Texas A&M before their acceleration run at the 5th annual Formula Hybrid International Competition

As I wrote at the start of last week’s blog, Texas A&M taught everyone a lesson in preparation, planning and hard work at this year’s Formula Hybrid International Competition at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.

Texas A&M’s team was better prepared than any of their rivals and won convincingly. The team’s faculty advisor, Dr. Make McDermott, believes Texas A&M benefitted from taking a conservative approach.

“I think it was because of the design process that we used,” McDermott observed. “A lot of people are looking at the Formula Hybrid competition as a research activity. They’re trying to come up with a lot of high-tech stuff and their criteria for making decisions early in the design process is based entirely on performance. Our early decision criteria are based on performance, cost and schedule. We throw out a lot of high-tech ideas because we decide we can’t get them done on the schedule we’ve got.”

As reported in my blog #8 from last month, Texas A&M’s Formula Hybrid team is run as a senior design class. “It’s a one-year project for a design class with two semesters,” McDermott said. “We start in September and we don’t have a running car until the end of March. So it’s eight months and if you try to do a whole lot of new, high-tech stuff there’s too much schedule risk.

“If you’re doing a research project you typically don’t have the hard time constraints that building a race car does. We’ll take on one or two technical challenges each year if we can devote the manpower to it. But we don’t want to address five or six at one time.”

McDermott reiterated his philosophy is to select the project manager and then step back and stay out of micro managing the program. “The only leadership role I chose is the project manager. I choose the staff and let the students themselves design it and decide who’s going to be the crew chief.”

Texas A&M after their acceleration run at the 5th annual Formula Hybrid International Competition

He says he applies the same rule to the team’s at-the-track operations. “I try to let them make the technical decisions. I am an advisor, so I say you need to consider this and that. If they ask I’ll tell them what my opinion is. But ultimately, the decisions are theirs.”

Will Hiltebeitel was Texas A&M’s team leader this year. Hiltebeitel is studying mechanical engineering and graduates in December. One of his goals in attending Texas A&M was to work on the university’s Formula SAE team. Because the school’s subsequent  Formula Hybrid team is taught as a senior class he couldn’t be involved with the team until this year.

“I came to Texas A&M with the intent of being on the Formula SAE team,” Hiltebeitel explained. “The way it’s structured as a class it’s really meant for seniors. I had other classes I had to take so it’s difficult to get too involved with it if you’re not a senior. Last spring I spent some time with the guys who worked on the 2010 car and went to a couple of practice days and started to get warmed up for the fall.”

Hiltebeitel is a car guy who always wanted to make his career in the auto industry or racing. “I work on a lot of the fabrication stuff and I just enjoy working on cars,” he remarked. “I’ve been doing it since I was a kid. My dad was into drag racing and he always encouraged me. I’ve always wanted to work for an OEM or a race team so it’s great being able to talk to companies like GM, Chrysler and Ford and see that some of the race teams like Joe Gibbs Racing are recruiting from Formula SAE. That’s part of the appeal and part of what draws me to the competition.

“We’re under competitive pressure and we really want to win. We try hard and it’s a lot of fun. We try to do what we can and we learn a heck of a lot. We learned how far behind we were and how much more work we could have gotten done. It’s definitely a great learning experience.”

Like many students who take part in the Formula SAE and Formula Hybrid competitions Hiltebeitel hopes to find a job working as a development engineer for one of the country’s major automobile manufacturers.

“I have a friend who was a project manager on our 2008 Formula SAE team and he’s working now for GM in their manual transmission development department. I think he’s probably the archetype for me of what I want to be doing. He’s out there driving the new Camaros and new Corvettes and doing testing and trying to find the issues and come up with solutions and disseminate the information. I think that’s awesome. I couldn’t think of a better job than that.”

Other key members of this year’s Texas A&M team included Cole Easterling, Malcolm Stephenson, Brooks Tempel and Will Dixon. “Cole helped out a lot doing a lot of our machining and helped us with making realistic designs,” Hiltebeitel said. “He worked on the drivetrain and did some welding on the chassis and building differential mounts. We had a great welder this year in Malcolm Stephenson and we had a couple of really good guys, Brooks Tempel and Will Dixon, on our chassis team who really stepped it up. We had a good team all-round.

“Cole and I will be involved next year. We’re already scheming out things we can do better and systems where we can improve. We’re going to work on this a little bit over the summer. We’ve got some concepts and research projects to look at so we can have some better concepts to present to the class in the fall. We didn’t have anyone from last year on this year’s team, which made it hard to figure a lot of things out so we want to help that process for next year.”

Unlike most of their competitors Texas A&M prepared their car to pass swiftly through technical inspection by making a complete dummy inspection run a week before the competition.

Texas A&M gets ready to run the autocross event at the 5th annual Formula Hybrid International Competition

“We went through a couple of mock technical inspections at Texas A&M,” Hiltebeitel explained. “We went through the tech sheet and said this is where we’re deficient. We need to fix this or that. Then, less than a week before the competition, we had a final mock tech inspection. We set an ultimatum. We said if we don’t pass our mock tech inspection then we don’t do the competition.”

A late decision to change a recalcitrant, purpose-built electric motor added to the workload. “That was a bit of a scare,” Hiltebeitel added. “We lost the electric motor we were intending on using and we had to make a lot of modifications for the competition. But we came together and got things done and got the car running.

“We ended up having to reuse the PERM132 electric engine that we used in 2010 and the same controller because we had a custom-built electric motor that put out the same if not a little bit more horsepower and weighed substantially less. It made a huge difference. We used different controllers we had set it up for and were able to run more power. Our acceleration times were even faster with that motor. We had done some tuning for running the autocross and we could run a very quick time just on our electric motor alone within a couple of seconds with what we could do with our IC engine. So we were pretty pleased with that.

“But when we started testing we had a compound problem that sneaked up on us and it eliminated our custom electric motor. So we had to scramble with a week to go. The only thing we had was last year’s motor so we put the old control back in, rewired our battery pack and our accumulator, redid the wiring and put a structure on the rear of the car and mounted the electric motor and retrofitted our one-way clutch onto the PERM to get it ready for tech.”

Hiltebeitel believes the key strengths of Texas A&M’s car was its light weight. The team’s 2009 car weighed 541 pounds and its 2010 car was heavier at 550 pounds, but this year’s was considerably lighter, tipping the scales at 441 pounds.

“We made a really big effort this year to drop a lot of weight,” he commented. “We were on schedule to be somewhere around 420 pounds before we had our mishap and had to go to our second-tier electric motor system. But we really focused on losing a lot of weight. We changed our wheels and tires which produced a lot of packaging problems. I think that was the main place where we saved a lot of weight and we just tried to keep the weight down in general.”

Texas A&M had always used thirteen inch wheels and tires since the team started competing in Formula SAE but this year they went to ten-inch wheels.

“We looked at the Formula SAE results in total,” Hiltebeitel remarked. “We said, ‘What’s working for them?’ Formula SAE cars are faster than Formula Hybrids and nine out of ten of them are running tiny, ten inch wheels. They’re really quick and they’re doing well on their economy score. With 450 cc engines they’re running similar economy to what we need to run and are definitely a lot faster cars. So we took some inspiration from that and it saved a bunch of unsprung weight.”

The other area where the team was able to reduce weight was putting its accumulator into a single box. “We reduced our accumulator from two boxes to one because the rules specify so much protection and so much conduit. We knew there was a lot of weight to be saved by putting everything into one box. So we did that and saved a bunch of weight.”

Texas A&M’s method of teaching Formula Hybrid as a senior class project means there’s a wholesale change each year in team members. Hiltebeitel says it took a lot of effort to get the entire team singing from the same sheet of music.

“We tried to work with what we had and tried to get a decent set up. We learned from a lot of the changes we made in testing and we had to work with the nature of it being a class rather than a club so it’s always new people. There are a few people who know what they need to do and what the processes are but most of the people don’t.

“So it was just trying to get everybody up to speed and working together. We really pushed to get everyone on board and get everything far enough along that we could actually test and find out what things broke so we could fix them.”

Hiltebeitel was delighted with the team’s two drivers, Thomas Schinderle and Daniel Records. “Our drivers were great,” Hiltebeitel declared. “That’s the one thing we were always focused on which was getting the drivers in the car and getting them comfortable. You can have the best car in the world but if it’s not comfortable to drive then it’s not going to perform to its potential.”

Schinderle had an impressive racing resume, including recent experience in Late Model stock cars. Records lacked Schinderle’s on-track experience but responded well to Schinderle’s speed and development skills.

“We were looking for drivers and we heard Thomas was interested in doing the program,” Hiltebeitel commented. “Our advisor said one of the things he was looking for in a driver was racing experience. Thomas had never autocrossed but he’s a very good driver and provided really good feedback. He’s used to working with Late Models where you’re always making adjustments.

“He’s very sensitive so we could make a change in our shock damping and right away he would say this is better or worse. We could talk very easily with him and it made it very easy to communicate and make our setup better in a short period of time.

“Tom is a fast driver, but as soon as we got our new car running for this year he and Daniel were neck and neck. They were within a few tenths of each other on our practice days. Daniel drove last year as well and he brought the experience from previous competitions of what we could expect and what the courses would be like.”

As he said a few weeks ago in my blog #8, team advisor McDermott emphasized the importance having a fast, savvy driver. “I’m an old motorcycle racer and I think even more than cars that the rider plays a big part of it,” McDermott commented. “I was kind of a top third of the pack talent as a rider and after you’ve done that and see what the professionals and really good guys can do, it’s just amazing. You can’t really have an appreciation for it until you’ve tried it yourself.

“We have driver try-outs every year and I tell the students there are two ways you can qualify for driver try-outs. One, you can put in enough work on the car that the team members feel like you’ve earned the chance to try-out. Two, you can qualify by a resume and that’s where Thomas qualified this year. He qualified as a driver with his resume before he’d done any work on the car. I said if somebody else is letting him race their Late Model and he’s racing with other people’s money, then he’s probably good enough to try-out for this team.

“When we have driver try-outs I tell those guys who have driven in the past that they have to come to driver try-outs. I want a benchmark for all the guys who think they can drive to compare their times to when they get out there. If there’s no benchmark then the fastest guy out there thinks he’s fast. But when somebody puts three seconds on you on a fifty second lap you begin to realize there’s more to this than you realize.”

Schinderle graduated last weekend with a degree in mechanical engineering and has landed a job with General Motors as a suspension development engineer. He starts work at GM on June 16th. “I’ll be working at General Motors’ technical center and test track in Detroit,” Schinderle said. “Hopefully, eventually I’ll be moving into their ride and handling group as a test driver. So I’m pretty excited.”

