FS Silverstone Report 2011
Formula Student 2011 officially started on Wednesday the 13th of July. However whilst most teams were preparing on Wednesday and scruitneering on Thursday, we were in our workshop trying to put the finishing touches to our car. The reason we had got into this position in the first place, was due to a culmination of facts. This year, our team has seen a fairly large reduction in team members and also financial problems from the start of the project has stretched our resources to their absolute maximum. When you add those factors to trying to complete a full time degree it is perhaps an inevitability that your project will face difficulties.
Friday
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Our small build team somehow managed to find the energy and drive to stay awake for 60 hours straight to get the car to Silverstone. When the team arrived in pit 6B on Friday morning, the car was rolling around for the first time, however it was far from complete.
The car still needed a full wiring loom building and fitting, which I was assured by another team is at least a 2 week job to get right. There was also the small matter of the static events to take care of during the morning. Despite the size of the task in hand, the team worked flat out to build a loom for the car. It’s probably worth mentioning at this point that our team has no electronics expert and consists of purely Mechanical Engineering students. The static events went really smoothly, our Business case was very well received and we were told that our cost report was one of the best submitted this year. The design event also ran well, however we were marked down heavily for having no electronics on the car, which we couldn’t argue with or do anything about at that stage. |
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Despite the seemingly impossible task, by the end of Friday most of the components of the car were wired up and working, the real test would come when we could attempt to start the car for the first time. Before we could get that far, technical inspection would need to be passed, as the rules state you’re not allowed to run your car without your tech sticker.
Saturday
| While our competitors were preparing for a very wet acceleration and skid pad on Saturday morning, we were in line for tech inspection. The official weight of the car (including wet tyres and the water residing on the cars bodywork and floor) was 223kg, a full 11kg’s lighter than last year’s car. Tech inspection ran pretty smoothly, with only minor changes required for the car to be fully legal. One scruitineer commented that a car of such quality shouldn’t be in tech on Saturday, a nice gesture but it didn’t change the reality of the situation. Once tilt had been passed, the moment of truth came when we would be allowed to try and start the engine for the first time. With quite a large crowd of family and friends around, we pressed the start button for the first time……to be greeted by only the sound of the starter motor fruitlessly spinning 4 cylinders. The fault finding began, all the time being inundated by goings on with acceleration and skid pad events. After an hour or so of testing the engines ignition and fuel system, the problem was traced back to low fuel pressure due to a cracked fuel pump. Our fuel pump is integrated into the fuel cell so replacing it is no small task and took a good while to replace. |  |
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By the time we had replaced the pump we had missed the skid pad and acceleration, but we at least had fuel pressure. Unfortunately though, we still had a problem. The fuel pump issue was masking a problem that was much more difficult to diagnose, a wiring issue. The engine would now run all be it very poorly. Once again, the fault finding began, we knew we almost certainly had a faulty earth somewhere in the system but tracing problems with wiring is not always straight forward. Whilst Global Formula Racing were proving to great effect that wings really do work in the Sprint event, we were back in the pits trying to find the problem. Eventually, the problem was traced back to an earth connection to our Motec M400 ECU, once it was re-connected the engine fired on the first turn but by this point, the sprint event had finished. The team had done a fantastic job to get the car running in such a short space of time, but we had missed out on a 275 points worth of dynamic events which at the time was quite difficult to swallow. |
Sunday
As we hadn’t managed to set a time in the sprint event on the Saturday, we were not allocated a running slot for the endurance event on Sunday, so we would have to run at the very end of the session. We were also yet to pass the noise and brake test. We passed noise first time with a maximum of 108 db’s and after we had tensioned the chain, we passed the brake test with no dramas. All that was left to do now was prepare the car for the endurance. For those not familiar with our team and previous year’s performances, we haven’t completed the endurance in the UK since 2007 and one of our main aims for this year’s car was to set that record straight. The weather throughout the day was changeable to say the least, so gambling on a set up is all we could do given the time frame. After a very technical ‘look at the sky’ we decided to go with a dry set up in the hope that the wet track would dry out for our run. As our time for the endurance came, the nerves began to kick in. Having not had chance to give the car a shakedown, we weren’t sure if the car would complete a few laps, never mind 22. The track was also still wet at this point, which added to the tension.
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After a few inspirational words from Chris, Scott took the car out for the first half of the endurance, the tyre choice at this point was defiantly slicks, however there were still damp patches and the usual amount of oil that you would expect to find after a full day of formula student events. The cars pace was instantly way beyond anyone else’s on track, so it wasn’t long before we were caught up in traffic. We couldn’t complain about the group that we went out in, however it was very frustrating to get held up on almost every lap. In fact, in total we got 4 clear laps for the entire session which cost us a lot in terms of our overall time.
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After a trouble free first stint from Scott, it was time for the mandatory driver change at the halfway point. Darren jumped into the car and instantly settled into a rhythm. The lap times were running consistently in the 63’s depending on traffic, with the single fastest lap being the high 61’s. For those not there on the day, Stuttgart’s (winners of the endurance and competition) fastest lap was in the high 57’s which highlights just what pace our car has. The commentary team went as far as saying, ‘Huddersfield are the revelation of the event!’ due to the lap times we were putting in. Darren ran into some minor gearshift issues towards the end of his stint, however it wasn’t enough to stop him or the car, which came home a relatively unnoticed 7th fastest of the day and 2nd fastest of the UK teams. After the fuel economy aspect of the endurance event had been taken into consideration, we placed 16th. Our already thirsty Honda CBR 600 engine had used a fair bit of fuel in our stint (4.7 litres), which cost us in terms of points. After the problems we had seen over the weekend, we played it safe with our engines ‘map’ which sets the amount of fuel going into the engine throughout its RPM range. When the points were tallied at the end of the day, our overall position was 28th of 79 teams, which considering our failure to run on Saturday was a very solid result.
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Team HARE would like to say well done to everyone at the IMechE and the volunteers that made the event possible, we feel they dealt very well with very difficult circumstances which were effectively beyond their control. We’d also like to say thank you to everyone that helped us through the weekend by lending us a hand or lending us spare parts! The team can now look forward to our next event in Hungary, where we will be looking to build upon our 6th place finish from last year. In the meantime the team will be busy refining engine maps on the rolling road, building a brand new wiring loom and also giving the car a new paint job! We are looking to find new sponsorship partners for our trip to Hungary, to see how you could help our team, please email teamhare@hud.ac.uk or visit the Sponsorship page of our website for further details.
