Shifting Gears!

Good Morning!

Wow...Where to began? The last 4 days myself and the Zips Racing team have been competing in a Collegiate Design competition called Formula SAE. 120 teams come from all over the world to show off their engineering skills and abilities to build a formula 1 style racecar. OK, now that I have your attention...Lets sum up the event. Yesterday, was the final day of the competition, which means the MAIN event! The endurance race is what we all work for...120 cars were apart of our competition this week, and only 49% of the cars finished the endurance event. Below you can see a picture of the race team shortly after the car finished the endurance race.

Later that evening we attended the awards ceremony, and were awarded 13th place overall out of 120 schools. We burnt up a clutch during the autorcross event and scrambled to fix the car for the endurance race. If it wasn't for the breakdown mid-week we most likely would have finished in the top 10... Below you can see a picture of the racecar being torn apart in our paddock.

Ok. Ok. As always, I try to wrap these blogs up pretty quickly...So let me conclude here. This morning I was very lucky to have two amazing friends drive me to the Detroit airport at 4:30am! You might be wondering what for? Well, for the next 9 days I'll be serving in Haiti. I am so excited to head back to their country. It impacted my life so much the last time I visited in 2011. I will try my best to update my blog, but internet is very limited in Haiti. No matter what - know that this is what I love to do... Serving others and seeing people smile!

Well, stay tuned!

--Benny

Formula SAE Competition - Day 1. The early bird gets the worm.

Good evening Ladies and Gents!

After 9 months of anticipation, the ZR-12 made its debut in Michigan this morning.

Zips Racing hit the ground running and proved that: "the early bird does get the worm". The competitors made their way to the track this morning and were a bit surprised when they found the giant Fear The Roo symbol at the front of the line to enter the track. Eager to show off our prized possession (The ZR-12) four brave young men camped out at the gate the night before the track opened... Call it crazy, call it passion, whatever you want to call it... just know we're on a mission!

The first day of competition went fairly smooth. The car passed technical inspection with no major problems. For you "Newbies" out there reading this, Technical Inspection is a one hour rummage through your race-car to find any unsafe parts, vehicles, or drivers. The formula SAE vehicles are built to a set of rules or specifications, and the students are free to design a car in any way, shape, or form....just as long as it meets the rules and passes inspection.

Tonight we are hitting the books preparing ourselves for the "Written-Exams" of our competition. We have 3 static events tomorrow to test the knowledge of our race-car. The events are: Design (150pts), Cost (100pts), and Marketing (75pts). We have been preparing for several weeks, making sure to dot our i's and cross our t's for these Static events. Sometimes the Static events may be overlooked at competition, but let me tell you the points in these events are very important!

Well for now I'm signing off... Finishing the night by studying braking calculations, reviewing tire data, and familiarizing myself with the fundamental vehicle dynamics of our race-car. YAWN. Are you sleeping yet?

Racing starts in two days....Be prepared for the rumble!

--Benny D

"Remember"......Haiti 2 years ago today

Hey everyone,

So I haven't posted since my recent visit to Europe, but today brought a lot of remembering to the country of Haiti. If you didn't know, I traveled there last March with a group of 16 college students to aid in earthquake relief. In May 2012 I am leading my first trip back to Haiti with a group of 8-12 people from my home church. Very excited for this!


As I was going through some of my old photos I came across this video I watched nearly 2 years ago. This video was my first inspiration in serving Haiti. Hope you can check it out.


--Benny D

 

This video is one of the first things that opened my eyes to "GO" and serve the people of Haiti. It's hard to believe the earthquake mangled the country 2 years ago today. Since the earthquake I have been fortunate to meet so many amazing people, and had the opportunity to work with organizations like Mission of Hope International and Be Like Brit! As the song states, "You are not alone"...Some may feel alone at times, but there is always Someone out there! Please remember the people of Haiti today

Successful Finish

So this will be the final update regarding racing.... Zips racing finished 12th overall at formula student Germany! A solid performance for our first year

We started the day on Saturday running Acceleration and Autocross. Keven and Logan drove acceleration. Our drivers drove the same time, putting us in 14th place! Solid performance.

Later that afternoon we set the car up for autocross. We planned to get our runs in before the rain. Michan ran the first lap and posted an average time of 58 seconds with 1 cone. He lined up to put the hammer down for his second run. About 15 seconds into the lap the car came to a hault! Schiezen... We pulled the car into the pits trying to diagnose the problem. It was a wiring issue, but unfortunately it took us about 1-2 hours to fix. We were the final car to go out in Autocross that afternoon, and it had just poured rain... This left us middle of the pack for our endurance run on Sunday.

Sunday we prepared the car for endurance. Checking every nut, bolt, connection. The car was ready to go, and we headed up to the line. We proved to be out of place in our endurance position because we were running about 6 seconds faster per lap. But hey, stuff happens. Our car was one of the fastest cars of the entire day. We ended up finished 9th place in Endurance, but the traffic really killed our time...