Schinderle started racing in go-karts when he was eight years old and raced karts regularly through middle school and high school. When he turned sixteen he moved into full-size cars, racing his family’s dirt modified, then driving a Late Model dirt car for a semi-professional team near his home in Sugarland, Texas, a suburb of Houston.

“During the summer I’d help out at the shop and then while I was in school I was able to just show up at the track and be able to drive. That’s given me a lot of experience, not only suspension-wise but driving-wise and being able to work with the team. I haven’t been racing this year because I’ve been so busy in school and working on the team.”

In addition to driving the car Schinderle worked on Texas A&M’s Formula Hybrid suspension team. “I was part of the suspension team. There were four or five of us and we had a big undertaking. We had a lot to make and customize. It was a ton of work but we had a blast doing it and we learned a ton. It was pretty funny how you would see us walking around with backpacks full of suspension books. We tried to learn as much as we could in a short amount of time.

“Working with a large team was really awesome,” Schinderle added. “A lot of us had never been a part of designing the nuts and bolts of the car. That’s what I found really interesting. As a driver I know how to respond to the car and to give feedback to the team about how it’s handling. But this year for me was more of learning about the theory behind the design and how that will affect the car’s handling. In that respect I was learning it backwards from everybody else because I know how the car handles and how to give feedback to the team. But this year I was learning the theory behind that and I really enjoyed it.”

The only problem Texas A&M ran into during the competition came in the autocross event where Daniel Records struggled momentarily with a stumbling power source. “Daniel had the short end in the competition,” Hiltebeitel said. “We had a little problem with our voltage system and he had to do his autocross run with the electric motor on. We hadn’t had time to really test it out very well so he ended up having some issues where it wasn’t predictable and that made it hard for him to put down a fast lap.”

Added McDermott: “I think his first lap in the autocross event would have been the quickest time. He would have been quicker than Thomas but something happened and the car died for a couple of seconds. He had the presence of mind to hit the kill button and pull it back out. He was rolling down the hill off the banking and the car restarted but he lost a couple of seconds.”

Records also had to drive conservatively during his leg of the endurance event. “He’s a very good and consistent driver,” McDermott said. “But he did not get to drive fast in the endurance because we were concerned with fuel shortage. So he went out and set a fast lap so we knew how fast the course could be driven and then we dialed him back a few seconds a lap. No race driver likes to do that but he did it.”

Steady rain on the final day for the autocross and endurance events added to the challenge. “We definitely stayed conservative on our endurance run,” Hiltebeitel remarked. “We actually ran with too much fuel in the car and that really boiled down to the fact that we didn’t have a whole lot of testing and were pressed for time. With the rain we were looking at other teams’ times and we ended up running really conservatively on our first stint. We tried to go for it on our second stint but the rain made it difficult. But we did well and we’re pleased with that.”

Hiltebeitel and everyone involved with Texas A&M’s 2011 Formula Hybrid team should be proud of their accomplishment. It should help them find exciting and challenging jobs in the auto industry. For his part, Thomas Schinderle has found his dream job and also hopes to resume his racing career once he settles into his new job.

“I’ve got quite a few contacts in the Detroit area,” Schinderle said. “I’m going try to work with some of those teams and see if I can start racing up there. My goal is definitely to try to get with an established team and work with them.

“Of course, everybody’s goal is to be a race driver,” he added. “But being around racing so much I realize that it really is a money game. So I’ll do as much as I can. I’m trying to work as many angles as I can to hopefully get to the point where I put on a race suit for a living. That would be great. But I’ve got a great job with GM doing ride-handling and suspension engineering and hopefully quite a bit of test driving also.”

Formula Hybrid has served as a great launching pad for Thomas Schinderle and seems set to play a key role in the careers of many other aspiring young engineers. That’s precisely one of the competition’s primary goals.

Texas A&M completes a test run at the 5th annual Formula Hybrid International Competition

Texas A&M’s winning team taught everyone a lesson in preparation, planning and hard work at last week’s 5th annual Formula Hybrid International Competition. Texas A&M arrived at New Hampshire Motor Speedway better prepared than any of their rivals and were the only team able to complete all phases of the competition.

Rated only seventh by the design judges and third in their marketing presentation, Texas A&M were the only team to complete both parts of the acceleration test, won the timed autocross event and finished a close second in the concluding endurance test. Dr. Make McDermott’s team accumulated 871.24 points, soundly beating Brigham Young University (712.04 points) and Sweden’s Lund University (691.6). UC Davis finished a competitive fourth (680.49 pts), trailed by Dartmouth (381.62) and McGill (325.24) in fifth and sixth.

Dartmouth was presented with the Chrysler award for design innovation for developing an accumulator comprised strictly of ultracapacitors, while Hal Flescher presented the IEEE engineering achievement award to Lund University. Flescher is a long-time SCCA racer who is a member of Formula Hybrid’s design judging panel. He explained his reasons for presenting the IEEE award to Lund.

“The first criteria for me is that the team is multi-disciplinary,” Flescher said at the awards presentation. “I’m looking for interesting and insightful solutions to the problems of building a hybrid vehicle race car. As a person who builds and drives race cars I’d like to see something that the British would call a proper race car. What’s a proper race car? It’s something that’s easily upgradable and easily adjustable with a number of adjustments that can make the car faster and faster.

Dartmouth Formula Racing talks with officials during the design presentation

“The next criteria for me is the car showing some potential on the track. I can’t give an award to a car that shows up and is a good model for everybody but doesn’t show some potential on the track.

“And the last criteria is real personal for me. I look for a car that I would really like to get in and drive and start making adjustments to see if I can make it better. I’m looking for a car I want to drive.

“The winning team had a very good mix of engineering disciplines and a clean design with good design implementation for both the hybrid vehicle and for a race car. It’s a proper race car with lots of adjustability so that you can make things work and it uses good technology and made me say, ‘I’d really like to drive that car.’”

Flescher also suggested that most of the teams take a closer look at dealing more effectively with the dreaded bump steer. “Something many of the teams ought to look at for next year is bump steer,” Flescher noted. “You need to look at your rear suspensions in particular because a lot of the suspensions are very pretty but they have inherent bump steer. For a driver that’s really uncomfortable because you never know what the car is going to do next.”

Formula Hybrid’s chief electrical technical inspector Rob Wills was next to briefly address the assembled teams at the awards presentation. “I think the interest in hybrid vehicles closely follows gas prices with a little bit of a lag,” Wills remarked. “My guess is that if gasoline hits five dollars a gallon over the next year I think we’re going to see a lot more entries and we’ll see a lot more people following what you’re doing. Your schools are going to be much more energized. They will know that you are at the leading edge and as engineers you’re going to be very sought after.”

Steve Daum, the SAE’s Collegiate Programs Manager for SAE International, also addressed the crowd. “On behalf of the rules committees for all the SAE competitions we do our absolute best to write rules that are completely clear and easily understandable by all of you,” Daum said. “But it’s clear by the difficulties some teams had in technical inspection this year that we have some rules that are probably ambiguous.

“If we have ambiguous rules I ask you and specifically the faculty advisors — because many of the students will not be here a couple of months from now — to please send us an email saying our teams had a hard time understanding what you meant in this or that specific rule. That will help us a lot and hopefully help the teams a lot to be prepared to go through technical inspection more easily next year. We need your help in this regard.”

Lund University, LU Racing from Sweden, works on their car before inspection

Daum confirmed that the SAE is developing a battery electric class for Formula SAE, most likely starting in 2013. “SAE is planning to add a battery electric class to the Formula SAE competition,” Daum said. “All of the details have not been worked out but tentatively this will begin with the 2013 competition at our event, which will be held at the SCCA national autocross site in Lincoln, Nebraska. Our California event will shut down after this year and will started up as a new competition in Lincoln, Nebraska in June of 2012.

“At this point we don’t think having a battery electric class is practical for next year. Who knows what will happen, but we’re planning to put it together for 2013 and any information you give us about the rules for Formula Hybrid will also apply to the SAE competition. We want to make sure the rules that evolve for the battery electric class for Formula SAE will be compatible with the rules for Formula Hybrid. Ideally, we will have worldwide rules that will be effective for all the competitions — the Italian, German, English and Australian electric rules. Our goal is to have one unified worldwide set of rules for that class of vehicle.”

After the awards presentation I talked with chief mechanical technical inspector and veteran Formula SAE and SCCA technical inspector Michael Royce. I asked Royce what he thought was good or bad about this year’s Formula Hybrid competition

“I think in terms of organization we were better prepared at both mechanical and electrical tech inspection than we were last year,” Royce said. “We had some serious hold-ups last year but this year we never had a line at mechanical tech inspection. We never had anybody waiting and I heard that was the case with electrical inspection too.”

It rained steadily for much of the final day of this year’s competition which made it hard on everyone involved. “Obviously the weather wasn’t the best,” Royce remarked. “But a surprising number of cars did receive rain certification. Rain did help in terms of endurance durability because the chassis were not stressed as much. Typically, at a Formula SAE event we might get thirty-five or forty percent finishers but here we had only two cars that didn’t finish the autocross and a similar number in the endurance test.”

But Royce was displeased with the number of teams who were not prepared to pass technical inspection because they had not thoroughly and carefully read the rules.

“What was not so good was numerous teams had not read the rules,” Royce frowned. “There are rule changes from year to year. It may be just a sentence here or there. Even Texas A&M missed an important rules change and had to weld some extra tubes into the chassis on Sunday night before they could go racing. Another couple of teams did not pick up that the driver’s suit requirements had changed for this year and had to go down to Massachusetts and spend a couple of hundred bucks on Nomex underwear. There were several instances where the teams had not read the rules.

The BYU Formula Racing team goes through design presentations

“The rules on the mechanical side were written 25 years ago and have evolved,” he added. “They’ve matured and been clarified but you can still recognize their parentage. So that’s the thing that disappointed me because many of the cars were not ready on Sunday because they had not read the rules and underestimated the technical challenge.”

Rob Wills added his assessment at the lack of preparation by a number of the teams. “I would say probably seventy percent of the technical challenges were more than they expected,” Wills observed. “The lack of rules knowledge came into it and certainly took time to resolve those issues. But I think more than half the cars were just not along in their project plans from our viewpoint. The definition of a basket case is when you bring all the pieces of the car to an event in a basket and tried to put them together before you run. It’s well-known that doesn’t work.”

