Bringing the Heat to Picnic Day

Spring quarter is in full swing with our team’s official rollout of FE13 complete! Formula Racing returned to the UC Davis Picnic Day Parade, bringing the heat with their fiery new livery for Michigan. Alongside the reveal of a fully functional race car, the team has much more to share from the month of April. 

Wheelpackage has completed their assembly onto the car, allowing for both a successful track day at Bluemax Kart Club and our participation in the 112th Picnic Day Parade. Thank you to Bluemax for their generous support of our team!

A week before the Picnic Day deadline, Electrical got our electric systems fully operational. This allowed us to bring FE13 to Bluemax, where they tested the accumulator's capacity for a full endurance event. They are currently working on some further adjustments to pass EV tech inspection, supporting the Accumulator Team with their tech and waterproofing, as well as collaborating with Firmware for further data collection.

Aerostructures made great strides in advancing our simulation capabilities using unsteady simulations, which involve the use of a computer system to create predictions on how the car interacts with aerodynamic factors like the wind. They have also worked to validate the aero package under yaw by finding the coefficient of moment. In other words, they tested how their package performs under angled airflow by measuring its rotational stability. To prepare for mechanical inspection at the competition, Aerostructures began designing specialized jig tools to confirm our bounding box, which is a rectangular border that defines the maximum extent, position, and dimensions of an object within an image or 2D coordinate system.

In addition, Aerostructures completed manufacturing on the rear wing and endplates. This was accomplished by 3D printing and bonding wing cores, manufacturing carbon fiber wing and endplate skins, then bonding the rear wing elements together. They have also finished manufacturing wing mounts, routing molds for the front wing, and completed printing for our front wing auxiliary elements.

Cooling completed the construction of the testing rig and found new techniques for system bleeding to maximize flow rate, which will further improve the cooling of FE13’s systems. This will also ensure that the car is able to operate safely at its peak performance. They made additional improvements in the development of our Simulink system model and are able to better quantify the behavior of the cooling system with a thermal characterization script and analysis. Cooling also completed the design of a custom catch to further assure our compliance with rules at competition.

Business has recently released new FRUCD hats, the first accessory in our team’s merch catalogue in a few years! They have also been hard at work planning the end-of-year banquet as an opportunity for the entire team to celebrate their accomplishments and to send the graduates off with a heartfelt thank you. If you are a part of the team, our banquet RSVP is open now until May 15th.

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Spring quarter has been such an exciting chapter for our team, and we cannot wait to see what the remainder of the school year has in store.