F1 Engineer vs. Student Built Racecar

What happens when a bunch of University Students try to build a race car with a whole lot of downforce? You get one of these FSAE/Formula Student cars. But what's it actually like? And how is all the aero working?

00:00 Introduction and history of FSAE
01:39 Events of the day
02:46 Turning some laps
03:45 Review of the handling and aero characteristics
07:13 Aero interview start and development strategy
10:00 Front wing
11:54 Front wing endplate
13:38 Chassis Vanes
15:24 Sidepod wings
16:30 Rear Wing
18:08 Rear Diffuser and outro

[kevinshen]

Hey Kyle, it was a pleasure having you! Funny that this exact channel is where I got a lot of help from when designing the kinematics for this very car. It has come full circle. Thanks!

[ajakmyslisz]

In Formula student the main role of aerodynamics is to increase the amount of space for sponsors :) more wing more space :)

[guybarker]

Hey Kyle, thanks so much for coming and driving our car! Unfortunately I couldn't be there for the drive day, but I'm glad you enjoyed the car. We are all so incredibly proud of what the team achieved with that car last year. To take one of the smallest budgets in Australasia and score 2nd overall and finish as the top Australian team, with only our first running EV, was huge from the team. I'm personally incredibly proud of the aero team especially, they took on a huge scope and performed brilliantly. RB23 was designed as a whole system working together, and the team more than delivered, so I'm glad you liked it.

[ale]

Mercedes-Benz F1 team's downfall began when Kyle left the team. Coincidence?

[juliomartins]

It was awesome to have you at track that day!! Thank you for coming out and giving your feedback and having a chat with us!!

[Aakash_Masud]

Ill give you full torque, full power next time ;) you drove well

[UNSWRedbackRacing]

It was a pleasure to have you Kyle! Hope you had a good time driving RB23!

[JaydenHW]

What a great video, thank you so much for coming out to drive the car along with all our other Redback Racing alumni!

As a driver of RB23 last year in skidpan and acceleration your feedback about the handling characteristics is extremely validating. Being part of the suspension department its always been a tricky balancing act between optimising the mechanical grip of the car compared to aerodynamic platform stability. Exactly as you said, our limitations with front ride height and heave stiffness does slightly limit our setup options in terms of front and rear stiffness and damping, where on this car we're running close to the minimum ride height and front springrate that we can run without excessively scraping the front wing. As a consequence this does result in a car that with this setup is slightly biased towards understeer, but also given the power of the electric motor going to the rear wheels the rear stability offered in return is actually quite appreciated. Even at this high power setting the car has even more power and torque to deliver, so at it's maximum setting understeer is less of an issue to say the least :)

We also tried out multiple different toe settings last year in testing comparing turn in response vs mid corner grip and this is something we're still yearning for even more testing time to get perfectly dialled in. What makes it even more complicated is when a toe out setting for a 60+kg driver becomes far too twitchy for a 48kg driver like myself due to different weight distribution, requiring different setups per driver lol. That's also not including different driving styles where I empathise with my fellow members' concern when I want more and more oversteer from the setup while already scaring the living daylights out of them with the silly way I drive :P


Hopefully this year's car will address a lot of the feedback we received for RB23 this and last year and we'll be able to have a car we can more comfortably tune the handling balance of. Thanks again for coming by and making this video!

[chriscampion]

As a current formula student competitor and a member of an aero team this was really interesting you should visit more comps like uk or germany

[rossj]

Wow. Great to see you go back to where it started! Blows me away to see what you've achieved since we were sitting in the lab gluing cardboardium alloy together more than a decade ago. Time flies!

[Nexville]

These cars are insane to drive, i got the chance to get into our universitys FSAE a few times when the team made the change to electric, its like an extra grippy kart and you accelerate the time x10

[BirnieMac]

It's surreal to see my uni's FSAE sticker on the spoiler

[gerrit]

Hey Kyle, great video. I've been waiting for a long time for you to do something about Formula Student. I think there‘s only little content on YouTube about it, even though there are so many young students who want to learn a lot in this area.

I hope you'll be making more videos about aerodynamics in Formula Student in the future. Since the rules are so open here, there are many teams that come up with creative and extraordinary solutions. It would be especially interesting if you took a look at the cars of the major European teams, as they operate at a very high level and yet use quite different concepts among themselves. Maybe in a similar way as you do your reviews on all the F1 Cars. Thank you!

[andrecarrato]

Bro was pretty nervous. Maybe cuz he was being interviewed by the best aerodynamicist in history.

[bigbuckoramma]

LOL, the irony of the wing element falling out that said "Not a Skill Issue"! Surely that bit of humor wasnt lost on the team.

[coliimusic]

Kyle on location! Cool seeing you go out to show us both grassroots formula racing and the real-world application of aero!

[johnbarker]

Very thoughtful design, a lot of sophistication at this level, and it looks like enormous fun to drive.

[oeliku]

It would be interesting for you to have a look at the european full carbon monocoque 4WD torque vectoring cars. Cars like from Stuttgard, Zürich or Karlsruhe

[peterbrown]

Great video and learnt a heap from such an in depth look at what the guys were up to.

You should look at doing some colabs with Mozzysails on the Americas Cup sail boats soon. It would be interesting to see your take on the boats noting the F1 interest in a number of the teams.

[toolscientist]

There's a small youtuber called @IndeterminateDesign that 3D printed an "RC Hypercar" and did a whole bunch of aero design on it. I'd love to see you review his project and make any comments on his design. It's similar to FSAE aero in that the speeds are so slow that you need to go to extremes to extract downforce.