Articles Curated by Formula SAE Judges
Guide To 2025 FSAE Frame Rule Changes
Ride Height, Impact Attenuator, Impact Structure Heights
Use Eyes For Harness Clips
EV Rear Diagonal Requirement
Get External Items off the Main Hoop and Main Hoop Braces
Why Do Engineers Need Social Skills?
Think about what other people are thinking.
Give honest feedback without being a jerk.
Take your own and your team’s feelings seriously.
A Faculty Advisor’s Perspective on Formula Design Judging
Notes for students
Notes for Design Judges
Simple Kinematic Philosophies
Suspension Geometry
Controls Toe Angle Movement
Controls Camber Gain
Controls Ride Height Movement
Good geometry gives the springs, dampers, and anti-roll bars more influence than the geometry itself
A Guide To FSAE Axles
Many of the common issues with FSAE halfshafts stem from these problems:
Extreme misalignment between differential and wheel hub
Tripod housing depth too shallow or too deep on either or both ends
Contaminants in grease
Engineering A Lighter Chassis, Part 1
Comparing and engineering for different materials
Strength, stiffness, triangulation, load paths, gussets
Suspension loading
EV Accumulator mounts
EV Performance Fundamentals
Engineer a strong battery lifespan
EV Efficiency is as important as mass, downforce, drag, power, and mu.
Create tools for drivers to manage energy
Add regenerative braking later
Tube Frame Analysis
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.
Starting A Formula SAE Team From Scratch
Set up business and school relationships.
Recruit and organize a team.
Write and raise a budget.
THEN design and build the car.
Field Guide To Design Finals
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.
Competitive Intelligence
Doing research, reverse engineering, setting design targets. Additional insight for teams thinking about making the EV transition.
The Indigo Story
They made a whole host of small changes that were almost imperceptible to the eye but aerodynamically significant. They also gave the car a nose-down rake by lowering the front suspension and raising the rear, both ever-so-slightly. All of the changes made the car significantly safer to drive at high speed. But the Ford Indigo was never going to be driven at high speeds as a show concept car – right?
Overall Vehicle Priorities
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?
Design Of Strong, Stiff, And Light Structures And Joints
The most common barrier between your team and your performance goals is reliability. These design best practices are intended to help you create strong, stiff, and light mechanical designs. Every design requires tradeoffs, and this list is not intended to be a set of absolute rules; but it will help you identify common design strategies to follow, pitfalls to avoid, and will inform your design decision making.
The Origins Of Aston Martin’s V12
There was one closely held secret design condition. It was secret because management would not want us to ‘overdesign’ the V12. The truth is, with clever engineering, planning for significant power increases adds very little weight and cost if you know what you are doing and if it is done up front.
An Introduction to Cost in Engineering
Engineering is about finding the Goldilocks Solution. Cost is not separate from engineering; indeed it must go hand in hand with it. Good engineering practice goes beyond the merely technical, and encompasses knowledge of customers, supply chain, society, environmental impact etc.
Notes On Anthropometry
There is amazing variability in human bodies. Generally, vehicles are designed to reach from the 5th to 95th percentile, including any gender differences. But determining the measurements to use is complicated. Different countries or regions may have different ranges, and the gene interactions for any individual result in many different percentiles depending on the measurement.
Writing the Design Report
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?”
Dynamic Valve Event Optimization
The approach to understand what makes an engine run well is to look at the opening and closing of each valve. But whatever you want the valves to do, they’re actually doing something else, because you always have: Deflection, Inertia, and Vibration.
Adding Aero, Justifying Aero
Simply finding the combination that gives the fastest laptime is missing the point. The point is to understand the size of each effect, and how to engineer each effect to achieve the fastest laptime.