Beeb Blog

     Last weekend I got the opportunity to go out again and drive with the UW Formula SAE team so I decide to share my experience with you all.

      We all met at the shop (uw mechanical engineering building) at 7am. Over the next hour we loaded the trailer with two cars, enough tools to take apart the titanic, and more gear than I thought possible. For the amount of stuff we were taking it really didn't take too long to load everything.

     After we arrived at the Tacoma Dome we unloaded the cars and gear then set up the course. When we go down there we usually practice for an event called autocross, mixed with a little endurance. In the autocross event it's all about the fastest lap. If you hit a cone that's a two second penalty, if you miss a gate (a set of cones) then that's ten seconds. We cycle through everyone giving them 10-15 laps each so they can get used to the car again, then we reverse the course to simulate the autocross. We reverse the course so nobody has had experience on it, then everyone gets two laps, that's it. In autocross your fastest lap counts, but it's the fastest of two. The common strategy is to learn the track on the first lap, then go balls out on the second one hoping that you don't hit any cones.

     I was randomly selected to go first. It's hard to describe how this felt; it was a very strange mix of excitement and nervousness. I was excited because I hadn't driven the car in nearly four months, but I was nervous for the same reason. As we get closer and closer to comp we will be making driver cuts because we have more people interested in driving than we need. For this very reason I treat every practice day as a real race. To gain a little advantage on this day I was hoping to observe a little bit and learn the course from other drivers. This, however, was not the case. I suited up, got in the car, and gave it my all. It took about one lap to get used to the car again, after that I felt right at home. I ended up putting ten laps in with a best time of 32.20 and I hit only one cone over the course of those ten laps. One cone. This is what I was most proud of because it's rare that anyone hits less than 5 (we do have a few other guys on the team that are consistently under this mark). I hadn't driven the car for 4 months and I only hit a single cone.

     Watching the rest of the team drive was fantastic, I was actually happy that I had driven first. Save for two of our most consistent drivers everyone hit upwards of 8 cones!! As far as times go I was about mid-pack, being half a second off of the best time of 31.60, but at the head of the pack consistency-wise. For the time I was gone from the car compared to the amount of practice everyone else had in that time I was very satisfied with a mid-pack time. Also, for this part of our "practice" day I had the lowest cone count of any driver.

     We managed to get through everyone doing their ten laps before it started to rain but we didn't stop for the rain, seriously... it's Seattle! However, it was now even more interesting because we were running both a new course and in the wet! My first lap out I concentrated on testing the limits of the car. I had been running the course backward in my head so I could concentrate more on other things. This paid off a lot because the car was all over the place. We still haven't pulled all the times off the computer but I feel pretty good about the autocross simulation after watching other drivers struggle with the conditions.

     Overall it was a great day and I can't wait to do it again, especially when the '09 car is done! Here's a video from the track: