• Think about what other people are thinking.

• Give honest feedback without being a jerk.

• Take your own and your team’s feelings seriously.

• Notes for students

• Notes for Design Judges

• Comparing and engineering for different materials

• Strength, stiffness, triangulation, load paths, gussets

• Suspension loading

• EV Accumulator mounts

In addition to a torsion test, local and whole-chassis FEA can show performance for different chassis designs during combined cornering, aero and bump loads, for drivetrain attachments during acceleration and braking, and for harness and other mounts during front impact.

In the time it takes to read this sentence, design finalists are capable of presenting data from the same day’s Autocross, along with analysis of which assumptions the data validates or invalidates, how it fits with all their other testing, and what the next steps are to continue improving the car and drivers. They do this for everything, all year.

To manage priorities, ask four questions about every design decision, in this order: 1. Is it legal or illegal? 2. How does the change affect reliability or repeatability? 3. How does the change affect overall vehicle performance over a lap? 4. What are the drivability effects?

Chris Warren provides some tips for what to expect and how to approach the design event.

Instead of thinking that you have to fill up X number of pages for the design report, the mentality should be “how can we fit all of our knowledge and work into these pages?”