How long have you been in the competition and what sort of car are you building?
Monash Motorsport built its first ever car in 2000, and we have been competing ever since. We have travelled over to Europe and competed in Formula Student at Silverstone in 2004, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016 and will be returning in 2018 to compete for the first time with two cars.
Having built combustion vehicles throughout our 18 year history, we are certainly excited to be bringing our first ever electric car to compete in Europe alongside our combustion car. Designed with simplicity, reliability and low parts count in mind, M17-C & M17-E share a variety of design components to reduce design and manufacturing time. A naturally aspirated KTM 690 Duke R engine resides at the heart of M17-C, while an EMRAX 228 powers M17-E - both supported on track by high downforce aerodynamics packages consisting of a front wing, rear wing, bodywork and an undertray.
We are currently also in our development and testing phase of our first ever Driverless car for 2019.
How large is your team?
Our team consists of approximately 100 students in total from a wide range of university faculties. With a majority of these team members in their first year of Formula Student involvement, we place a large focus on knowledge transfer and upskilling throughout the year. In July, Monash Motorsport will have a team of 40 senior students travel across to Europe to prepare, test and compete with our two vehicles across three European competitions.
Our team runs a highly structured hierarchy to promote strong leadership, direction and management of the team. Together with the Chief Engineers of each car, our CEO and COO form the Upper Management team, with support from the Leaders of each section of the car - Aerodynamics, Chassis, Powertrain, Suspension, Autonomous Systems and Business. Each section consists of roughly 15 members including recruits, and is managed by a Section Manager. Finally, to support the team operations, the team is also supported by various auxiliary managers, from the Workshop to our Drivers.
What are your objectives for this year’s competition?
Following our most successful competition to date at the 2017 Formula SAE-Australasian competition last December, we will be looking to challenge for the podium at Silverstone with both our updated and improved championship winning cars. We hope also to catch up with as many other teams as we can while we’re over there!
How close are you to finishing your cars?
M17-C and M17-E are currently in their second testing period, shaking down our new 2018 systems, including updated aerodynamics on both cars and an improved powertrain package on the electric car - all while also continuing essential driver training. With over 2,000km of combined testing between the two cars, the team has also begun preparing for the Static events, with dedicated managers for each event.
As a team, we work towards deadlines set by the Upper Management team based off competition dates and required design, manufacturing & testing time. Our Section Leader and Managers are responsible for the delegation of tasks through their respective sections. As all our students spend their time at the workshop voluntarily, without credits for university subjects, we encourage balance with university study, Formula Student work and, wherever possible, time for family and friends.
What is new and exciting for your team in 2018?
2018 will see Monash Motorsport take on an intake of around 60 new recruits, who will develop their design and manufacturing skills alongside their technical knowledge throughout the year in preparation for their first design period at the start of 2019.
As 2018 is the second half of the competition season for our 2017 vehicles, the team has worked hard on updating important points from last year while also working to an extremely compressed timeline restricted by the long shipping periods required to transport our vehicles to Europe. Primary focuses include a fully developed aerodynamics package for the electric car, as well as more detailed tuning of the powertrain package. The combustion car has seen additional setup tuning in regards to its suspension parameters and powertrain package, particularly in regards to Launch Control.
We also have plans for an extensive tyre testing session, with back-to-back comparisons between four different tyre compounds and sizes, to gather data for important vehicle concept decisions moving into the future.
Lastly, with our new Autonomous Systems section, we have moved into previously uncharted territory for the team, working with LiDAR, camera and GPS systems as well as developing path planning algorithms and more complex vehicle state models.
What have been your biggest challenges this year and how have you overcome these?
The turnover of experienced team members each year is perhaps the most significant ongoing challenge for Formula Student teams. This year we said goodbye a large number of experienced team members, leaving only a handful of senior members who have had more than two years of Formula Student experience. This was particularly significant as all of our experienced Electric Powertrain members have moved on, along with most of those who had competition experience in Europe from 2016.
Being our first year undertaking the huge task of travelling with two vehicles, we worked closely with team alumni to ensure logistics were thorough and planned well in advance. Our focus on testing has also allowed not only ample time for vehicle tuning and reliability testing, but also to bring our younger team members up to speed in terms of running the cars, ultimately preparing them for our European campaign.
