Formula Sun Grand Prix 2019 — Day 6
This post is a little late, we left at the end of Day 6 to drive 4.5 hours to Sulphur Springs, Texas to get a head start on the trip. The entire team ended up leaving Saturday night to make it back in for Monday and after the entire week it was absolutely exhausting.
In classic Midnight Sun fashion, we had to fix things at 6:30am to get the car ready. We thought we’d be ok last night, but after the motor crash there’s a bunch of things that need to be done again. Also after all the effort to put the NGM 100 on the car we had to take it off for the 150 that was repaired overnight. We took off the 100 and put the 150 on, but struggled with a tire so I took it off again and thankfully I did because a communication disconnect happened and I didn’t know we wanted to get shimmys from CalSol to space our motor.
Well turns out they didn’t have any that we wanted so we just ran with a 2mm air gap and put the motor back on the car. The motor was on around 8:40, delayed primarily because I was tired and forgot to put the retaining ring on before safety wiring, so I had to cut it and do it again. There was a chance we’d make the starting grid…until the motor controllers decided they didn’t want to spin the motors. The accelerator was being pushed with no output to the motor, so electrical had to spend time debugging and trying to figure out the problem. Again, we are so close yet so far away.
It was a pretty stressful waiting game. The whole team was tense, especially since it was the last day and we really, really wanted to make it onto the track. Other teams were pretty tense too, CalSol dropped by and jokingly said we had to make it onto the track because it would look bad to sponsors if the podium was only two people. Technically, it would be three since the guy that got arrested for driving his Dodge onto the track did do a full lap in a multi-occupant vehicle but I guess he won’t be getting a podium spot.
Electrical also began to multitask, working on both the array and the motor controllers. Somehow our array began to work again without us doing anything at all so we were quite surprised. However at this point, the array wasn’t critical because we were only going to be running for one day. Or half a day depending on when we get out onto the track. Hardware made the decision to swap out the motor controller interface board and it seem to do the trick. Admittedly, by the time we got the all clear from the hardware team most of our team wasn’t even in the garage. A majority of the mechanical team left to work on CAD for MSXIV again (for those wondering why we skipped MSXIII, google MS-13) but they all ran back to see the car head for pit lane. We weren’t sure if we were going to make it that far, since the last time we said we were ready to go we fried a mosfet and were delayed four hours.
This time however, we did make it to pit lane without a problem. Everyone gathered in our pit to watch the car make its way down pit road (with the loud motors announcing its presence) and up Turn 1. I was in the process of filming the pits when our car made our way out and when I went to U-turn back to our tent I nearly ran into Principia’s car. Sorry. Now that we had made it onto the track, the primary concern became ‘can we make it up Turn 1’. The answer? Hell yes we can.
I’m admittedly surprised we went up the hill as smoothly as we did. CalSol could do it with the same motors, but we were still very concerned about our ability to climb. Especially with our previous track record of hill starts and climbs during American Solar Challenge last year, but we did it and that is what matters. We were finally underway, and after that moment of exhilaration of our car making it up the hill the excitement kind of died down and a majority of the team left to do who knows what. I’m admittedly disappointed in this attitude, as there were only about three people at a time in our hot pit and it became problematic later on when we had to go rescue the solar car and no one was around to do it. At the end of the day, this is what we were here for, and no one was around to pay attention to how the car was doing. I would say I got on peoples’ case about it, but since no one was nearby I couldn’t really get after them so it ended up being a three man rescue crew a couple times.
The car didn’t actually have a problem until seven laps in, when there was a BPS fault at the bottom of the hill. It caused the motors to cut out and the car only got part way up the hill before having to stop. This was another major concern of ours, as our braking system was a little questionable and we weren’t sure if they were able to hold the brakes to prevent the car from moving backwards the entire time. The addition of the parking brake did help the car hold until we made it out there in a rescue vehicle to push the car across the track and back down pit road. We brought the car directly back to our garage to take a look at things, but it seemed to just be overheating motor controllers. Considering that laps 2–5 were about a minute shorter each time as we pushed the car harder, I can’t say I’m entirely surprised after we posted our fastest lap of 6:08 right before the overcurrent. We also switched our drivers and passengers out to let the two first years have a shot at driving on COTA. Only two of our four drivers actually drove the car at all on this trip, so hopefully next year they might be around to be a driver in MSXIV.
Two laps in after the driver switch, the car stalled on the hill again. This time there was a BPS fault down the straightaway up to the hill so the car stopped functioning and just rolled partway up the hill. We had to pile into a rescue vehicle again and steer the solar car across the track and back down pit road for the second time today. Poor Puerto Rico was stuck watching a little further down the hill since the rescue vehicles were in use, but they got their rescue eventually. Again, we took the car back to the garage to take a look but didn’t find anything wrong so out again onto the track it went. The time graph shows a considerable progression as the drivers become more comfortable in the car lap after lap, but unfortunately the drivers didn’t really get a ton of laps in.
About five laps later, the solar car called and said they had big problem. The driver motor had made a sound that was very similar to when we sheared bolts during dynamics testing, so we had them stay where they were around turn 6 and got ready to go and rescue them again. Unfortunately, all the rescue vehicles were occupied as at the time of this incident, about four other vehicles were also stopped around the track. Two of them on the Turn 1 hill in front of us. We waited approximately five minutes for a rescue vehicle to return before piling in and heading out.
