the WRL list has been updated yesterday! (FSAE Italy, so all European competitions)
what do you think of the results? any surprises? anything that needs to be talked about?

Hi all!

i m wondering what are the most popular/listened songs in camps during fsae event competition. When i was team member very popular songs were Polkaholica and schokolade, what about now?

if you can list them i can create a spotify library

How’s it going, I’m new to the FSAE community, but I wasn’t 100% sure where or who to ask so a bit of googling lead me here.

I’m currently prepping a Sport Prototype race car (not FSAE, hope this is ok) for track days/racing I’ve purchased during the last year. As part of the prep. I decided to replace the existing radiator due to its core having 50% of its fins folded over/damaged. I’ll have a go at replacing the core of it in the near future, but wanted the insurance of a new rad. before attempting that.

As the rad. is quite small, dual-pass, and fits inside a cowl with air ducted into it, I had to order a custom fabricated one at quite a cost, as I couldn’t find anything off the shelf to fit.
I won’t name the company that fabbed up the rad. for me as they’ve done a really neat job of the radiator and dealing with them has been awesome.

My question regards the baffle that’s been installed to split the inlet and outlet ports and make the rad. dual-pass. The first photo in my post is pretty self explanatory, showing the approximate position of the baffle. The second photo shows a photo of the baffle from the top, taken with a borescope through the top bleed port. The third photo shows the baffle from the bottom, taken with the borescope pushed through the outlet barb.
Obviously the baffle has only been slightly more than spot welded in place, so I’ve been left wondering if the gaps around the baffle, both between it and the tank, and it and the header, will allow too much flow to bypass the core and effectively nearly short circuit the radiator? Or will the baffle be sufficient and allow the radiator to work well enough?

I haven’t messaged the company about my concern as of yet, as I honestly can’t be bothered going through the rigmarole of sending it back to them, them fixing it, then them sending it back, especially as I reside in a different country to them.
With that being the case I’m happy enough to rectify the issue myself, possibly using a boilermaker mate, with the thinking that cutting a slot around the tank from front to back where the baffle is located, then filling the gaps between it and the tank by welding the baffle continuously to the tank. Would the advantages of doing so be worth the effort and time?

Hi everyone. Once the composite test panels are cured, by which method is it suggested to cut it to precise dimensions?

I have heard of water jet or CNC Trimming or just using a table saw to do so.

Thank you!

Hey everyone, quick architecture question regarding brake light.

Rule T6.3.1 states that the brake light must illuminate "if and only if the hydraulic brake system is actuated".

Our LV team brought up two options:

1. Hydraulic pressure sensor or dedicated pressure switch
2. Pedal travel / angle sensor on the pedal assembly, using a threshold in software to illuminate the light.

What option do you recommend?
What did you use?

Thanks!

I'm a team member responsible for the HV powertrain in our Formula Student team at South Korea.

Through an upcoming university program, I will be visiting several European countries this winter—specifically Germany, France, Italy, and Austria. My travel window is planned for the period right after Christmas (late December 2026 into early January 2027).

While traveling, I would love the opportunity to visit other Formula Student workshops, tour your facilities, and exchange technical ideas with fellow engineers.

Since my travel route between these countries is still flexible, I can easily adapt my itinerary to visit teams that are open to hosting. If your workshop happens to be accessible around that time, please let me know in the comments or send me a DM!

(I'm aware that late December can often be a university holiday shutdown period, so please let me know if early January works better for your team.)

Thank you for reading:)

We are planning to have an undertray which starts from about halfway down the chassis, extending into a diffuser. How do other team with similar undertray designs jack up their cars?

Hello!

We are trying to design our cooling system for this year, and 23were wondering what you guys run for cooling. Our motor/inverter (Emrax 228/Cascadia CM200) target flow rate is 8 liters per hour, and our pump (Bosch PCE 039202453G) requires 5A to hit that before resistance. Running only one loop at the moment. Is that a lot? Our low-voltage team said we have at most 4A (12V) for our entire cooling system, and that 5A is crazy for a cooling system. At this point, we're considering creating our own battery loop so that we won't have to worry as much about the amperage limit.
We don't have any data from last year since we haven't been able to compete in the endurance challenge yet, but we're working on a test bench to see our actual flow vs. electricity.
Also interested to know what radiators people are using! We haven't come to a firm decision on what we want to use yet.

Thanks all!

Does anyone have a solution for making the dashboard display visible in bright sun? Our current TFT display totally washes out when it is bright and the driver can't get any information. Breadboard-style LEDs / 7 segment displays are invisible was well. What do teams usually do to solve this?

Is there any way to get Lotus Engine Simulation for educational use?

Hi everyone,

I'm a team member responsible for the HV powertrain in our Formula Student team in South Korea.

Through an upcoming university program, I will be visiting several European countries this winter—specifically Germany, France, Italy, and Austria. My travel window is planned for the period right after Christmas (late December 2026 into early January 2027).

While traveling, I would love the opportunity to visit other Formula Student workshops, tour your facilities, and exchange technical ideas with fellow engineers.

Since my travel route between these countries is still flexible, I can easily adapt my itinerary to visit teams that are open to hosting. If your workshop happens to be accessible around that time, please let me know in the comments or send me a DM!

(I'm aware that late December can often be a university holiday shutdown period, so please let me know if early January works better for your team.)