To ensure a similar situation is avoided in future, we are also currently documenting our entire Europe planning process, including the various administrative challenges that inevitably pop up, such that when the team travels to Europe again in 2020 (possibly with three cars!), they have a large base of previous experience to draw upon from the outset.
The development of a Driverless class car has also presented as a challenge for the team in a number of ways, from the more obvious funding and system complexity issues to the challenges of managing a 100+ person team and long-term planning to ensure the sustainability of such a large undertaking.
To alleviate the pressure of delivering our first Driverless car whilst also managing a European campaign, the team decided to timeline the design, development and testing phases of the Driverless car over roughly 18 months, with a planned First Drive in August 2019. This year’s electric vehicle platform M18-E is slated to evolve into our Driverless from the start of 2019, which means that the need to manufacture an entirely separate third car has been removed, further reducing pressure on both manpower and resources.
What made you join Formula Student?
Our team members join Monash Motorsport and the Formula Student project for a wide range of reasons, and also come from a wide range of backgrounds both in terms of personal experience and university study fields, which goes to show how applicable and diverse the skills developed through the project can be. This is further shown by where our alumni have ended up.
While a number of students are striving for careers in the motorsport or automotive industries, there are also many who are simply keen to pick up transferable practical design skills to apply in other fields.
Over a number of years of Formula Student involvement, our team members begin to develop an appreciation for not only the technical and practical knowledge learnt, but also the amount of work that goes into managing the project and working closely with a high performance team in a fast paced, high pressure environment in a professional manner. Of course, seeing your year’s worth of hard work roar to life on the race track helps motivate too!
What’s your proudest moment at Formula Student?
In our long history in Formula Student, Monash has seen many highs and lows, from 7 failed competition endurances in a row in our early years, to our first competition win in 2009. Arguably the team’s proudest moment was seeing two Monash cars not only hit the track together for the first time in 2017, but take out the championship in both classes at the 2017 Formula SAE Australasia competition.
What advice would you give for fellow teams?
The current Monash Motorsport team is lucky enough to have 18 years of Formula Student experience behind it, with alumni, senior team members and multiple seasoned Faculty Advisors to help guide the team’s decision making process.
We believe the competition is as much a project management challenge as it is an engineering challenge - a significant deciding factor towards competition success is often related to a team’s ability to effectively and efficiently manage its resources, whether it be money, time or manpower.
For teams just starting out, remember that to be able to earn points at competition, a car needs to first be able to reliably complete all competition events - often easier said than done! Increasing time invested into design optimisation does not necessarily result in a proportional increase in competition points, and so instead, our team is always careful to appropriately balance design time with getting the concept built early and testing out on track.
This idea of early testing also forms a part of what we call ‘concept utilisation’, which essentially refers to a car and a team’s real-world ability to deliver its theoretical competition points potential. For example, if a team pushes to develop a highly advanced vehicle with many complex systems which would theoretically net a large sum of points at competition, there is a possibility that without sufficient testing time, the team would be unable to fully utilise this vehicle concept’s full potential, whether due to vehicle unreliability, insufficient driver training, or lack of setup testing, ultimately resulting in a lower points sum at competition compared to a more finely developed, yet simpler, vehicle concept. We track and prioritise fully executing our vehicle concept, and aim for +90% concept utilisation.
In regards to the design decision-making process, we often refer to the term ‘lowest hanging fruit’, which describes how we prioritise our design and development tasks to provide the most substantial points gains for the least amount of effort or cost. There may be no point, for example, designing a forced induction system if a team has yet to fully understand, develop and tune its naturally aspirated setup. By also taking a points-based approach to the decision making process, all new designs can be assigned a potential points gain using our competition point simulation, which can then be directly compared with their required resources. How many points does 1kg of mass reduction gain compared to an additional 1kW of power from the powertrain package? Being able to answer these questions accurately allows our team to best expend our very finite time and resources on making our car faster.
How can we keep up to date with Monash Motorsport?
You can find out more about our team on our website, while our social media pages are regularly updated with our progress, both in the workshop and on the test track! You can also subscribe to our newsletters, which include various articles by filling out the form at the bottom of our website.
Website: www.monashmotorsport.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/monashmotorsport
Instagram: @monashmotorsport
(All photos kindly supplied by Monash Motorsport)
Thank you to the team for a great insight into the team for this year - I think you will all agree that both cars look stunning. We look forward to seeing both cars out on the circuit and wish them the best for the competition!