Pushing the car over to the side, we could hear problems with the drivers side motor so we had the car towed off the track and down to our pits. after jacking the car up and taking off the fairing, I was faced with a considerable amount of damage. The safety wire had broken and the wheel had come approximately halfway off of the hub. This had given the spacers that we had put in previously for the shoulder bolts enough space to fall out and we sheared two more of the bolts. The rotor was effectively ruined, as the holes for the shoulder bolts were now stripped and much larger than they were supposed to be. Even after getting the mechanical scrutineer to take a look at what had happened, we couldn’t isolate the problem down to a single reason. With only one and a half hours of racing to go in the day, we decided to pack it in. We probably could have gotten back out on the track, but without us knowing exactly what had caused the problem we had no way of 100% preventing it from happening again. No point attempting to rush back out there and risk our drivers for an extra hour and a half.
I was quite disappointed that we had to pull out early. After all the work it took to get ourselves out onto the track, we got sidelined again. This time permanently. I so badly wanted to just swap the 150 out for a 100 and throw ourselves back on the track to tackle the hill again, but in my heart I knew we couldn’t do that and endanger our drivers if we couldn’t figure the problem out. We don’t intend to use NGMs past this competition so in theory we won’t ever actually need to find the problem, but I’d like to over the next couple weeks. Maybe it all came down to the safety wire snapping, who knows.
We closed out pretty quietly. After our withdrawal from the track we started to pack things up and organize our bay into bins to go home. For the first time, given that the entire week the bay has been an absolute mess of things. Makes us jealous seeing other teams with their tool cabinets and organized setups, but I also remember hauling a tool cabinet in 2016 and holy it was heavy. Packing actually went relatively smoothly and everything went back into the trailer to head back home as the race came to an end and the cars left on the track rolled over the finish line to come to a stop. At one point, Esteban, Kentucky and Principia were all within a lap of each other (just on day 3 lap count) so it was a very close finish. However Esteban’s lead from previous days led them to finish 35 laps ahead of Principia to take the win.
T-shirt trading also began and I ended up purchasing more of the Midnight Sun jerseys so I could trade some more. I got my hands on shirts from RUM (Puerto Rico), Illini (Illinois), SolarPack (NC State), SunSeeker (Western Michigan) and Georgia Tech (I’ll update with a pic at somepoint). The one I wanted the most was CalSol (their ‘around the world on daily rays’ design was so nice) but most of their team had one of ours from last year so I had to hunt down first years. I nearly ended up just purchasing one of their shirts, but one of their members was nice enough to offer me the shirt she was wearing for the one I was wearing. Except we had to keep our shirts for the podium and award photos and then our team left halfway through the awards ceremony so I never got to trade. Not gonna lie, I’m actually really sad and felt bad too, maybe I can message CalSol and ship my shirt over or something I’m not sure.
Since five members did not intend to leave today, we had to go back to the airbnb to grab our bags. The 20 minute drive on top of traffic meant we made it back a little late for the podium photo, but teams were behind on that so it was fine. I missed the food trucks though but thankfully someone cashed in my voucher and I got a pulled pork sandwich and shrimp tacos. I’d talked to someone earlier who drove by in their truck asking about the competition in the paddock and apparently he owned the pulled pork sandwich truck and told me to get one, so that was my request when I left for the airbnb. The tacos were just a bonus.
Taking the photo up on the COTA podium was pretty neat, but it was also pretty small. Granted, the podium is made for one guy on each platform and not a team of 33 or 26 members but we made it happen. You can’t really see the podium as a result especially since the cameraman was essentially down at the race track taking a picture up but I got to stand on that podium so I’m happy.
MOV Final standings:
- 1st: University of Calgary (Schulich Elysia) — 122 laps, 0 lap penalties, score 24.188
- 2nd: UC Berkeley (Tachyon) — 51 laps, 22 lap penalties, score 13.171
- 3rd: University of Waterloo (MSXII) — 11 laps, 3 lap penalties, score 0.5448
I realized as I sat down inside the event room for closing ceremonies that this was the first time I’d attended the ceremony. 2016 we left because we didn’t qualify for ASC and 2018 I went home with the FSGP group. It was nice to see the teams cheer as they went up to collect the trophy (which was a very nice glass plaque). I’m blocked in the picture, but in my defence there were two cameras and I don’t think I was blocked from the other one. Since our team wanted to be back in Waterloo for Monday, we left in the middle of the ceremony to high tail it to Dallas. The 24 total hours on Google Maps becomes more like 32 depending on if you’re hauling the trailer or not, so we wanted to get as far as possible Saturday night. It felt a bit sad saying goodbye to COTA, especially since I will likely never be back again, but it was a good experience for the team to learn and overall I’m happy with how we pushed through every roadblock we encountered to get onto the track on the last day. Despite this car running fine last year, things changed and in the end we did test our systems for MSIV so hopefully next year we will return with much better reliability and roll our way through everything.
MSXII at FSGP 2019 Stats:
- Total laps completed: 14
- Fastest lap: 6:08 (lap 7)
- Times rescued: 3
- Times stuck on Turn 1 hill: 2
- Times windshield and dashboard were removed: 8
- Number of clickbonds broken: 9
- Times stuck at track past curfew: 2
- Number of shoulder bolts sheared: 7
- Number of issues faced: MSXII is Murphy’s Law personified