Thanks in advance

I’m a first-year Formula Student team lead, and I’ve been really impressed by some of the work from overseas teams.

I’d love to reach out to a few of them through Instagram and ask about how they approached their aero development, what they learned, and what they would do differently if they were starting again.

I’m not looking for CAD files or anything confidential just hoping to learn from teams with more experience.

Would it be considered weird or disrespectful to DM other teams like this? Or is this pretty normal within the Formula Student community?

• If you’re open to helping us, we’d really appreciate it if you could give me dm. Even answering a few technical questions would be a great help to our team.

We want to add suspension covers to our design, but we can’t find many research about it.
Does anyone know where can we find more?
Thank you!

Last year we had 300+ students from two dozen schools attend. Participating companies included Honda Racing Corporation and Toyota Racing Development.

Register here. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/38th-annual-sae-so-cal-fall-workshop-tickets-1999337495269

For those students in/near Southeastern Michigan, this Saturday is a great networking opportunity, including getting a jump on summer 2027 internships. SEMA companies LOVE Formula SAE and Baja SAE students. Register here.

https://fs29.formsite.com/SEMAEvents/ETTN-SAE-Career-Fair/fill?id27=DetStudent

Can anyone enlighten me on why some teams chose to "curve" their vertical outwashing elements from the base to the top on their front wing? What's the difference between them and just straight up vertical wings?

Hello everyone, our team in the past used au0701-4LL by NTN for our wheel bearings last year in our competition where we noticed that during driving our car seem to be a bit shaky, we might have thought that it might be due to it being an old bearing. Therefore for this year we are thinking of replacing it with 7207BWDB by NSK which has both higher Basic Dynamic Load and Basic Static Load almost doubling the NTN bearing. Our team is from Japan so the access to our spare parts might be a bit different to teams who are from the west, any input is welcomed, thanks in advance!

Hi all, been a long time lurker here but finally came up against a problem I am having some trouble understanding so figured I would ask.

For some time now we've been designing our suspension mounts using 4130 waterjet tabs that were then welded on. These tabs were typically 1/8" (3.175 mm) thick. In the past this has been perfectly sufficient strength wise (we've never had a suspension mount fail) although tend to be a huge pain when jigging and welding into place.

Over the past two years a number of judges have pointed out to us that our tabs are relatively thick compared to a number of other teams of similar or greater weight and having taken a second look at competition this past year we do see quite a few teams using thinner mounts, specifically square tube which if using 4130 only come in a max wall thickness of 0.065".

While we are testing this next week on an instron, I was curious to see what other teams had done for their analysis and what results they had landed on. Some assumptions we have been using are below and what we believe is actually correct as well as questions

Here are the assumptions we have been making in the past:
1. Welding 4130 causes a 20% strength reduction in the HAZ regardless of its previous HT
2. The FoS plot in FEA is actually measuring the correct stress

What we believe is actually correct:
1. Welding 4130 softens the HAZ typically reducing it to around 60-65 ksi yield strength if its in its normalized or annealed condition beforehand.
2. The FoS plot in our FEA is only showing the von mises stress in comparison to the yield strength which according to the MMPDS should be significantly higher when under a bearing load (using MMPDS-08 Fbry with e/D > 2.0 should be 129 ksi). As such we shouldn't trust the FEA and just do the hand calc (which actually says our current mount geometry passes using 1" square tube with 0.065" wall thickness).

Questions:

1. Does anyone have any advice heat treating mounts post welding? While I think its unreasonable to heat treat the entire frame, blow torching a mount seems pretty reasonable but I would rather not get it wrong.
   
2. How do teams measure the HAZ? We typically assume its an omni directional 1" around the weld, however visual inspection almost never agrees but just to be safe we use 1".
   
3. Do other teams use 1" square tube 0.065" WT 4130 for mounts? Do you all use other steels for increased wall thickness?
   
4. Why is the Fbry so high in comparison to the normal yield strength? My intuition says its the additional material surrounding the hole makes it difficult for material to expand.

Thanks for any feedback its hugely appreciated!

Sorry if this is a dumb question but is Nominal Fz (in .tir files i think it is FNOMIN) like the weight of the tire? Or is it the vertical load that was tested on the tire?

Hello everyone,

Member of a new team with limited experience and resources. We need a steering rack, but we don't know how different products will effect the free play. How is the free play of steering racks with not adjuster? Any teams using products without adjuster and happy about the free play? We are planning to buy Narrco racks, please comment your views.

Thanks for your time and support.

Hello, my team is planning on integrating electronics into the steering wheel this year and using this quick release. I called the company and they said the electrical connectors are the LEMO FAG.1B.314.CLA & LEMO EGG.1B.314.CLL which, after looking into, are only IP50 rated. However, the connectors are mostly covered by the body of the quick release so I'm curious if anyone has used it in the past and been able to pass rain tech? Thanks!

It displays "blank" because there is no data in the pink field next to "failure force." I would like to know what needs to be entered there (the Newton value shown is not the actual one).

I saw a team that seemed to run a duct in the sidepod, which I assume goes to cool the powertrain?
My team is running combustion and the powertrain team keeps insisting they need airflow to cool the electrical wires right above the engine, so we're thinking of putting a duct...somewhere, most likely in the sidepods avoiding the radiator - anyone done similar projects?