I said I'd be making an IRL blog soon, so here it is. But where to start?
FSAE = Formula SAE
What's SAE, you say? The Society of Automotive Engineers. Formula SAE, then, is a automotive engineering/racing competition. Students spend all year building a car, and then compete in a variety of events a few times a year. These cars are very small, typically weighing in between 400 and 500 pounds (although the lightest had a titanium suspension, 1 cylinder engine, and carbon fiber wheels among other things and weighed in at 285 lbs). I could go into lots of detail explaining how the car's designed and built, but suffice to say they're basically 4 wheel motorcycles in terms of weight and power.
In the middle of May, the main competition for the US was scheduled. So, me, being a member of my university's team, headed up to Michigan with the rest of the group to compete. It was a 14 hour drive after working almost non stop for 72 hours (Out of those 72 hours, 4 were spent sleeping, none of which came during the last half of that stretch) to get the car ready to go. It was pretty grueling. Competition was actually pretty relaxed compared to the build up.
We did decent. The first day went well. We got 6th in acceleration (out of 120). You basically a straight line course that's 75m long. Your time determines your place. We did it in 3.997 seconds. If you're trying to get a feel for how fast the car is, we got up to 63mph by the end of the course. We got 17th in Skidpad (a circular course with a radius of 25 ft where you try to complete the loop as fast as possible).
The second day didn't go so well. We had issues with the brakes, and as a result of that and some bad luck did very poorly in autocross. it was somewhere in the 50s. What makes this even worse is that endurance (a 10 lap race with 5 cars on at a time) uses autocross times as qualifying, so we got stuck with the slower cars and were constantly being held up.
We ended up 34th overall in the competition. Not bad, but not what we were hoping for either.
Here are some shots of cool cars (they both did much better than us
):
A couple of weeks after the competition I headed down to the beach. A friend of mine has a beach house down there, and she was staying there for the summer with her sister. The unfortunate part was that they both had to work every day I was down there, so we were basically only able to hang out during the night. Still, it was a ton of fun, and I got to see a beautiful sunset too:
So I'm doing this thing called co-op where you work for a semester, go to school for a semester, work for a semester, go to school for a semester, etc. It works out to getting a year's worth of work experience within MY FIELD before graduation. Not only is this great for finding a job after I graduate, it means I'm going to be getting paid serious money for the first time in my life. My income will far exceed my expenses, so I plan on picking up a car within the next year or so. I'll be moving down to South Carolina for work, too, so I'll be out on my own. I'm really excited. I start on August 2nd.
I picked up a 25" Monitor/HDTV for the move (the place I'll be living doesn't have a TV) and it's sex. It dwarfs my laptop's puny 19 inch screen, and the quality is amazing.
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