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San Jose State's 2017 FSAE Car

Posted: Tue May 02, 2017 6:02 pm
by moy
I wanted to share the Formula SAE car I have been working on for the past 9 months for San Jose State University's team.

The engine is a 675cc 2013 Triumph Street Triple. We are using an S100 for engine control and to control our pneumatic shifting. We are also using an STC to control our Bosch electronic throttle body.

If you want to follow us or learn more about it check out our website and social media pages:

http://www.sjsuformulasae.com/
https://www.facebook.com/SpartanRacingSJSU/
https://www.instagram.com/sjsuformulasae/

Re: San Jose State's 2017 FSAE Car

Posted: Wed May 03, 2017 4:01 am
by ignitionautosport
Very, very cool.

Re: San Jose State's 2017 FSAE Car

Posted: Wed May 03, 2017 7:06 am
by katana
Neat project but i'm really not liking the wings front or rear! Aren't these cars artificially strangled by regulations so power is capped and wasting what you have on massive drag inducers seems counter productive?

Re: San Jose State's 2017 FSAE Car

Posted: Wed May 03, 2017 4:32 pm
by moy
katana wrote:Neat project but i'm really not liking the wings front or rear! Aren't these cars artificially strangled by regulations so power is capped and wasting what you have on massive drag inducers seems counter productive?
Can't comment on the aesthetics, you either like it or you don't. It took me a while to get used to seeing these things with wings too.

The one thing you can't argue with is the performance benefit the giant wings provide on the autocross track. It is a night-and-day, "why didn't we do this before?" type of thing. It does add drag, but at the speeds we see (under 120 km/h) the drag penalty is well worth it.

As far as power goes it just depends on the whole system. We ran the CBR 600 before and that engine was very limited by the intake restrictor as it was designed to make power up to the 14,000 RPM redline. The restrictor starts limiting torque at around 9,000 RPM so unless a team could do a ton of cam work, there was a huge hit in output.

The triple is tuned from the factory to be more efficient at lower RPM, so with the stock cams we can tune the engine to make power before the restrictor does its thing. The result is that we make more torque than the stock bike, but because the torque drops at high RPM we do not make the same top end power. The following power curves show this, and it's clear when the restrictor screws with everything.

BTW even with the giant wings we are traction limited in every gear, the traction control is working pretty hard! We are actually looking at ways to give it more wing.

Re: San Jose State's 2017 FSAE Car

Posted: Fri May 05, 2017 5:58 am
by PhillipM
katana wrote:Neat project but i'm really not liking the wings front or rear! Aren't these cars artificially strangled by regulations so power is capped and wasting what you have on massive drag inducers seems counter productive?
It's easy, the average speeds are low, downforce generally squares with velocity, so to make them useful at low speeds they need to be massive.

Same reason I have a 1.5m wide tri-plane wing for the rear of the buggy, the drag isn't much of an issue (our average speeds are only 50mph)

Re: San Jose State's 2017 FSAE Car

Posted: Fri May 05, 2017 10:08 am
by DTA Gareth
might have to nab some of those photos for our FB feed.
are you only racing in the states? or are you coming over the pond in july?

Re: San Jose State's 2017 FSAE Car

Posted: Sat May 06, 2017 7:16 pm
by moy
DTA Gareth wrote:might have to nab some of those photos for our FB feed.
are you only racing in the states? or are you coming over the pond in july?
Sure, feel free to use any of them.

We will only be racing here in the US; Michigan next week and Nebraska at the end of June.