The following rules clarification for next year has been posted by Formula Hybrid:

In response to the difficulties many teams had getting through mechanical and electrical tech inspections this year, Formula Hybrid will be adding a new requirement for 2012:

• All teams must perform their own (unofficial) inspections and submit the completed mechanical and electrical inspection forms a minimum of two weeks before the competition.
• This must be done using the same tech forms used by the inspectors, which can be downloaded from the Formula Hybrid website.
• Teams may perform these inspections themselves, however it is highly recommended that they be done by experts who are not normally associated with the teams.
• These forms will be reviewed by the tech inspectors (time permitting) who will notify the teams if they find discrepancies that might require attention.
• Teams that do not submit the required sheets by the deadline will be put at the ends of the queues for tech inspection upon arrival at the competition.

In closing I have to add that as a judge sitting on the presentation panel we were disappointed with many of the sales jobs put forward. Most teams lacked serious research data, particularly when it came to assessing production costs and potential profits and also regarding real world details about how they planned to market their product.

Some said they were so preoccupied with designing and building their cars that they hadn’t devoted the time required to their marketing presentations and it showed. As we said to quite a few of them, you can have the greatest concept in the world and first-class execution, but if you can’t sell your idea you’ll be forced to sit on the sidelines.

Beyond these criticisms, it was great to see such a wide variety of solutions presented by the teams competing in this year’s Formula Hybrid competition. Every entry was distinctly unique with each team pursuing their own design objectives and philosophies. It was also good to see the high degree of motivation and enthusiasm from the competitors and their commitment to unrelenting hard work.

A panoramic shot of the entrants of the 5th annual Formula Hybrid International Competition. This year's event brought together 34 teams and 500 students from five countries. Photo by Kathryn LoConte Lapierre.

“You had GM, Ford and Chrysler here wanting to sign people up,” Michael Royce remarked. “The word is getting around that the people from Formula SAE and Formula Hybrid are the people they want to hire. There are things that the profs cannot teach in the classroom. Working on these projects gives the students about a two to three year flying start and it’s stuff that the companies don’t have to pay for.”

There’s no better recommendation for the growing value of the Formula Hybrid International Competition.

Texas A&M has competed in Formula Hybrid the past two years following ten years in Formula SAE. Texas A&M’s team advisor is Make McDermott who led the team during its Formula SAE days and serves these days on Formula Hybrid’s rules committee. McDermott earned his degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Texas in Austin, and then worked in spacecraft guidance and controls for NASA for four years. He joined Texas A&M’s engineering department in 1973 and has been there to this day.

McDermott won the Carroll Smith Mentor’s Cup in 2005. Smith was a legendary racing engineer and crew chief who worked for Carroll Shelby’s Ford Le Mans teams in the sixties and went on to prepare race-winning cars in many major American motor racing categories. Smith also wrote a series of books about how to go racing, including ‘Prepare to Win,’ ‘Tune to Win,’ ‘Engineer to Win,’ and ‘Drive to Win.’

“He was a great engineer and a great mentor for many students,” McDermott remarked. “I was very honored to win that award.”

McDermott is a big supporter of Formula Hybrid. “The Formula SAE and Formula Hybrid competitions are great educational experiences,” McDermott said. “Doug Fraser has done a great job with Formula Hybrid and I’m very encouraged with the progress of the competition.”

McDermott is impressed with the steady progress made by Formula Hybrid’s rules committee. “It’s a tough deal to start from scratch,” he commented. “They were able to take the Formula SAE rules, which are pretty mature, and take care of the chassis and engine drivetrain, but all the electrical stuff is brand new. They’ve had some teething problems but they’ve been very diligent in addressing those problems and it seems to get better each year. I’m sure it will be better again this year.

“It’s a great technical challenge for the students to figure out that this is a race car,” McDermott added. “It’s not an economy car. What are the requirements on the whole car and in particular on the electrical drivetrain for a race car? It’s an interesting challenge and it’s great for me because I get to play with neat toys and work with neat students and get paid for it.”

McDermott is equally impressed with the level of motivation he sees in his Formula Hybrid students. “The students are so motivated!” he exclaimed. “They do much more work than you could possibly get out of them for any other three-hour course. Some of them keep track of their time and they told me they averaged 36 hours a week through the whole semester for this one three-hour course.”

He also deeply believes the Formula Hybrid competition is an excellent tool in providing his students with a wide swath of real world experience. “It’s a great technical exercise to work through. But not only that, it’s also a great project management study. They’ve got to deal with all the dollars and schedules and people issues that there will be in their professional careers and mastering those will pretty much determine their success in their professional life. It’s a great experience for them to work on that kind of project management here before they are faced with a million dollar project in their working lives out in the industrial world.”

McDermott points out that most Formula Hybrid teams effectively spend more than a million dollars to design, build, develop and race their cars. “It’s really a million dollar project we’re running if you count all the students’ labor at the rate they’re going to be making in any industry they enter. I’ve done the numbers and by counting everybody at 36 hours a week at a reasonable rate it’s about a million and a half dollar project.”

McDermott explained how Texas A&M operates its Formula Hybrid project. “We do it as a senior design class and I teach that section to the design students,” he said. “We have about 120 students that break out into studios to do design projects. A couple of months into the semester after we get to know the students a little we interview them and choose a project manager. He chooses his staff and they run the project. I don’t tell them what they should do or make out the schedule. I make out some of the schedule as far as design reviews but they make the decisions on the car processes.

“We teach the design process but the first thing we do is come up with a needs statement about what the customer needs and what functions this design has to accomplish. We have to make sure that we meet that need in addition to the performance requirements of how well it has to accomplish those functions. Then the students can come up with various concepts followed by some serious design reviews and recommendations. Then we give them some more feedback and they go with their detail design work.

“I’m a real believer in the design process that we go through,” McDermott added. “It’s a real good application for the process of a complicated system. We break it up into about seven subsystems with three or four people working on each subsystem. They’ve all got to talk to each other and interface and learn how to work together and it’s fun too.”

Building and testing the car takes many more hours than some people imagine and the amount of work required can be daunting. “We started building the car on January 2nd,” McDermott said. “The target was to have it finished somewhere between March 20th and 30th. That was the week after Spring Break, so if they were behind they could stay here through Spring Break and work away at it.

“Some of them did and some didn’t. Some of them felt they needed to and some felt they didn’t need to. It’s interesting to see how people react to working on a tight schedule like that.”

The pressure to get the car prepared is just like any other motor racing competition. In the end, practical considerations are the most important. The car must operate cleanly and effectively through all aspects of the contest and reliability is more important than pure speed.

“I tell the students that the schedule is not going to slip,” McDermott noted. “When the flag drops to start the race they’re going to wave the green flag whether A&M is there or not. I also tell them that there’s always more to do on a race team to make your car better but the people who win are the ones who prioritize the best and get the most important things done.”

McDermott has hit on an essential rule of motor racing that’s often hard to learn. “Engineers in particular want to do this and do that and keep trying new things,” McDermott observed. “But at some point you’ve just got to quit that game and say, this is good enough. This works and we’ve got to go out there and compete.”

Will Heiterbeitel is Texas A&M’s crew chief. “He’s our number one suspension guy,” McDermott said. “He’s the most knowledgeable guy we have about suspension design and set-up. Will is also a practical guy who knows how to get things done.”

Another axiom of motor racing is that the driver is always the most important part of the equation and McDermott subscribes unequivocally to this philosophy. “I really believe that the most important piece in the whole project is the nut behind the wheel,” he declares. “We want to get our car built and give our drivers some seat time to get the handling and the balance the way they want it and get familiar with the car so they can get the best out of it. If you’ve got a really good driver he can take an average car and win. But if you’ve got a really good car and a bad driver, you’re going to be an also-ran. Like I say, the driver is the most important part of the whole equation.”

McDermott emphasizes that driver feedback is more important than the ability to drive fast. “Our driver started out racing go-karts when he was real young and he’s raced Late Model stock cars on dirt,” McDermott related. “He’s real good at providing feedback about what the car’s doing and that’s really hard and really important.”

From Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss to Mario Andretti, Ayrton Senna and Rick Mears, providing good technical feedback to a race team’s engineers or crew chief is essential to success in big-time motor racing, whether it’s Formula One, IndyCar, NASCAR or long-distance sports car racing. Technical savvy and the ability to describe what the car is doing makes the best drivers in any category of motor sport.

“My son races motorcycles and we get along great,” McDermott remarked. “But we have a hell of a time with him communicating what the bike’s doing so that I can try to figure out what to do to fix it. So I really appreciate the drivers who can do that.

“We’ve got 50,000 students here, so there’s got to be some good drivers among them,” he added. “We do our best to find them. One guy was very, very talented but he was terrible at providing feedback. He’d just drive around the problems but a couple of them have been really good at providing feedback.”

Another part of Formula Hybrid that McDermott finds satisfying is the job recruiting from Formula Hybrid by the automotive industry. “We have a couple of guys this year who have offers from GM and I think they’re going to accept those offers. We have at least one candidate every year, and some years two or three, who go to work in the automobile industry. Every once in a while someone will go to the motorsports business. Brian Welling is a Texas A&M graduate who works for Chip Ganassi’s team. He’s the assistant engineer I believe on Scott Dixon’s Indy car.”

By all accounts Formula Hybrid is alive and kicking. It’s providing great motivation for many engineering students across the United States and around the world and helping supply the automobile industry with some fast-thinking, hands-on young engineers who are dedicated to improving the efficiency and performance in the automobile. In today’s world that is an admirable goal.

“What are the goals we’re trying to achieve with Formula Hybrid?” Wills asks. “I think the first thing is that the ultimate hybrid hasn’t been built, either in Formula Hybrid or in commercial vehicles.

“The complexity of different approaches is very interesting. Look at the various approaches that are out there. The lengths that they go to is pretty astounding with the Prius, for example, to be able to run effectively all the way from series through parallel using a complex planetary gear system and motor generators. Apparently Toyota needed to do that to match the engine performance over all the operating conditions of the vehicle. Then you’ve got GM going with apparently a much simpler design in the Volt.

“In Formula Hybrid we have everything from straight parallel to straight series. There are different approaches, from gasoline on the rear to electric on the front and variable speed drives. So it’s all very interesting. I’d say there’s probably more analytical work that could be done to say what’s the ultimate Formula Hybrid car.”

Wills points out that the method of scoring determines where Formula Hybrid teams concentrate their efforts. “It’s entirely dependent on our scoring,” he says. “That’s something I learned in the Tour de Sol days. The teams designed their cars to meet the rules. In Formula Hybrid we’ve got an acceleration event, we’ve got braking, we’ve got autocross and we’ve got the reliability or endurance event. Endurance rewards miles per gallon or efficiency and the others reward performance, but the bulk of the scoring is on the autocross and endurance event.

“I would say that acceleration and autocross are pretty easy to analyze. Acceleration rewards best power-to-weight and best traction, while autocross rewards those things plus the ability to go around corners and to brake well. But then the scoring in the endurance event is making sure your car is reliable and efficient in all those areas.”

