An Spartan Racing newsletter for Sponsors, Faculty, Professionals, and Students

Upcoming Events: September 6th Spartan Racing Kickoff Meetings 3:00pm and again at 6:00pm ENGR 187 of the Engineering Building September 8 Student Organization Fair 10:00am–2:00pm San Carlos Plaza September 16th-18th Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca Volunteering, American Le Mans Series

This summer was spent at the track. We attended three events at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca; Rolex Grand Am, Red Bull Grand Prix and Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion. Our favorite event, Red Bull Grand Prix, was held July 23rd and 24th where the Sports Car Racing Association of the Monterey Peninsula (SCRAMP) provided

Spartan Racing with yet another invaluable opportunity to network and watch the races. Team members volunteered to help SCRAMP handle the rush of race fans in the track souvenir shops. The ongoing mutual relationship with SCRAMP has proven to be an effective means of generating interest in Spartan Racing's activities, both through interaction with race fans at the events and communicating with motorsports industry professionals. The team is looking forward to assisting SCRAMP again at the American LeMans Series (ALMS) races, the next event at Mazda Raceway, which will be held the weekend of September 17th and 18th.

Volume 4 Issue 1

Writers and Editors: Ross Fraser, Robby Sampson, Dustin Decker, Kevin Krakauer

SAE.SJSU@GMAIL.COM

We are happy to announce the official start of our 2012 season. As the first order of business we would like to congratulate our new officers. SAE President: Dustin Decker SAE Vice President: Natallia LoCicero SAE Treasurer: Tanya Krueger FSAE Team Manager: Simone Getty FSAE Chief Engineer: Robby Sampson FHSAE Team Manager: Manuel Mangrobang FHSAE Chief Engineer: Stephen Sellick Baja SAE Team Manager: Matt Mohr Baja SAE Chief Engineer: Ricky Delgado Marketing and Communication: Ross Fraser We are excited to see what this year’s team can do.

As the school year started we spent many hours toiling away in the club room getting organized. We did however manage get out and participate in Welcome Week events by setting up a tent to get the word out and attending a engineering dept freshmen welcome BBQ. Both events are designed to help recruit new members and after collecting four pages of sign ups we’re declaring it a great success. As well we are concentrating on diversifying our team this year and we are pleased to see that there has been a significant increase in the amount of interest in our organization.

From San Jose to Michigan to Southern California and back, our 2011 Formula Team finished off the 2011 campaign with arguably their best competition results to date. In May we competed in the FSAE Michigan event for the first time since 1993, and in June traveled to Fontana, CA for the FSAE West event. We were lucky enough to spend a few days of testing before the Michigan competition in Madison, Wisconsin with the UW-Madison team and the Uni-Stuttgart team from Germany. This prepared us well, and we headed for Michigan with much needed

confidence. On Saturday, when all was said and done, and the car crossed the finish line in Endurance, we came out in 22

nd place overall out of 122 registered teams, including a 3

rd place in

Fuel Economy. It was also the first time since 2009 that we scored points in all competition events. The results from Michigan further boosted team confidence, and after a few minor design improvements, we headed down to Fontana ready to succeed. However, 80 schools representing the US, Canada, and South America also showed up on site with the same attitude. After a decent showing in the initial Static Events, we finished the week off strong, placing inside the top 20 in all remaining Dynamic Events, including 3

rd in Acceleration and 10

th in Endurance. This put us in 10

th

place overall and the top California team. For SR-4, the 2012 Spartan Racing Formula Team plans to build on the success and learn from the

failures of the 2011 team by improving on and simplifying a lot of the successful systems on SR-3. The most noticeable changes planned for this year include a new push-rod front suspension design and side exit exhaust. We are also busy establishing a new Marketing Team to further improve our sponsor and faculty communication, as well as expanding our connections with other universities, programs, and industry professionals. Spartan Racing could not have achieved any of this success without the amazing support of all our sponsors.

It was an unfortunate year for the hybrid team. We failed to pass tech inspection at competition by not having a system to monitor and control our batteries. This is important because it keeps the batteries from potentially failing or worse. We are however happy to say that we managed to build the lightest car at the competition. We believe, that since hybrid cars use lower horsepower motors, weight reduction is key to winning dynamic events. We plan on performing much better this year. Some of our goals are to keep it light, add regenerative breaking and data acquisition systems. Much of the design is good, now we need to focus on the elec-tronics. Next steps are to finalize some design decisions and start manufacturing.

The Baja competition last year was in Peoria Illinois at the Caterpillar Proving Grounds. We spent a lot of time this year improving the overall looks of the vehicle and adding a reverse to our custom gearbox. We had many complements on how good our baja looked during competition, not only from judges but from other teams as well. The highlights of the competition include a 11th place finish in the rock crawl and a 8th place finish in the hill climb. During the endurance race we broke our tension adjustment of our gearbox and were forced into the pits. We were able to fix the gearbox and finish the race, but did not place as well as we wanted to. We made many friends during the competition and have a few ideas for the 2012 baja. We plan to make a sturdier gearbox tension device or use sets of shims to maintain adjust-ability for different size belts. We also plan to add more camber to our suspension design and shorten up the rear to get a better turning radius and increase our maneuverability.

We will be ordering metal tubing soon from our sponsor Inland Metal Industries to start on the 2012 Baja. The 2012 SAE Baja competitions will be held in Oregon and Wisconsin this year. We will decide soon which event we will compete at.

Messages from our SPARTAN RACING Alumni:

-communication -researching -problem solving -organization

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