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"         For the past three years R&amp;amp;amp;T has given a to the best-performing Formula SAE team. We have on occasion also given a brief overview of the entire event. Brief, because it would be impossible to cover all the trials and tribulations of a single team, let alone 140 of them.   Every team producing a car deserves credit and any team that makes it into our top five deserves special recognition. The task of building a competitive formula car is not an easy one. Chassis are fabricated from nothing more than a collection of steel tubing or expensive rolls of carbon fiber. Suspension type and geometry is a choice left to the students, as is the camber gain, motion ratio, Ackerman steering angle, caster and king-pin inclination. These aren&amp;#039;t things many racers get to worry about. At best they get to make small adjustments to an already built system. To design an entire car from scratch is a daunting task for any engineer.   The construction of a custom-built race car in Formula SAE is an enormous undertaking. If a school wants to be successful, the car becomes an all-consuming project that saps its team&amp;#039;s members of money, grade point average and sleep. The work these students do rivals that of a small Formula 1 team. Back in the &amp;#039;80s when the competition started, the cars were nothing more than big go-karts. Today teams are developing their own fuel injection, building custom V-8 engines, producing carbon-fiber monocoque chassis and investing in wind-tunnel testing. Of course this is all done in the name of education and much is donated.   FSAE is the number-one place to find future automotive engineers. The students know this, and realize they are competing not only for a trophy but for a good job as well. This is quite a good motivator for innovation and the production of fast cars.   Over the past 20 years, school teams have learned what it takes to go fast. Schools with longer legacies tend to do well, because they have more experience \u2014 although that experience is difficult to pass along when teams disband at the end of a school year, and new members form the next team. A good faculty advisor can help tremendously. Some advisors have written SAE white papers on the subject and there is at least one case of a book being published.   Spectators rarely understand the complexities of building a competitive car. The most important aspect is reliability. Before you can win, you&amp;#039;ve got to finish. To be reliable means testing and using practices of assembly similar to those of an airplane mechanic. Safety wire, Loctite and high-strength bolts are the norm. Practice runs before the May event is a luxury only the best teams seem to have. There is always something left to be done, and there are few cars at the year-end competition that aren&amp;#039;t still being worked on.   The cars that made it in our competition had plenty of driving time and all of the teams have had previous successful teams. The cars are also fairly simple. Not using too many problematic ideas, but focusing on one or two important ones. University of Missouri at Rolla invested time in developing wings, Cornell developed an electronic boost controller for their turbo, Auburn focused on pneumatic shifting, while Texas A&amp;amp;amp;M and Akron kept it simple and built their cars as simply and lightly as they could. Don&amp;#039;t be fooled. Just because a car has some nifty gizmos doesn&amp;#039;t mean it&amp;#039;s going to be fast. The whole car has to work together. Building a fast FSAE car is a puzzle, and I&amp;#039;d bet the guys on these teams can beat a Rubik&amp;#039;s cube. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/motorsports/news/a10365/formula-sae-2004/>