Wills says improvements in efficiency don’t necessarily translate directly to similar increases in performance.

“There’s probably not a whole lot of difference between a 90 percent efficient electric motor and a 95 percent efficient motor in terms of overall performance in the endurance event,” he observes. “You often hear the claim of the motor guy who’s come up with a 98 percent efficient motor and they say they’re going to double the range of the car. They’ve reduced the losses in the motor by half, so they believe they’re going to double the range of the car. But all they’re doing is improving motor efficiency from 92 to 96 percent. That’s a common fallacy.”

Quicker recharging will be essential to the success of hybrid or electric cars and a great deal of research and development is going into making batteries that can be recharged much more rapidly. Meanwhile, lightweight lithium batteries have become much more popular in recent years and Formula Hybrid has followed that trend.

“The thing we saw over the last two years is there’s been a massive jumping on the bandwagon for lithium batteries,” Wills remarked. “Before that probably half the cars were lead acid with maybe a few NiCads, but I would say we got to maybe seventy percent lithium last year. There are still some ultracapacitors, but fewer. So there’s still a huge amount of room for fundamental technical innovation.”

Wills is convinced that in the end pure electric power will prevail. “I think a very interesting question is what will win ultimately,” he said. “Will it be hybrid or will it be fuel cell or electric? I think the answer is it will be battery. It will take more evolution in battery technology but with nanotechnology coming along I think it’s just a matter of time before someone improves substantially on Mr. Edison’s original battery.

“An interesting challenge for Formula Hybrid is that we need to be converting our Hybrid-in-progress pedigree to allow pure electrics, starting next year. How that impacts the whole Formula Hybrid event is going to be pretty huge. I think the question for electric transportation in general is where is the market heading. Is it the Nissan Leaf? Is it the Volt? Is it Toyota’s efforts? I believe Subaru is heading down the pure electric path as well. So it’s going to be very interesting to watch.

“It’s all about batteries,” Wills adds. “If they can make batteries in large enough volume and inexpensively enough and with enough cycle life and power-to-weight, then batteries will win. Simplicity wins.”

Wills points out that if the electric car becomes as successful as he believes it will, it will require the auto manufacturers to develop a whole new business model.

“One of the things I like to ask people about electric vehicles is, ‘what’s the typical life of the new car you just bought?’” Wills asks. “How many hours do you expect to put on your new car before you retire it and get a new one? One hundred thousand miles divided by a 30 mph average means the car is good for 3,000 hours of operation and the life of a gasoline engine is probably twice that. Two hundred thousand miles is 6,000 hours and the life of an electric motor is typically rated at about 100,000 hours.

“So the problems we’ll have with electric vehicles are the life of wheel bearings and brakes. Nor will there be an exhaust system to change, so it could result in a change in the car companies’ business model. If you have a car that’s good for 100,000 hours instead of 3,000 hours that’s thirty times longer. So a car could be good for sixty years of driving!

“But you’ve got a serious problem if you could make a car that is that reliable. The market will saturate and you won’t be selling any vehicles. So the ability to change the bodies and re-use the chassis could become an interesting element. You could have a relatively inexpensive plastic body that would change the look of the car. Like I say, it would require a whole new business model.”

As we all know, more and more hybrid and electric cars are beginning to enter that market. There’s Toyota’s Prius, Nissan’s Leaf and Chevrolet’s Volt and at last month’s Geneva Motor Show each of Lexus, Porsche, Land-Rover, Mercedes-Benz and BMW displayed electric or hybrid cars. Even Rolls-Royce rolled out a hybrid concept car built on a huge Phantom chassis.

“That brings up some really interesting questions,” Wills observed. “I think the biggest one is how strong does a hybrid have to be in order to be effective and what degree of hybridness does it have? The other question is, if you look at the Chevy Volt it’s a hybrid essentially, but not entirely. I believe it has a parallel path engine to the wheels.

“The interesting thing that’s going on in the automotive world is that many hybrids essentially have just a hefty starter motor with only a couple of kilowatts, maybe five horsepower, just to give a little bit of extra push. It doesn’t need a lot of battery and you’ve got to have all that stuff onboard anyway to be able to crank the engine.”

Meanwhile, Formula Hybrid has established itself as an ideal recruiting ground for the auto industry to find skilled and motivated electrical and hybrid engineers.

“If you look at the alumni from Tour de Sol and Formula Hybrid you’ll find a lot of them are working in the car companies and the hybrid vehicle business. A lot of early Sol people have ended up working on hybrid vehicles and the same thing is happening with Formula Hybrid. That’s all good. It’s exactly what we wanted to see from the competition.”

“All through grad school I’d been putting solar panels on people’s roofs to make some extra money and I ended up doing it professionally,” Wills remarks. “I’ve been doing that for thirty years.”

He also does quite a bit of additional consulting work and has helped design a wind turbine and helped write the most recent national electrical code standards. For nineteen years, from the late eighties through the opening years of the new century, Wills ran the American Tour de Sol competition.

The Tour de Sol was modelled on a Swiss version and was a long-distance contest for purpose-built solar-powered vehicles that attracted as many as fifty competitors. Wills’ deep involvement in the solar contest was triggered by an encounter with Doug Fraser at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering one day in 1988.

“Doug was the instigator of the whole thing,” Wills recalls. “I was walking down the corridor outside his office as a doctoral student at Dartmouth and Doug said, ‘Hey, what do you think about this guy Tim Warden from MIT racing solar cars in Switzerland?’ I said, ‘Wow! That sounds like a really neat thing.’ And Doug said, ‘What say we try and form a solar racing club?’

“I had been on the board of the solar energy society and as a graduate student I had been helping some of the locals in Vermont with solar panels on their roofs as a side business helping keep me alive. So I knew a fair amount about the fledgling solar industry as it was then about 1988 or ’89.”

Wills orchestrated designing and building a Tour de Sol racer. “We built a solar racer and competed with MIT and everyone in the Tour de Sol. In the Tour de Sol in Switzerland you were not allowed to charge your vehicle from the (power) grid. If you charged from the grid you were out of the event. The point was to go the length of Switzerland, from the bottom to the top, from Italy to Germany, and do it entirely on solar panel power.”

After competing in the Tour de Sol Wills responded to more encouragement from Fraser to create an American version of the event. “When we got back from Switzerland Doug said, ‘Wouldn’t it be a good idea to have an event here?’” Wills recalls. “He said, ‘Why don’t you do it?’”

So Wills dedicated himself to the task with a key change from the Swiss regulations. “When we started the Tour de Sol here we said we would allow charging from the grid,” Wills said. “There would be a point penalty but you could continue in the competition.”

For a while the Tour de Sol thrived. Toyota came on as a sponsor and provided a prototype Prius as the pace car a few years before it was introduced to the market. But as time went on Wills found himself doubting that solar cars were the way forward and ultimately the government funding for the Tour de Sol was eliminated.

“After a couple of events we worked out that it was all very interesting but they’re not practical vehicles,” Wills says. “They also are pretty scary vehicles with bicycle wheels and lots of sealing wax and solar panels and very fancy batteries. But ultimately they weren’t leading to a practical outcome. But there was one wonderful ground-up car done by a high school here in New Hampshire that was incredible in terms of its performance. It had a purpose-built all carbon chassis and was very aerodynamic.”

As the Tour de Sol came to an end Doug Fraser was creating and launching Formula Hybrid and Fraser invited Wills to take charge of Formula Hybrid’s electrical rules committee. “When Doug started Formula Hybrid he asked me to help on the electrical side and I’ve been helping formulate rules and guiding the inspection crew,” Wills commented. “So far we’ve had safe events and we’re growing so we’re very happy with the way everything’s going.”

Wills described his philosophy regarding Formula Hybrid’s rules and regulations. “Safety always is item number one,” he emphasized. “The rules may seem a little Draconian to some people. We’ve brought the voltage limit down but we would certainly consider allowing a higher limit under appropriate conditions. One of the problems you face is that you have a very wide range of capability in the students. A lot of them are mechanical engineers who don’t know a whole lot about electrical engineering and some of them are electrical engineers who don’t know a lot about mechanical engineering.

“A good example of that is we have requirements for team-constructed electrical equipment that has spacing requirements that are slightly bigger than the standard industrial standards. The reason for that is when you make it on your own bench it might be that the assembly is not quite as neat as a machine made in a factory. On the other side we want to leave plenty of room for innovation, so the rules are actually in some ways pretty open for what people can do from a design perspective.”

Wills loves to look forward and is intrigued by what might comprise the ultimate Formula Hybrid car. “A really good question is where can this all lead to?” he asked. “Back in the Tour de Sol days there were always discussions on the rules committee about what was the ultimate car and the same thing is true with Formula Hybrid. When you look at the way things are going I believe that the development of very lightweight wheel motors would give four-wheel independent traction control. That’s probably where the most performance can be gained from a traction point of view. We haven’t seen that yet in a Formula Hybrid car but I’m looking forward to it.

“You can imagine getting to the point where the traction is fully in control and it would be up to the driver to judge how fast they can go into a corner without spinning out. But apart from that everything would be in control with absolutely optimal torque on every wheel. You would still have to have some skill at turning a steering wheel but basically you would put your foot on the throttle, push down, and you should have full traction with it. It won’t work if you have too many G’s in the corner but it’s an interesting concept. I guess you could get to the point where a computer could be analyzing road friction all the time and would guide you, knowing the track layout, how fast you could go into a corner.”

Wills also noted the pure performance of Formula Hybrid cars is quite impressive. He would like to see these characteristics better promoted. “These vehicles have pretty darned fast acceleration,” he observed. “They have a pretty good power-to-weight ratio. We don’t do a standing quarter mile because it would be too fast and too dangerous at the end. But I’d like to see us translate our acceleration results to both G’s and to an equivalent 0-60 mph time. That’s a metric that most people understand and they would be impressed to know that Formula Hybrid cars are competing with Porsches and cars of that type for times below four seconds. So I think it would liven things up a bit if we could transmit the equivalent 0-60 times live at the event.

“When the autocross or endurance test was laid out a couple of years ago someone tried to take a conventional vehicle around and they couldn’t get anywhere near the Formula Hybrid times. The low center of gravity, the amount of stick on the road and the acceleration out of the curves is so dramatic that a Formula Hybrid’s performance is very significant.”

In my next blog Wills looks forward to where Formula Hybrid is heading. He also looks at the broader picture of the hybrid or electric car market and what type of post-internal combustion technology is most likely to win the battle for consumers’ minds and wallets.

