gone as well as we had hoped but we are still in the running for the win with teams such as Stuttgart, Aukland and RMIT standing in our way! We achieved 8^th place in Presentation and 7^th in acceleration. This is well below our potential and it is a little disappointing but we’ll have to live with it and do our best in the coming event. The results for the cost event and design finals comes out today after the endurance events.

I’ll post an update as soon as I can about the final results of the competition. Wish us luck!!

Dear all,

I am extremely pleased to announce that UWA Motorsport have come 2^nd place at the formula SAE Australasia competition!! The winners were from the university of Stuttgart who are an extremely strong team having already won 2 competitions this year with that car! We are honoured to come second to such a good team.

I would like to apologise for not sending out these details earlier. After the competition ended, we went to the after-party which left me incapable of using electronic equipment such as laptops!

The results that Formula SAE - Australasia has posted are here.

The overall results are:

Overall placement: 2^nd Place

Presentation event: 8^th

Cost event: 7^th

Endurance event: 2^nd

Acceleration event: 7^th

Autocross: 1^st

Overall performance: 2^nd

Fuel economy: 3^rd

Design Event: 3^rd

I would like to thank all of our sponsors for their kind support throughout the year, many of whom showed enormous patience when dealing with us! You have played a huge part in our learning and development.  I would like to thank the Vice Chancellor for his continuing help and also the School of Mechanical Engineering of UWA. Without this support the team would not exist and we are all eternally grateful for this. We would also like to thank our families for putting up with us. It is not easy living with a UWA Motorsport member because of their ludicrous sleeping habits and various other uwam annoyances.

We would also like to thank the UWA Alumni Club for helping us prepare for the competition. The team members from previous years have a huge amount of knowledge not only about the cars but also about the competition itself, assisting us to compete as best we can.

A heart-felt thank you to everyone!!!!

Please keep an eye out on the website for all the pictures and videos from the competition!!