"tromoly" (tromoly)
12/12/2015 at 13:54 • Filed to: Formula SAE, Australasia, FSAE-A, Racecar
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"tromoly" (tromoly)
12/12/2015 at 13:54 • Filed to: Formula SAE, Australasia, FSAE-A, Racecar | 2
| 2 |
In a few short hours teams down in Australia will start running the Morning Endurance session down under at the 2015 Formula SAE Australasia competition. Before the session begins, a quick recap of the previous days’ events is necessary.
The Static events played out to a few different teams on Friday. Cost was taken by University of New South Wales, Presentation was taken by University of Auckland, and Design was taken by Monash University.
Yesterday, being Saturday, the Dynamic events began. The biggest change for those who have never seen the Australasian competition was the number of runs each team is allowed in each event; Here in the US teams are allowed two runs with two drivers, giving a total of four runs per event, whereas in Australasia, due to the much lower car count teams are allowed as many run as they desire within the time window while being fair to all other teams. This gave an interesting scenario in Skid Pan where some teams made many laps while incrementally reducing their times, while others took very few runs.
Skid Pan and Acceleration were run in the morning, with Monash taking the Skid Pan win, and Edith Cowan University taking Acceleration.
In the Afternoon the Autocross sessions were run, with two sessions ran and “unlimited” laps available for each team. The track was rather long, with initial sighting laps hovering around 1:55 to 2:00, and with drivers learning the track times quickly fell to around the 1:45 mark. The early session was a dogfight between University of Wollongong and University of Melbourne, with both setting times in the 1:41s; However, Wolongong clipped a cone or two and handed the session fast time to Melbourne.
During the break between Autocross sessions one eye was kept on the Monash team, as an electrical gremlin popped up as they were about to start the car for their first lap in the first Autocross session, and they spent the remaining session time working on the car. As the second session began they still were diagnosing the car, with time ticking away their participation looked grim.
After a few runs in the second session times began to drop significantly. University of Auckland knocked a couple seconds of their previous sessions’ best, as did University of Melbourne and Wollongong. One car of note was the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology’s (RMIT) Electric car taking the 6th fastest time, relatively speaking E-cars are newer to the Australasian competitions and for such a car with no aerodynamic package to be running just under 3 seconds off the pace of the winning car is incredible.
With time winding down the Monash car made it into the queue, however due to the previous problems they could only get four total laps over their two drivers, as opposed to the dozens ran by other teams. Getting out on track the Monash team showed once again how they’ve won so many championships, with the second run of their first driver taking the fastest time of 1:38.275, half a second faster than the second-place car of Wollongong. With that single lap, Monash was back on top and with three event wins sits on top of the standings with only the Endurance events left to go.
So that leaves us with today. Because Australasian teams love driving, they have two (2) Endurance sessions, one in the Morning, one in the Afternoon, both are sure to be exciting. Can Wollongong, a team only half a second behind Monash in Autocross, take down the giants and take the victory? Could there be a dark horse victory with the RMIT car, already seen to be fast, taking an Endurance win? And the biggest question of all, has Monash banished their electrical gremlins, or could they sputter out on track in the Upset of Upsets? Keep an eye on the clock for the Endurance events to begin!
uofime-2
> tromoly
12/12/2015 at 18:33 |
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Aaaaand another win for monash
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tromoly
> uofime-2
12/12/2015 at 18:54 |
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Most likely, yeah. If they didn’t get everything fixed for Autocross yesterday it would be a massively different story.