Formula Hybrid teams pursue the same goals but for infinitely less cost. In this way, it’s an excellent lesson in efficiency. Adam Marano is the leader of Dartmouth’s Formula Hybrid data gathering and telemetry team and his team designed and built their system for a fraction of the cost lavished on these items by professional race teams.

“This year we’re making the push to put a lot more sensors on the car than we had last year,” Marano said. “We’re looking at what we need to monitor to know how the car is performing both from speed, efficiency and reliability of all the components. We’re looking at it as a whole to really know what the car is doing, what potential issues might crop up and how we can improve the car.”

Philly Croteau says the team takes great pride in building as many details of its car as possible, telemetry system included. “We developed all the printed circuit boards and fabricated them right here,” Croteau emphasizes. “We’re really proud that we designed, developed and fabricated them right here. A big part of this is you can go out and buy a race car or components. But our goal is to work with our students who are really interested in racing, engineering and design to develop our own systems so it’s our race car. Everything isn’t designed one hundred percent here, but to the greatest extent possible we try to design and develop it so it’s our car.”

Frank Fortin-Houle says building one’s own data system is a no-brainer compared to relying on a commercially available system. “We used to have a system which we bought off the shelf but when it broke we couldn’t fix it,” Fortin-Houle said. “We had to send it back to the company that made it because learning about how it was made would take forever.

“What’s neat about it running your own system is that if something breaks or a part needs changing instead of having to go out and buy a new part we can now go and change the interface and the parameters because it’s our part and we know it from A to Z. So it’s easier for us to tailor it to our needs.

“Now, instead of recording the data on the car, we’re using the telemetry system to record them directly on the computer. That works out really well. A year ago we would not have been able to do that. Now if the telemetry system breaks we can come back to the shop and the guys who wrote the code can hopefully figure it out and we can go back out and run again almost immediately.”

Fortin-Houle is delighted with the progress in data gathering and telemetry. “In the past six months we’ve made a leap forward in working the telemetry system,” Fortin-Houle said. “It’s working fairly well now so we can monitor all the systems while the car is driving. It makes it a lot easier to understand what’s going on. We’re using it right now to monitor the strain gauges and the temperatures, pressures and parameters all around the car so that we can improve the design for the next generation of components.”

Fortin-Houle looks forward to being able to tune and maximize the power sources of Dartmouth’s Formula Hybrid car. “Ultimately we want to use it during competition so we can adjust our engine,” he commented. “We want to monitor it to make sure we’re going to be able to finish the event or know how much fuel we’re going to have left and try to put a little bit more performance back into the engine.

“It also allows us to monitor the driver,” Fortin-Houle added. “We have throttle position and brake pressure so we monitor how early he’s getting on the throttle and how late he’s getting on the brakes. We also monitor when he’s using his boost and the regenerator.

“The first time we monitored regeneration braking in the pedal it was amazing for the driver because we can tell how effective it is and how we might improve the way we use it. Right now it’s linear with the brake pressure but you want to take advantage of the fact that if you’re not braking much with the hydraulic brakes you want to use as much of the regenerator as possible. So the telemetry system is a real nice tool.”

The experience of driving the Formula Hybrid car is a primary draw for many of the young engineers who work on the project. “Driving the car is a key part,” Eric Mann agreed. “We’re trying to bring in new people and get them interested and obviously they are further motivated by having the opportunity to drive. People work on the car and then get to enjoy something they’ve worked on.”

Through the first few years of the project the car’s reliability was so poor that the team was unable to put in many test miles and very few people were able to drive. “With a hybrid with the high voltage and the mechanical systems it’s been tough because you have things that fail a lot more often,” Mann said.

“As a result over the last three years with the hybrid we haven’t driven that much. It was only last spring and this past fall that we got four driving days out of six weeks and we do it every four weekends out of six weeks. So we’ve gotten to where we’re making progress and fewer things are breaking and we get more people to drive the car.”

Deciding who drives the car in competition at New Hampshire Motor Speedway is more difficult than might be imagined. “Over past years,” Mann said, “it’s been like a seniority thing where you put your time in throughout the years and I think that’s generally led to some of the faster drivers. Frank and I are competitive alpine ski racers and we have a very competitive nature which is if we’re going to work this hard on the car let’s put the fastest driver in the car. There’s no reason to have a fast car and take away from it with the driver.”

This year the team is going to select its fastest driver for the contest. “We’re hoping this year to maybe rent Loudon and have everybody have the same experience on an open track to the extent that the competition allows,” Mann said.

Added Fortin-Houle: “The way we want to do it is throughout the spring, as test days go more into time trial days, we will do timing and the faster drivers will get to drive. The bottom line is you want to win.”

Mann says in the extreme there could be different drivers for each event. “There are definitely events that tend towards different types of drivers. You’ve got acceleration, autocross and endurance, and the guy with the heavy foot probably shouldn’t drive in the endurance event. The fastest driver is best for the autocross event. The best way to do it is to have the best driver suited to the particular event.”

Adam Marano adds that some of the team’s development work requires a keen feel from the driver. “As we’ve added quirks to the car we’ve had to have people who are familiar enough and know how to work with these quirks,” Marano noted. “We have a traction control system, for example, and it takes some knowledge of how it works to get the best from it. The driver has to know all these things to get the best from them.”

Some of the participants are very inexperienced drivers and require instruction in many of the basics of the art of driving. “We have some people who have never driven with a clutch for example,” Eric Mann said. “So we talk about how to use the clutch properly as well as the strategies of braking and acceleration and what the line through the corners is.”

Italy’s team placed extreme value on the driver’s speed and employed a professional driver for its car. “Last year Italy was an amazing team,” Fortin-Houle remarked. “They had a great car. They didn’t have the fastest car as far as top speed and acceleration, but they probably had the best handling car and they had by far the best driver. Their driver is on a driving scholarship at their school and you could tell he was a professional driver.

“For us it’s an engineering exercise before it’s a driving exercise. We’re not professional drivers. We enjoy it and try to go as fast as possible but none of us have driven enough to have the skills of a top professional driver.

“When you’re driving the car it’s hard to work on technique because there’s so much going on. When you’re a kid and you’re learning go-karting all you do is brake and accelerate and by the time you go into a Formula car you don’t have to think about braking. You brake at the right time and know when to let go of the brake and how and when to use the throttle.

“But for us, it’s not ingrained in us. We still have to think about braking, shifting, clutching, using the regenerator and boost. We’re doing our best, but we’re not the best drivers.”

Adam Marano interjects that there’s more pride in the design and engineering of the team’s car than in the driving. “It’s not just getting the best time,” Marano said. “That’s good, but we’re also trying to be competitive with the engineering. We’re trying to have the best electronics and engineering of anybody.”

Added Eric Mann: “We’ve had some unfortunate failures in the last couple of years which stopped us from finishing the endurance competition. But we’ve been in the top three in the design contest and we all pride ourselves on having good systems and pushing the limits.”

Fortin-Houle says all the team members take tremendous satisfaction from finding ways to beat the competition by building a more efficient car. “That’s the fun thing about Formula Hybrid,” Frank declared. “We might not have the best drivers but if your car is fast enough and efficient enough you can make up a little bit of that lack of speed by being better at engineering and building a better car because it’s not only based on speed.

“We know that in pure speed it’s going to be really hard to beat Italy, but we know we can design and convince the judges that we’re better engineers and get a better score for design and engineering. If our car is more efficient, their very good driver will have to take it easy to finish. Because the energy allotment is so little he may have to drive five seconds a lap slower than possible. If we’re able to make up five seconds in efficiency, we can beat them and win.”

We may be struggling to break out of winter here in New England but be assured that inside Dartmouth’s Formula Hybrid workshop the competitive juices are flowing.

Dartmouth’s car is a parallel hybrid drivetrain design. It’s powered by a 250cc Honda CRF250X moto-cross engine which makes 27 hp at 10,500 rpm plus an HPGC AC-15 electric motor in parallel which produces 43 hp. The team has moved this year from a carbureted gasoline engine to a more modern unit with electronic fuel injection. Electrical power is accumulated in a package of 40 Maxwell ultra capacitors. “Our whole strategy,” commented team leader Eric Mann, “is limiting the size of our accumulators and having fast-in and fast-out energy.”

When the Formula Hybrid competition started, Dartmouth’s team ran their existing Formula SAE cars which they turned into hybrid cars. But two years ago they built a brand new, purpose-built hybrid car that they have rapidly developed.

“Our current chassis is the first from the ground up hybrid car that Thayer built,” Mann explained. “We had an engine that would run a generator and all the power ran in series from the generator to the accumulator to the electric motor and out. But last year we switched to a parallel architecture where you could have the gas engine or the electric motor or a combination.

“We have the parallel hybrid drivetrain which is the engine and the electric motor. So there’s an engine team and a rear electric motor team. We have a vehicle cooling team and then we have driver controls. As we got into the hybrid there are so many more controls.

“We started over last year and there were some big failures but this year we’re lucky enough that it’s working reliably. We’re going to keep the same architecture so all the information we’re going to get now will just make it that much better.”

Frank Fortin-Houle says the team is closing in on finding the best overall package. “We’re slowly converging towards a solution,” Fortin-Houle said, “which makes it easier to focus on certain areas as opposed to the whole car.”

Added Mann: “I think in the competition as a whole in the first year everybody started with their own ideas and some things worked and some things didn’t. Bigger schools are coming in and becoming attracted to the competition so it’s definitely pushing it in the right direction. It’s not that all the teams are converging to one solution but they’re definitely becoming more refined.”

Philly Croteau agrees with Fortin-Houle and Mann. “It’s definitely moving from being the new hybrid concept to an actual race car that’s a hybrid as opposed to having the science project aspect of it,” Croteau observed.

One of the challenges of a Formula Hybrid car is coping with the high voltage inherent in a hybrid and making sure the car is as safe as possible. “That’s probably the most rigid part of the rules in Formula Hybrid,” Mann commented. “There’s a lot of constraints and safety checks. Everything has to be in conduit and be isolated if it’s over thirty volts. There are a lot of kill switches so everything can be killed from the outside. Any time the high voltage system is on there’s a light that’s blinking.”

Added Adam Marano: “There’s a ground fault detector and it won’t even let the high voltage system or anything on the car power up until it’s had a chance to verify the wiring integrity. If it detects that there’s any significant difference between the high voltage and low voltage side it just won’t let the car power up.

“Except for the huge capacitors all the motor controls are bled off within ten seconds of when the car turns off so you’re not keeping any stray high voltage. We’re monitoring voltage and temperature. Every wire on the car has to be fused to its gauge so it can’t spark fires and burn somebody.”

