Formula SAE?

I was involved with the FSAE team at University of California at Santa Barbara, at least until they cut our funding and the whole student machine shop. I don't go there any more so I can share secrets. Make the driver sit up tall, you can't see if he's down low even though it may be more aerodynamic. Garrett will offer free turbos to the schools out here so they are worth a shot. Try running compressed air in the frame from a small compressor on board, then release it into the intake when you start the straights. I'm not quite sure about the legality of this as we never got to test it, but it was a cool idea. Try running a small engine that will use something much closer to the 20mm restrictor as it's normal intake. It will run more smoothly and in it's power band as opposed to a full 600cc engine running at less than half power due to the restrictor. Our engine normally used 4 30mm intakes and we had to put all the intake air through that one tiny 20mm restrictor. If you don't want to machine your own restrictor find one off a road race car, they are very well engineered in terms of flow characteristics and cheap if you know someone in the racing scene. Don't bother with ram air, it's poinless. Don't run the exhaust right behind the driver, it gets really really hot, trust me. Put a radiator in the front of the car and run aluminum piping to the back, it will cool much better and allow you to have a large coolant capacity. Motorcycle/four wheeler parts are great.

I'm sure you'll have a much much larger team and a huge budget but those are some things we learned working with a team of 8-10 people and a budget of about $7000 a year. I'm also pretty sure that you guys have had numerous FSAE teams in the past, it's a pretty popular project. Good luck with it and I hope you get to drive the thing when it's done.

dude, compressed air in the frame? that's awesome... yeah, I'm not too sure if MIT has actually run teams in the past. there doesn't seem to be any record of it. all the funding thus far has been donated by different departments and a couple of sponsors from what I've gathered. I'll be helping out a lot in our funding drive this year. hoping to gather up enough cash to get more nifty tools and purchase all materials in advance next year. We're definitely hoping this will expand here, but the team just went from 10-12 ppl to 25 or so. MIT tends to kill your schedule though, so it's anyones guess as to how many can stick with it all year. Looking at what they did last year, they ran a diffuser back from the restrictor into this truly bizarre dual plenum intake manifold. I guess it got them equal length runners into each cylinder though. Hopefully the entire vehicle will be drawn up in cad in another month. My goals though are to start off with funding and parts suppliers so we don't lose so much money to mcmaster and to hunt down a faculty advisor so we can weasle some credit out of doing this. :-D

-tom