With lessons learnt from an over ambitious 2001 car, Full Boar Racing's 2002 SAE entrant went back to basics. Using the CBR engine as a fully stressed member, "lightweight, reliability and simplicity" was team's motto.
2002
was the first year that Swinburne ran a fully stressed engine - it worked well, much testing was done
(dynamically and statically) and the judges seemed to like
it.
Again 2002 was the first year that Swinburne ran MMC brake disks, this material is an aluminium matrix with ceramic impregnations. Because it's mostly aluminium, the material is very lightweight and has excellent heat transfer characteristics, while the ceramic particles give the material harder wearing characteristics than pure aluminium. While it is an excellent material that gives very good brake performance, it is very hard to work with and machine.
The shifting system of this car used a fairly conventional shifting lever but had an in-line hydraulic clutch that automatically actuated on a down shift. The system was very driver friendly and reliable. A "freak failure" did occur during the final endurance run which left the driver without gears, however the car still finished that event.
In an effort to reduce weight the pedal box and pedals where manufactured from nylon. Unfortunately there was some rigidity issues with the design and some heavy modification to the unit was undertaken during testing to give the driver good brake pedal feel.
All chassis members were fish-mouthed on a mill - very time consuming but gave good results. The pickup points were located with machined aluminium blocks mounted to the welding table while the tubes where located using one-off aluminum flat sections
The Differential of the 2002 car was a viscous LSD unit sourced from a WRX encased in a custom housing
In the Welding Bay
In an effort to eliminate any "slack" in the steering system a right angle bevel box coupled by flex plates was used.
With thanks to Paul at Dynomotive we managed to get good horsepower and drivability after many late nights on the dyno.
Almost 50 hours of track testing time was logged up on the 2002 car
Two weeks before the competition things were looking good, the car had been built early and had had plenty of track time to find and tune any gremlins. It was then discovered, due to confusion of the rules, that the roll hoops and side intrusion bars had been built from the wrong wall thickness tube (they were 0.2mm thinner than required). After much debate about solutions it was decided to cut out the offending bars and replace them. That night the chassis was stripped and jigged to the welding table awaiting conformation that new roll hoops could be bent in time. The next morning one team member went to the bending company with new tubes and pleaded with them to do the work and around 9:30 he called us in the workshop with the news that they would bend the tubes that day and we could start cutting out the old ones. By 6pm the roll hoops had been carefully removed leaving the fish mouthing on the adjoining tubes. At 4am the welding was completed and after a few hours sleep the new chassis got a coat of paint. At 4pm the next day the car was back together and ready for the track!!
Swinburne's 2002 Formula SAE event went well, with no problems through scruitineering the car completed every event except the first enduro when the car would not start for the second driver due to heat problems. The team managed a 2nd in design and won the testing award while coming in a impressive overall 4th in the competition.