Croteau says the team of people working on cooling the car’s components are critical to both safety and performance. “Their job is, number one, to get the engine cooled and the rear electric motor cooled and the motor controller and brakes cooled,” Croteau remarked. “They then develop an efficiency model for the car. One of their goals is to calculate what is the loss from the allotment of energy in the brakes, the engine and the electric motor controller and also what’s the loss in the rolling resistance.”

Dartmouth’s car differs from many Formula Hybrid entries in having its batteries located low and close to the car’s centerline. “Our car is quite wide,” Fortin-Houle observed. “We’re the only team that runs with the batteries inside the car. A lot of teams have very narrow cars but with large battery banks sticking out. Our idea was to try and bring the batteries as close as possible to the driver and keep the weight down the centerline because the batteries are the heavy part.”

Fortin-Houle pointed out that the team has been able to cut a lot of weight out of the old Formula SAE-based car. “Our car from three years ago went from weighing almost a thousand pounds to weighing 570 pounds,” Fortin-Houle said. “So we’re learning how to make hybrid race cars, not just hybrid cars.”

Added Mann: “A hybrid is primarily about packaging. You’re trying to drag down the weight and fit it all in there. The big teams on the big race circuits obviously run into packaging issues too as they try to reduce weight.”

The team is reasonably happy with the handling of their car. “The SAE cars were inherently pretty narrow so the opportunity to build one from scratch enabled us to build a better hybrid car,” Mann commented. “We’re pretty happy with how it handles and the suspension geometries. That part isn’t broken so there’s no reason to change it. So we’re going to keep the chassis and suspension essentially the same. The amount of development that goes into a hybrid car means it’s too hard to build every year from the ground up.

“We’re dedicating so much to the powerplant. We’re making some jumps with the electronic fuel injection but we’re keeping the suspension. We’re starting to tune it and try to get the car handling better and understand how our systems work and have it be really robust. That’s what our overall goal is.”

Christian Busch is focused on making lighter and better suspension. “I’m doing computer simulations,” Busch commented. “We measured the forces with strain gauges and for next year’s car we won’t have to test the geometry. Building new A-arms cost a lot of time and money and when you have the simulation you can compare the results so you can use it for faster and more effective building of the suspension.”

Under Busch’s direction the team will move from using traditional steel A-arms to carbon fiber wishbones. “We purchased three main carbon fiber tubes and Christian makes all of the inserts for the geometry,” Mann said. “The big part has been the manufacturing process of getting good adhesion between the metal insert and the carbon fiber tubes.”

The new carbon fiber wishbones won’t be ready until later this year. “We have some assembled but we’re not done with the simulation,” Busch remarked. “There may be a change in geometry or design so we won’t build the final pieces until we have completed all our simulation work.”

The springs and shock absorbers on Dartmouth’s car are operated by pull rods which require more support in the lower part of the chassis. “Compared to Formula One and Indy cars we go so slow that aerodynamics does not have a big impact on our cars,” Fortin-Houle observed.

“Aerodynamics is such a big influence in modern race cars that everybody in most major Formulas are running pushrods so the nose is quite high and you can push a lot of air under the car. But we don’t go fast enough to have an aerodynamic impact so our cars look a lot more like older race cars. In that sense our cars are mechanically sound rather than aerodynamically sound.”

The main Formula Hybrid event is an endurance event where you’re given an initial allotment of energy. Each team is given more or less fuel depending on how much capacity is in their electrical system and how many batteries or capacitors they have. More electrical power means less fuel allotment.

“We’ve optimized it to the point where we have enough electrical power to be able to do the electric-only acceleration event,” Croteau pointed out. “But we’re maximizing our fuel for the endurance event which is where the majority of points are awarded for the competition. We’re trying to develop our electric system and our engine to the point where they work consistently and are very efficient.

“Rather than trying to tune the carburetor we’re going to use the electronic fuel injection to change our fuel-mapping and hopefully do that on the fly through the four different events. We’ll be able to change the fuel map for the acceleration event versus the endurance event to really optimize our performance.”

Added Mann: “It’s a choice of whether you’re going for performance or efficiency. The autocross is one lap as fast as you can go so for that you could have more performance-based fuel mapping. The endurance event is about efficiency and trying to get the best possible range out of it.

“Our overall strategy is to have fast-in power with regenerative braking and try to recoup some of the losses that you get out of the hydraulic braking. We went with capacitors rather than batteries to get fast-out power because the old technology batteries are current-limited, although the latest batteries are definitely getting better.”

Mann added that regenerative braking makes driving difficult. “Last year we got into regeneration and acceleration on the paddle control,” Mann said. “You have the accelerator for the gas and your main mechanical brake and then your clutching and shifting. So the amount of things made it a little challenging to drive.”

Fortin-Houle also emphasized the difficulties in using the braking regenerator. “It’s hard to optimize regeneration while you’re driving,” he commented. “When you’re coming into a corner you have to downshift through the gears and at the same time you have to operate the regenerator with the same hand you’re using to downshift. You have to commit to one or the other and because you have to downshift regeneration takes a backseat. So we’re trying to incorporate the regenerator with the brake pedal so that every time you’re braking you’re regenerating.”

Added Mann: “The reason we initially decoupled it was because you want to regenerate as much as possible and not use the mechanical brake so you’re not losing efficiency. We weren’t far enough along in the development to control it electronically through the car’s brain so it was the best way to maximize our efficiency.

“But when you see the complications that arose the driver is not maximizing it. So we’re definitely getting the driver controls more integrated especially with the EFI. We’re looking at electronic shifting by spark cut, or at least wire shifting that’s pneumatic or electronic, or paddle shifting on the steering wheel.”

Mann says the complexity of the car can easily get in the way of competing successfully. “One big thing we struggled with in the past is there are so many complex systems and the development pushes up so close to the competition date,” he observed. “So we’re always struggling to drive. There’s so much stuff that’s so new to a lot of people that it almost feels like a science project.

“This year our goal is to make the jump to having it be a race car and get to where we’re testing and understanding everything about it so you’re not making such huge strides in new technology but you’re really starting to optimize and find efficiency.”

As I said last week, there are plenty of real world engineering lessons to be learned by competing in a fascinating and demanding contest like Formula Hybrid.

Over the decades many of the concepts that have made today’s automobiles deceptively effective and reliable were developed on the racetrack, including pneumatic tires, rear view mirrors,  independent suspension, monocoque and crash-resistant chassis, rear engines, disc brakes and turbochargers.

At the same time companies like Ferrari, Peugeot, Jaguar, Porsche and Audi built their brand names and reputations by competing successfully on the world’s race courses. In recent years Audi and Peugeot have developed and showcased their clean-burning, direct injection turbo diesel engines by competing in and winning France’s renowned Le Mans 24 Hours endurance race.

These days all the world’s auto makers are grappling with developing more efficient cars from all-electric to hybrids to turbo diesels so the Formula Hybrid competition is a perfect training ground for young engineers. Formula Hybrid also helps teach them about teamwork and the practical application of engineering concepts.

Competition is the best and quickest way both to push boundaries and break down barriers and this spirit reverberates in Dartmouth’s Formula Hybrid contest. It was a great pleasure for me recently to meet the key members of Dartmouth’s Formula Hybrid team and enjoy a close examination of their latest car. Thirty-five Dartmouth engineering students are involved in Thayer School of Engineering’s Formula Hybrid project. Leaders of the program are Eric Mann, Adam Marano, Philly Croteau, Frank Fortin-Houle and Christian Busch.

Mann obtained his bachelor of engineering at Thayer and will complete his master of engineering management next spring. Marano is in the second year of his masters studies and his sixth year with the Formula Hybrid team. Croteau is a Thayer bachelor of engineering graduate who’s in the first year of his masters program. Fortin-Houle will complete his bachelor of engineering studies in March and Busch is an exchange student from Hamburg, Germany, who’s doing his research thesis at Dartmouth.

“The Formula Hybrid program is about the whole process of designing something and then building, testing and driving it,” Philly Croteau explained. “You get the whole spectrum. When you’re in the real world you’re doing one of those things. You’re designing it, building it or testing it. But the Formula Hybrid class allows you to experience the whole spectrum.”

Eric Mann expanded on Croteau’s observations. “Dartmouth does a good job of exposing you to systems so you’re not necessarily involved in just one area of engineering,” Mann said. “Doing the hybrid project teaches you a lot about interdisciplinary engineering.”

The Formula Hybrid team comprises five groups each with three members. “Adam has been particularly engaged in the electronics,” Mann reported. “Frank has been in charge of the administrative work and Philly and I develop the mechanical stuff. We develop a team strategy as a group. Each group is doing the big systems that are associated with their course work so a lot of work comes out of that.

“We have four captains and we’re lucky to have Christian who’s done Formula SAE with his team back in Germany. We have four or five other dedicated members who are volunteers who have done either a five-year bachelor of engineering program or a more senior level, maybe their masters.”

Mann has no doubt that the Formula Hybrid program helps build communication and interdisciplinary skills. “There’s so much communication required between the five teams because they’re so interrelated,” Mann observed. “The three of us who work on the front electric motors for example are mechanical engineers and we had to learn all about electrical motors and a little bit about power electronics. So you interface across disciplinary fields and that builds skills that you might not get from the regular curriculum.

“We’re trying to get more freshmen and sophomores involved,” Mann added. “We have a good group of ten or twelve freshmen and sophomores who are learning and are excited about it. We have volunteers who are part of the club team and we have a core group who are part of the culminating experience here at Thayer.”

A weekly meeting takes place to keep everyone informed of the latest developments. “We do tech talks every week on Wednesday nights,” Croteau said. “Everyone comes from the ‘ENGS 89-90’ bachelor of engineering group as well as the volunteers. We might do a quick overview of vehicle dynamics about why they are important and why it’s important to keep weight down. We might do another tech talk on the internal combustion engine, how it works and how we try to optimize it. We’ll discuss what the differences are in using ethanol and 93 octane fuel. That’s one of the learning pieces where we can come together and hash out the next week’s goals and plan out what we’re doing for the test day.”

Added Mann: “In our weekly meetings we make a presentation about what we’ve done in the last week and what we’re planning for next week so everyone’s on the same page.”

Croteau emphasized that achieving the best teamwork is not easy. “The volunteers and the captains are responsible for blending everything together and making sure the final product is more than the sum of the parts and everything fits,” Croteau said. “It’s a challenge. It’s been done in the past very well and at other times not so well.”

Still, Croteau is convinced the Formula Hybrid program provides a perfect learning environment for working in the real world. “It really works out well as far as the groups in this class because they’re getting the experience of acting as an engineer,” Croteau said. “They’re developing something that’s very much coupled to somebody working next to you who’s developing another system, which is the way it is when you’re working in an industry.”

