Our road trip of 2 500 kilometers from Oulu, Finland to Assen in the Netherlands started early Saturday morning from the University of Oulu. Our plan was to drive to Uppsala in Sweden during Saturday and to continue our journey to Assen early on Sunday morning. This road trip tested our teams limits in terms of short sleep-time and sitting in the van for the whole weekend. But all of the team members were excited and motivated to participate in the first international official FSAE-event.
Luckily the scenery especially in Sweden was spectacular. Great lakes and hills kept our team interested during the long drive and also the famous Øresund Bridge (FIN: Juutinrauman silta) kept the team members busy with their cameras. Also the long drive gave us opportunity to take a closer look at the MaxxECU provided by our sponsor TTSpeed and to think about the final adjustments for our engine.
After two whole days of driving in Sweden, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands we made it to to the TT Circuit of Assen late in Sunday evening. We constructed our pits and set a camp to the local campsite. On Monday morning we had time to do our final adjustments for the FSO17 in the pits before the evaluation of the Engineering Design-event.
The Engineering Design event was about evaluating the methods on which we designed and constructed our car. Team members had their chance to express their thoughts on their solutions for the design of different parts of the car. The engine, frame, the electrics, suspension and brakes were all evaluated. After the evaluation, the judges left to calculate the points that the team would score.
The next checkpoint would be the scrutineering, where the car would be inspected to be as such as the rules of the competition define. The rest of the Monday all about building the car in order to get it pass the inspection, so that we could participate the events of Acceleration, Skid pad and Autocross on Wednesday. The Final event of Endurance would be held on Thursday in the TT Junior Circuit.
Meanwhile the marketing team had to present their Business Plan Presentation on Tuesday for the judges. Each team had to create a valid business plan for their prototype racer to make a profitable business around it. Our team did pretty good in their debyt-presentation and the judges actually liked the idea to establish a Formula Student-production line in Tornio, Finland!
On Tuesday we were standing on our toes when we rolled our car to the Techno Center for scrutineering. We had worked for the whole year around our car for this very moment. Our ultimate goal is to build a car according to the rules that it would pass the official FSAE-sctrutineering and we would be able to race in our first official FSAE-event with the best teams in Europe.
The joy was tremendous when we were told that the car had passed the scrutineering! Our car had been accepted by the official FSAE-judges and we would be able to compete in the competition! We passed the tilt-test, noise-test, braketest, the technical inspection and the tests of frame and safety equipment. We were also astonished by the weight of our car. With the weight of 211,4 kg, not only our car is almost 56 kg lighter than our last car, the FSO17 was one of the lightest cars in the grid! Even lighter than most of the cars equipped with a carbon-fibre monoque.
Unfortunately, our car didn’t turn out the way we planned it to be. We didn’t have time to finish our aerodynamics and also our plans for the colour changed a little. We decided to paint our first version of FSO17 with a color of pink and we got a lot of attention from the other teams in the pits because of our color. The Finnish guys with a pink car become almost celebrities in the pits when teams around the world wanted to see our car and the team behind it.
In the edge of the first events we suffered a major setback when we noticed that our alternator didn’t work. A quick decision was to run without the alternator in order to participate as much events as possible. Only what we needed for the acceleration event was to setup our engine with the ECU.
Early on Wednesday we made two stints in the acceleration event, and we noticed some problems with the gearbox. The car ran otherwise well, but we had difficulties with the shifter when shifting to the 3rd gear. Nevertheless we managed to put a competitive time to the table and to get decent points from the first event.
Next up was the skid pad, where it would be required to drive 4 laps around a figure of eight in a wet track. The first stint was good and we got good points from the skid-pad as well. Unfortunately, during the second stint in the skid-pad, we suffered an engine failure.
When the car was rolled back to the pits, we opened the oil pan and realized that this was game over. The bearings from the connecting rods were all broken and the 600cc Triumph-engine was ruined. Looked like we had to build our engine all over again for the next competition.
Even though we suffered a major setback and our competition was over, the team spirit was still good and everyone were still glad that we made it to the competition overall. We managed to get some proper points from our debut-competition in an official FSAE-event, and we got to meet the best teams in Europe and learn so much from them. At this point we’d like to thank all of the teams in the pit-lane that helped us with our car! We couldn’t have made it this far this without them!
The official results are in and we managed to be 28th in the competition even though we had challenges with our car. Unfortunately this year we lost the unofficial Finnish Championship to UAS Motorsport Tampere. But we are still really proud of what we have accomplished in our debut-competition and we are developing our car further the rest of the year to get even more better results next year. And we aim to beat our competitors in Tampere next year. The results with individual events can be seen below.
We’d like to congratulate are colleagues of Valencia for the spectacular win!
If you are interested in our organization or are interested with sponsorships and marketing, feel free to contact us in [email protected].