Progress Update and Car Teaser

Team Update

With exams out of the way, the team has had massive progress in the past few weeks and are on track for our completion and testing deadlines. With the chassis being completed this has paved the way for the engine team to get the engine mounted and begin mocking up the ancillary systems. This will bring together all the wiring, fuel system, cooling air intake and exhaust. This has provided a fair few packaging challenges but nothing that can't be solved over a cup of tea. The engine team are hoping to attempt to start the engine next week which will be a big step and allows the Engine Control Unit to be tuned for maximum power!

The brakes and driveline team have been busy with their new gear selection actuator and have been testing and calibrating it in the lab. This will be put on the car in the next few weeks and will hopefully provide rapid gear changes! Along with this the pedal box has been manufactured and is being currently linked up with the brake and clutch hydraulic lines.

The chassis and suspension team are still busy with designing and ordering components for the suspension and hopefully we'll have some wheels on the car soon. The bodywork is currently being refined in a CFD (computational fluid dynamics) modelling package and this will provide us with results about which is the best design for the bodywork and diffuser. Steve, Will and Scott are off to Millbrook Proving Ground tomorrow to pickup the impact attenuator material which is a specialist aluminium honeycomb mesh. This will provide a crash structure of the front of the car to withstand impacts, but hopefully this won't be needed!

Finally the data acquisition team are in the process of programming their various systems which will collect data from the car during testing and allow us to refine any properties or set-up parameters. This results in a large mass of wires for David from the engine team to lay on the car which can been seen in a few of the pictures. The dashboard is looking pretty snazzy with a LCD screen displaying the speed and rev counter which replaces the usual dials.

The big(ish) reveal...

Steve has been busy for the past few weeks gathering a huge amount of CAD models and assembling them. With some work still going on the model is not complete but below is a little teaser of the suspension system and we'll have a full model sometime soon for the big reveal of F15! Although we won't have a questionable looking nose like some of this years formula 1 cars. 

F15 is shaping up to be one of Leed's most advanced and refined Formula Student cars and we're all looking forward to testing it soon.