Mann elaborated on Croteau’s comments. “A lot of the nature of Thayer’s culminating course is about start-ups where the technology is maybe a step removed from being applied so it takes a lot of development,” Mann remarked. “This course is used to get that development. This program provides that instant feedback to see how components are going to react. You might take the car out to the track and it might break for example, so you’ve got to do another iteration. So it’s good experience to get that feedback. For sure it makes you a better engineer.”

Another real world aspect to the program is finding sponsorship. Formula Hybrid has been invited to be part of the 100th anniversary celebrations at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway during the month of May. Dynamic and static events will be displayed at the fabled Speedway on May 7th, the weekend following the fifth annual Formula Hybrid competition at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway. Mann and Dartmouth’s team are excited about the exposure and sponsorship possibilities afforded by appearing at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

“Frank and I have been doing a lot of the marketing stuff and fund-raising, identifying potential sponsors and how to approach them,” Mann said. “This coming year with the event at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway that’s a great marketing tool because it’s a major venue and will provide us with more exposure. So we’re really excited about that.”

The Formula Hybrid team is also building a link with Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business through the MEM program, a master of engineering management program that takes place half at Thayer and half at the Tuck School of Business. Mann is a student in the MEM program this year.

“It’s an industry-related masters degree,” Mann explained. “It’s for people who have a technical background but might be more interested in the business, finance, operations or marketing side, but have the technical background they can apply to something like this. We’ve got three or four people in the program who are interested in cars and this gives them the option to build their management skills.”

Frank Fortin-Houle says he’s learned a lot from the Formula Hybrid project about the real world demands  of engineering. “It can give you the perspective of both an engineer and a fund-raiser,” Fortin-Houle commented. “But as an engineer you’re still an engineer. When we talk about design you dream all you want. Then you turn around and ask, how are we ever going to pay for this? Little details can make almost no difference but add a lot of cost which is why Formula One teams spend so many millions of dollars. This program teaches you about being more cost-effective.”

Added Croteau: “It’s really ours. We’re not building it for someone else. We’re building this for the team and yourself to be able to race, so you really want to do a better job.”

The Formula Hybrid team tests by setting up an autocross course in the parking lots at Timken Aerospace and New Jersey Machine Tool in nearby West Lebanon. They also enjoyed an opportunity last spring through Thayer alum Charlie Nearburg to test on one of Lebanon Airport’s open runways.

“Saturday is a shop day,” Mann said. “We get everybody in here to work on the car and get it ready for Sunday. Then on Sunday we start at ten or eleven and run until dusk so we get five or six hours of driving pending something breaking.”

Adam Marano says everyone loves driving the car. “If spending all day Saturday working on the car is what it takes to drive on Sunday we’re going to be in here all day Saturday until the car is ready to drive on Sunday because all of us really want to drive,” Marano remarked.

Concluded Eric Mann: “We have a blast with it. We all enjoy it. This is how we spend our spare time. Sometimes it comes across negatively because some people at Thayer ask why are we spending so much time on this?

“But Dartmouth Formula Hybrid has gotten people thinking that you have to put in that time. For the culminating course you’re required to put in twenty hours a week and we have some people who have done sixty or eighty hours a week. Sometimes it’s a negative because people feel like you have to do that to work on the car. But we enjoy it so much. We’re always pushing for that extra bit.”

As I said at the beginning, that’s what the spirit of competition is all about.

University of Madison Wisconsin gets ready to run the track at the 3rd annual Formula Hybrid International Competition.

In this week’s second Formula Hybrid blog I continue, with Doug Fraser’s help, to discuss the primary rules and theories that define the annual early May contest at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway. Doug starts this week by describing his essential concept of the Formula Hybrid rules.

“Of course, there are many different hybrid configurations,” Fraser notes. “The Formula Hybrid  rules require that the vehicle has an internal combustion engine and an electric motor system as opposed to hydraulic accumulators, flywheels and fuel cells. The only devices that are approved for electric accumulators are batteries or capacitors and they have very different characteristics that can be used to advantage in different ways.”

A significant change from the SAE rules was reducing Formula Hybrid’s maximum engine size from the SAE’s 600cc to 250cc. “In a hybrid the 250cc engine is more than enough to get the car around very smartly,” Fraser says. “None of the teams have ever objected to that. It’s worked out just fine.”

There’s no minimum or maximum weight for Formula Hybrid. The cars must have four wheels and a minimum wheelbase of sixty inches. “We have deliberately set up a minimum of rules because we want the students to be as creative as they can be,” Fraser relates.

“We do have rain tire policies but there are no tire rules. There are grooving requirements for rain tires. We don’t allow hand-cutting of grooves and they can’t change wheel types after the judging has been done or use tire warmers or traction enhancers. But other than that, it’s wide-open.”

Formula SAE requires a new frame every year but Formula Hybrid allows older chassis to run as long as they are safe. “Formula SAE has been really successful and their fields filled up to the point where they had to do something to throttle it down a little bit,” Fraser says. “They used to allow second-year cars with a penalty but then some years later they said each car has to be built from scratch with a brand new frame.

A team works in the paddocks at the 4th annual Formula Hybrid International Competition.

“But we said we would permit multiple year cars. In fact, we encouraged teams to resurrect old Formula SAE cars, strip the engine and drivetrain out and hybridize it. Unless there was a serious safety issue involved — our rules lag Formula SAE by three years. If your chassis complied with Formula SAE rules three years ago you would probably be able to get it into Formula Hybrid.”

The chassis rules are largely unchanged from Formula SAE. The same chassis strength and impact attenuators are required plus SAE-spec driver protection for driver’s suit, helmet and safety gear. But the electrical rules are very different. “The voltages aboard a Formula Hybrid car are lethal,” Fraser emphasizes. “Particularly when undergraduates are in the garages pulling all-nighters trying to get their cars fixed during the event. So we have a lot of rules regarding systems isolation.”

A Formula Hybrid car must have three kill switches or ‘Big Red Buttons’. Two of them are located on each side of the roll bar so safety or emergency crews can hit them easily. The third button is located within easy reach of the driver. “Hitting that button drops out the entire electrical system and shuts everything off,” Fraser says. “All the relays are shut off so that no voltage will appear outside the accumulator housings.”

There are also strict rules to isolate the high voltage from the low voltage system that runs ancillary things like brake lights and the dash panel. “The twelve-volt system has to be well isolated from the high voltage system,” Doug stresses. “We have a rule that says there will be no high voltage wiring anywhere inside the driver’s compartment. All the controls have to be isolated if you’re using fiber optics or transformer couplings so that there’s no electrical connection at all between the low voltage system, the high voltage system and the chassis of the car.”

Another important electrical component is the ground fault interrupter, supplied free to the teams by the Bender Corporation. “It’s a small circuit board about the size of a Coke can,” Fraser explained. “It sits in the car and watches the high voltage system in relation to the car’s frame and twelve volt wiring. If there’s any leakage at all between those two systems it shuts everything down. It’s a very important component.”

Additional precautions are taken for running in the rain which requires a further technical inspection. “There’s an underwriters laboratory design nozzle that is specifically designed for checking the integrity of the electronic systems when they’re wet,” Doug says. “The tech inspectors reserve the right to spray the student cars with water. If the ground fault interrupter trips they won’t be approved to run in the rain.”

A Formula Hybrid’s accumulator is limited to 4,449 watt hours, just under 4.5 kilowatt hours, and can’t cost more than $6,000. “We can’t have these kids buying ultra-lightweight aerospace stuff,” Fraser said. “So we set a standardized cost for the accumulator based on what the average customer walking into the store can buy the stuff for. It can’t be some special prize that the student team negotiated with the manufacturer.”

The accumulator is closely monitored both electronically and visually. “It can be spectacular when these things overheat and fail,” Doug remarks. “So we talk a lot in the rules about isolation of the accumulator from the drivers or students working on the vehicle. Part of the accumulator housing has to be transparent so you can see in there and see smoke or something. We’re also very specific about marking and locating high voltage stickers.”

Dartmouth College's hybrid team initiated and now sponsors the annual Formula Hybrid™ competition. Fourteen teams from around the world gathered to compete in the 2008 event.

Technical inspection of the cars is kept to a rigorously high standard. “The mechanical tech inspection is about the same as Formula SAE,” Fraser observed. “The students have about the same type of difficulty in getting through it. Maybe twenty percent of the teams struggle to get through mechanical tech inspection. But electrical inspection is a lot harder. We’ve posted a number of items that give teams examples of good and bad designs.”

Fraser could not be more pleased with the quality of Formula Hybrid’s wide selection of technical inspectors, rules committee and judges. “We beat the bushes really hard to find the best people,” he said. “I think we’re pretty fortunate because we’re getting pretty close to a critical mass where we can start being picky about who comes on board which is really nice.

“We have a very strong group of chief technical inspectors. We recruit a lot of SCCA people. I tend to call on my connections from the old days. The electrical inspectors come out of a different pool. We’ve been pretty fortunate in having people from battery companies come on board and we have two people from Thayer, Jenna Pollock and Charles Sullivan, both PhDs in high power electronics.”

Fraser’s key right hand person in bringing Formula Hybrid to life is Wynne Washburn. “I do most of the technical stuff,” Doug says, “and Wynne does pretty much everything else — all the administration, promotion and marketing.”

Washburn has been at Thayer since 2006 and is working on her thesis in globalization and sustainability for a Master of Liberal Studies. “It’s a similar thing to Formula Hybrid,” Wynne remarked. She hopes to earn her masters degree in the spring.

“Doug roped me into Formula Hybrid,” Wynne grinned. “It works really well because there are a lot of things I know how to do that Doug doesn’t and vice-versa. So we work together as a good team. We literally started this thing together. We’ve been working on it together since day one.”

Washburn is responsible for generating the funding for Formula Hybrid. “It’s a lot of work,” she said. “But we’re starting to see more and more companies and corporations coming to us who are curious about what the competition is all about and how they can get involved. At the beginning, through a friend of a friend of a friend who worked at Toyota, I called them and months later Toyota became our first sponsor besides Thayer. Then we started to be approached by interested companies. So we’re gathering interest and strength.”

Wynne says Formula Hybrid’s impressive panel of judges is a key element in attracting sponsors. “Our judges are from all over different industries and when they come and see what we’re doing they get excited about it. They want to be more involved and as a result their companies become more involved. They have responded really well. It’s a process that’s gaining more and more momentum.”

Fraser has handed off his role as Dartmouth’s team advisor to John Collier. “When we started the Formula Hybrid project I stayed involved with the team for a while,” Doug says. “But then we handed it off to another faculty member, John Collier. It had become a conflict of interest for me to be one of those running the competition and at the same time help one of the teams win. So John is now the team advisor and he does an excellent job.”

