Formula Sun Grand Prix 2019 — Day 1
Day 1 of FSGP thankfully started with a sleep in. Jokes, this is solar car racing you don’t get to sleep in ever. Track opened at 8am this morning, which meant the team had to leave the airbnb by 7am to be on time (read: so we have half an hour leeway to be late) so team up at latest 6:30am. Needless to say, most of the team wasn’t up by 6:30am but I left the airbnb at 7:06am, which wasn’t too bad.
Circuit of the Americas is 20 minutes away according to Google Maps. We pulled into the track sometime around 7:35am (closer to 30 mins really) and were the fifth team in line behind Esteban, Illini, Principia and Florida. There were only five Midsun members at the time so we walked down the line, talked to a couple teams and said hi to some familiar faces before our trailer arrived and we were allowed into the pit area. Originally, we were supposed to share the garage with University of British Columbia but due to teams dropping and UBC not actually bringing a vehicle (they are now a guest team, couldn’t finish their aero in time), the bays got rearranged and we are sharing with Illini instead. So far hasn’t been that bad. Michigan State and their cruiser are on the other side of the wall from us and we’ve slowly expanded into the passthrough garage on the opposite side. We really shouldn’t be occupying that space, but no one has said anything yet so we’ll ask for forgiveness rather than permission.
We managed to make a mess as we got into the swing of things immediately upon unloading our car. Registration did take a bit, but we got through it before the line really formed and got back to our bay to set everything up. Initially, our primary tasks were to move the ballast box to the front and install the solarsense master enclosure but then we happened upon tragedy. We found that several of the clickbonds (method we use to connect aerobody panels to the chassis) had snapped off of the aero panels, so our panels were connected only on the front half of the vehicle. This is particularly frustrating as we spent a good chunk of the past month determining which ones we needed to replace and putting them back on, added to the fact that the recent round of clickbonds were getting very close to sanding through the carbon fibre aerobody. We had reached core material in several places, so we applied the last set with the intention of never having to do it again. But of course that’s not how things work and look where we are now. Doing another round of clickbonds.
I personally think it was a combination of the trailer bouncing, vibrations and the fact that several of the clickbonds were tightened too much during installation that caused them to break off, but it’s not the end of the world. We just have to add a couple more with some improvisations (read: tape in strategic places) and we should be good to go. On the other hand, NC State broke their suspension during their trip so we’ve definitely been beat when it comes to worst problem due to transit. I don’t know if they’ll even get their car up and running in time, but best of luck to them. They took a huge leap, trying for a cruiser as their very first vehicle and I have to admit there’s a ton of questionable design decisions, but it’s not a bad start at all.
While we took the side aero panels off to prepare the clickbonds we started up a list of mechanical tasks that needed to be completed for scrutineering and holy was it long. I stopped counting the list at 20 items. Granted about half of them pertained to the brake rotor that exploded on Friday so maybe it was a bit less but it’s a lot more than I thought needed to get done when we left for competition. We were unable to complete our mock scrutineering for the mechanical side due to missed track days and the exploding brake rotor so that likely contributed to the problem. I thought I was staying ahead of things as a manager but clearly that isn’t the case. Guess I have some work to do.
All-team meeting followed by the safety meeting was up next, as is standard with FSGP. There was an introduction to the scrutineers, team roll-call and then a lot of discussion on team safety and things that were going on. Pretty sure nearly my entire row was passed out at some point throughout the presentation but we got through it in the end. Also during break between meetings someone found out there was free soft serve ice cream so a lengthy line formed in the lobby. Unfortunately we all got called back inside before I got any and when we came back out after we discovered someone had taken the handles to the machine. Was a tragedy for everyone.
We got our scrutineering schedule, and almost everything is Wednesday (it’s picked based on when technical reports get sent in) except for… guess what: MECHANICAL. Literally the one thing we can’t do right now is the earliest scrutineering we have, so we’ve traded it off with the intention of completing a few tests today. The first we did get to was solar array testing, so we rolled the car over without side panels since those weren’t important for the tests and attracted a fair bit of attention. We did pass and get our first green of the day so pretty happy with the start, especially since we weren’t actually supposed to do the array testing until Wednesday. One less thing on the schedule keeping us from dynamics. Throughout the day we also completed driver’s registration, hilariously one of our drivers is so light we ran out of ballast and ended up with a 29kg ballast bag. I hope it fits into our ballast box.
I also got to tour a bit of the COTA facilities when I got asked to drive around a computer with an LTE to test out our telemetry reception. Another team member came along to take pictures and got some pretty nice shots with the sun going down. Unfortunately the drive got cut short when we lost reception going through a tunnel and again somewhere halfway across the track. We came back to the pits to pizza, wings, and pasta from Pizza Hut so thank you ops for keeping us fed. Honestly, it feels really weird not being ops. There is a strong urge to pull things together, to organize the area and make food but now my role has changed and I’ll leave it in the hands of the more capable people. The team overall is pretty out of it, with several members passing out around the bay. Whether from the heat or from lack of sleep, not too sure. Probably a mix of both considering both are getting to me and it’s only day one.
The evening, both before and after dinner, was a group clearing away the mechanical tasks slowly. I’m really happy with the progress, hopefully if our brake rotor makes it in tomorrow then we can be good to go for dynamics on Wednesday. I also learned that DP420 actually cures to a majority of its strength within an hour, so we were able to reattach the panels on and worked on doors and windshield.
We didn’t end the day on a great note. We weren’t able to get the windshield back into the car in time before the 11pm curfew that we had to be off-site by. However the cars that were sent back to the airbnb didn’t seem to know that they had to come back to get half the team. One car was on its way with 3/5 seats taken, one just arrived at the airbnb at 10:50pm after leaving near 10 and the last one was just leaving the airbnb at 10:50. We had the Chevy truck at the track with us, but that was it. Six seats for eleven trapped people and it doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out that you need more than the one vehicle to get everyone out. FSGP staff also wasn’t too impressed with us so we started shuttling people using the truck to the gas station just outside of COTA just so we were off grounds. There’s no excuse for this situation to occur, and were lucky that FSGP staff was somewhat tolerant. I say somewhat because I know they weren’t too impressed with having to stay half an hour past the curfew and we cut it pretty close to actually being locked on site since the gates do close at a certain time. We cut it real close, and to make things worse all the work in the last hour and a half has to be undone because tape is not going to stick to the dirty aerobody. 6:30am tomorrow we need to be working on taking off the panels and adding more clickbonds to be ready for 9am. It’s now 2am and I need to be up in three hours. Stress is growing pretty fast and it’s literally day one. It’s going to be a long week…