We chilled out the rest of the day waiting for the awards cermony later that evening.... Now that competition was over it was time to celebrate. We had a blast and were rewarded with Music, Beer, and free mugs! We danced until about 1am and then headed to the campsite for the ''after-party''

Monday morning we packed up our camping gear and headed to one of our sponsors facilities, LUK, for a tour! They welcomed us so gernously and head a great presentation prepared.

Later that evening, around 11:30pm, we arrived back in Munich where we crashed from exhaustion! We plan to tour Munich for the rest of the week. I was given a Fordors book before we left and it is proving to be a huge help! THANKS : )

Chao!

Time to compete!

Hey everyone!

So yesterday marked the first "official" day of competition. The team competed in 4 events... 3 of them were static, and the other was dynamic. Static events test our engineering and business mindsets. (The car is not racing for them.) And the dynamic events are pushing the car to the limits in different areas. I will give you a quick breakdown of our finishes and then go into more detail if you have time to read...

Design - 33rd
Cost - 14th
Marketing Presentation - 28th
Skid-Pad - 18th

Team Photo FSG 2011

I actually competed in all the static events yesterday so I'll try to give you the best personal recap of them. First we headed to our Design event where about 6-8 engineers from Germany go over our car with a fine tooth comb. This event lasts 1-hour and is worth 150 points. The judges ask each engineer on our team questions like:  A.) Why do you run these Goodyear tires instead of Hoosiers? B.) Show me calculations of your suspension system. C.) Explain your choice of engine.... Etc. The questions get harder as the time goes on. I was incharge of the Brake Design system and Driver Ergonomics. A couple questions I was asked were: 1.) What adjustments do you offer in your cockpit (Pedals, seat, brake bias). 2.) Why did you choose this rotor material? Overall the event went well, but we are a young team and our knowledge is still growing. We placed 33rd in this event out of 73.

5 Akron Engineers - 7 German Design Judges

Preparing For Design

Our second event was the Cost event. For this event we construct a 200 page excel document which is used to calculate the cost of every component. From the Shocks all the way to the smallest zip tie. I have actually competed in this event since I was a freshman. (hence why I am bald now...) This was our best static event, we placed 14th out of 75.

Lastly we competed in the presentation event. This event is actually really fun. Maddy & and I provide a 10 minute mock marketing presentation for our car. The overall goal is to market the car & produce ~1000 per year. We calculated all the production costs, return on investments, etc. We were hoping to do a lot better in this event, but we ran in to a few problems. One particularly was our "slide-clicker" stopped working before our presentation : ( Overall we were ranked 28th.

Finally we competed in the Skid-Pad event for the first dynamic event. Logan and Kevin drove this. It tests the cars steady-state turning capabilities. They are both young drivers, but are proving to become comfortable in the car! The placed 18th in this event, which was really good!

RIT running Skid-Pad in the "WET"

This afternoon we competed in Autocross, but ran into problems. I will explain more in tomorrow's post when all events are completed and scored.

Have a great night!

Fuel to Noise

One of the biggest challenges at competition so far is getting up on time in the morning. We have limited access to "alarm-clocks" on the campsite and 6:45a.m. comes around pretty early. So you might ask, "how do you do get up in the morning?"...

...Thats a great question. Our friends from Munich have invented a patented "Fuel-to-Noise" machine, which solves this tremendous problem. The fuel to noise machine is an old chainsaw with no blade, and hardly any muffler. The intended use of this machine is to wake up sleepy Germans. So when someone will not wake up a fellow team member starts the machine at full throttle, places it in their tent, and zips the tent back up. Believe it or not this does this trick, everytime!

Anyway now for the part you all have been waiting for....The update of the day. ya right! Today we had our technical inspection. For those who don't know this is an event where engineers scan your car for about an hour for defects or possible failure modes. It is actually a strenuous process. We build these racecars to a set of rules, but everyone has their own interpretation of the rules. Creativity usually means success! In the hour you have it can be stressful! Luckily the ZR-11 has entered two competitions now so the process wasn't too bad. Only a few minor things we overlooked, which we were able to fix immediately. Tomorrow's outlook is all the static events; Cost, Marketing, and Design. As well as skidpad. Thats all for now.

Chao!

Benny D

Livin' up to the hype!

Hey All!

First off, I hope you're enjoying this blog!? Below check out the team celebration photo from Austria...

So far Germany has lived up to the hype. I'm going to type as fast as I can because my battery is about ready to die. Anyway, Germany is pretty awesome. They are so efficient here. Everything seems to be organized. From the roadways, food centers, to the racetracks. you can quote me on this: "the people have a clue!"

Last night we arrived at Hockenheim speedway. Set up our camp and paddock. Everything went smoothly. Unfortunately we have a high number in the tech order so we will not be inspected until Thursday morning. This is ok though because we will not start ANY events until Friday. This is different from the states. So today we mostly checked over the car, ate food, and chilled out. Tonight we will hang again with the Germanys! Such a good time.

So for now thats all I really have....

PROST!
---BennY!