Fraser has also stepped down from his formative role as the chairman of Formula Hybrid’s rules committee. “I did that until this past season,” Doug said. “We now have two chairs of the rules committee, one mechanical and one electrical.” Rob Wills, president of Intergrid, a solar power consulting company, is the electrical chair, and Dave Schaller, president of Texas Engineering Systems, is the mechanical chairman.

There’s plenty of competition to be part of Dartmouth’s Formula Hybrid team. “It’s a pretty popular program on campus and it’s not easy to get into,” Fraser commented. “Its makeup is interesting and always changing. Very often, the Dartmouth Formula Hybrid race team is all men and they all live in the same fraternity house. But in other years we’ll have a good number of women and they are from all over campus. You never really know where they’re going to come from.”

Teams work into the night in the paddocks at the 3rd annual Formula Hybrid International Competition.

Every September a fresh group of eager young students are attracted to the Formula Hybrid team. “They show up at the first meetings and arrive in the workshop with their sleeves rolled up ready to do whatever’s thrown at them,” Fraser remarked. “But often, because they’re new, when they ask one of the older team members how they can help they’re told by the experienced people that they’re busy and don’t have the time to explain how to do it. They would rather do it themselves.

“So,” Doug adds, “you’ve got to be pretty determined to earn your way into the team and still be on the team a couple of years later.” Fraser adds that Formula Hybrid teaches the skills of teamwork and interdisciplinary training. “That’s what we’re trying to work on,” he remarked. “Building cross-disciplinary teams is a key element of the competition. It’s about learning to work with people who talk different engineering languages.

“I think it’s been very successful in that way. It really prepares our young engineers to work effectively and successfully in industry. In many ways, that’s the bottom line.”

Next, two weeks down the road, I visit the Thayer School’s Formula Hybrid workshop to meet the team and learn about Dartmouth’s entry in the 2011 Formula Hybrid contest.

Gordon Kirby

Allow me first of all to introduce myself. I am the United States editor of Motor Sport magazine, the world’s oldest motor racing periodical founded in 1924. I’ve covered automobile racing across the United States and around the world for forty years and I’m delighted to have accepted Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering‘s invitation to write a bi-weekly blog about the Formula Hybrid competition.

As most of you know, the Formula Hybrid competition takes place every year at New Hampshire Motor Speedway over two days in early May. An offshoot of the very successful Formula SAE inter-university contest Formula Hybrid is for hybrids only, which are not allowed in Formula SAE.

Formula Hybrid was conceived one day in 2004 by some of Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering students who worked on Dartmouth’s Formula SAE car. They were brainstorming with Doug Fraser, an instructor and research engineer who at the time was the faculty advisor for Dartmouth’s Formula SAE team. Doug is now director of the Formula Hybrid competition.

Fraser has been at Thayer for twenty-nine years. He started his career at Autodynamics in Marblehead, Massachusetts, building race engines for a series of winning cars in SCCA Formula Vee and Formula Ford races. Later Fraser started his own engine building company before he was hired by Dartmouth as a research engineer doing microprocessor applications in electronics.

An experienced racer and accomplished photographer, Fraser worked with Dartmouth’s Formula SAE team for many years before helping create Formula Hybrid and also produces all of the Thayer School’s in-house photography. Fraser remembers the day back in 2004 that laid the foundation for Formula Hybrid.

“We were sitting around brainstorming one day,” Doug recalls. “We were talking about how the Formula SAE rules require an inlet restrictor and it dawned on us that if we added an energy accumulator to the system and ran the engine up against the restrictor plate all the time, even when we didn’t need the engine power propelling the car, we could collect the excess energy and apply it to accelerating the car when we got into a straight line.”

Fraser and his students realized that they could take advantage of the inlet restrictor rule and what might have been a loophole in the rules to build a much higher performance vehicle. “If you’re up against a restrictor plate when you’re going down the straight at high speed you have no excess power coming from the engine,” Doug notes. “But as soon as you put on the brakes and the engine drops to idle you’re wasting the ability to create more power and save the excess energy.”

Dartmouth Formula Racing Team 2004

Some testing of the idea followed. “We put together a paper study and did some modeling that looked really promising,” Doug recalls. “So we built a test bench and mounted an electric motor, a gasoline engine, a generator, a torque meter, a dyno absorption unit and a lot of control electronics, and started playing with it. We were able to convince ourselves that this was a really interesting way to go and could definitely give us an unfair advantage in the competition.”

Fraser’s team started converting an old Formula SAE car to hybrid drive, but then the Formula SAE rules committee announced that it wouldn’t permit hybrids and energy accumulators. “We talked and they allowed us to bring our hybrid to the Formula SAE competitions in 2005 and we did a demonstration run. They didn’t allow us to enter it in the competition but they let us drive it and show people what it could do.”

Although Formula SAE banned hybrids they’ve been extremely helpful to Formula Hybrid. “The SAE has been very supportive right from the beginning,” Fraser says. “They sent us the source for the Formula SAE rules which we went through, tweaked a lot of details and modified it heavily. Originally, the Formula Hybrid rules were published as an addendum to the Formula SAE rules.” With Fraser’s prodding the Thayer School decided in 2006 that it would start a separate Formula Hybrid competition. The trustees of Dartmouth College trademarked the Formula Hybrid name and logo and a conference was organized at Thayer School. Included was the chairman of the Formula SAE rules committee, other members of the Formula SAE organizing group, some faculty advisors from Formula SAE teams, plus some representatives from the electrical engineering world, most notably the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE).

“We sat around a table for a couple of days and talked about how we would formulate this thing,” Fraser relates. “Then we put on a demonstration event in one of the parking lots at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway.”

The only team to accept Dartmouth’s invitation to build an experimental Formula Hybrid car for the initial demonstration show at New Hampshire Motor Speedway in 2006 was Montreal’s McGill University, a leading Formula SAE competitor. “Unfortunately,” Fraser recalls, “They got held up in customs and arrived at NHMS half an hour before the mandatory 5 pm shut-down time. But they managed to drive their car a little bit so we actually had two entries in the first Formula Hybrid demonstration event.”

Dartmouth Formula Hybrid 2008

The first real Formula Hybrid competition took place in 2007 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway which has established itself as the home of the event. “The New Hampshire Speedway has been great,” Doug remarks. “They donate the track for four days and do a great job promoting the event.”

Nine entries were received for the first formal event in 2007. Six appeared, two cars from Dartmouth, and one each from Florida’s Embry Riddle, the Florida Institute of Technology, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and McGill and Yale universities. McGill won the inaugural contest with Embry Riddle finishing second, Yale third and Dartmouth fourth.

Since then the number of competitors has grown steadily. There were sixteen entries with twelve cars showing up in 2008 followed by thirty entries and twenty-two arrivals in ’09. Thirty entries were made again this past year with twenty-six appearing. Some international teams already have established themselves in Formula Hybrid, including MADI State Technical University from Russia, the Politechnico di Torino from Italy and China’s National Chiao Tung University as well as the University of Manitoba.

“In 2009 and 2010 we had the same number of entries in part because we doubled the entry fee,” Fraser said. “We had to because the bottom fell out of the economy and a lot of sponsors and potential sponsors dried up. But things are slowly picking up again.”

The annual, four-part competition at New Hampshire Motor Speedway takes place over two days. It opens with the teams making a formal presentation of their car and theories to a board of engineers who ask probing questions to test the students’ knowledge. This is followed by an engineering and design analysis.  The initial presentation is worth 100 points in the competition’s total of 1,000 points and the engineering and design segment is valued at 200 points.

“The presentation event is a coat and tie event done inside in a classroom setting,” Fraser comments. “The student team tries to convince a review board of the marketability of their vehicle and of the sustainability and recyclability of the materials.”

Formula Hybrid International Competition 2009

The design and engineering portion of the contest carries considerable prestige. “This is arguably the most important event of the competition,” Fraser stresses. “There’s preliminary judging and then final judging. Winning the design competition is considered extremely valuable because there’s little luck involved. You’ve got to know what you’re doing. There’s no subjectivity or good or bad luck. But there’s always an element of luck involved in winning the dynamic events.”

Whenever possible the design judges are engineers from automotive companies who are working on hybrid systems and fully immersed in hybrids. The teams present their vehicles and will be surrounded by a group of engineers who thoroughly quiz the students’ understanding of their work with very specific questions.

“This works really well in two ways,” Doug said. “First, it’s really good for the students to interact with these guys. It’s not unusual to see one of the judges handing a student his business card and say, ‘Give me a call.’ That’s the cool aspect for us and it works out well for the sponsors and judges and for the students and for us here at Thayer too. An example is that even though we have had a relatively small number of engineers who go through the Formula Hybrid program there are now three Formula Hybrid alums working at General Motor’s electric vehicle division.”

The design and engineering contest is followed by the on-track competition which consists of a pair of acceleration runs over 75 meters, an autocross, and a concluding 22 kilometer endurance test. The two acceleration runs carry 75 points apiece. The autocross is worth 150 points and the concluding endurance event is the big one, worth 400 points toward a maximum potential total of 1,000 points.

The acceleration runs must be completed in no more than ten seconds and one of the two acceleration runs has to be completed with electric-only power. If the car can’t make it, the team doesn’t qualify for the rest of the competition.

“A Formula Ford would qualify as a Formula Hybrid car if you were to run it any distance just on the starter motor,” Fraser notes. “So one of the acceleration runs is designed to prevent people from making a vehicle built to that kind of extreme.”

The deciding endurance autocross event must be completed as quickly as possible without using more than 20 megajoules (the equivalent of 2.3 liters of gasoline). “One of the main things that sets Formula Hybrid apart is the energy allocation,” Fraser observed. “They’re allocated 20 megajoules of energy to complete the 22 kilometer endurance event. If they run out they’re out of the competition. A lot of teams run electric only for the autocross. If they’re a series hybrid their final drive is all-electric but in many cases the electric motor is the more powerful of the two than the internal combustion engine.”

Formula Hybrid 2010

All the teams start the event with the same amount of energy on board with their accumulator systems filled to capacity by plugging into one of New Hampshire Motor Speedway’s garage wall outlets. They are then given just enough liquid fuel to round out the 20 megajoule limit. “Some accumulator systems, particularly batteries, have a very high energy density,” Fraser remarked. “They’re capable of storing a lot of energy and the accumulator can get pretty close to 20 megajoules. As an extreme example, if a team were to arrive with an accumulator which is rated at a capacity of 20 megajoules they would not get any gasoline.”

Thus is the basis of the Formula Hybrid competition. In my next blog in two weeks I’ll continue this look at Formula Hybrid’s rules and regulations, including its emphasis on safety. I’ll also take a look at the competition’s growth and seemingly steady road to longterm success.