Presenting: The (sort of) official 2009 nationals thread!

Results:
1st Place: Moorebank High School, Stealth
2nd place: Box Hill High School, Killswitch (that's my team! )
3rd place: Queechy High School, Hot Chilli
4th place: St. Patricks College, Team Extreme
Best Engineered: Box Hill High School, Nigresta

My team had an interesting weekend. We had a fairly consistent Saturday, getting seeded #2 (#1 was Stealth). Lap times were 16.53 s and 16.88 s in high sun (~100%) and some okay low sun ones. Sunday was fun. We destroyed our car in the first race. Sun level was 120%, one lap race. We did a 15.17 second lap (Fastest ever recorded) passed the timing gates, and then had a huge crash, breaking most of our body panels and a wheel. We reconstructed our car in between rounds, then raced on to second place. Final race was a really tight one, and congratulations to Stealth for a superb performance.

Big note to the committee members around was stopping cars after the race. We really need to bring back crash barriers instead of letting teams use their own methods of stopping the cars which could potentially (And in a few cases on Sunday, actually did) damage the other car. Another interesting and rare occurrence on the Sunday was a car crashing (Bullet) that actually broke it's egg. In my memory there has only been one other time when this has happened, at the 2005 Nationals in Melbourne (Car from memory was Lionhart from BHHS). I think that they should change the rule so that if the Egg breaks during the race then that car is disqualified from competing any further. It does sound harsh, but it makes cabin design much more important (During our large crash on Sunday we didn't damage the egg at all, btw)

On another note, car diversity was... interesting. From personal observation, there were only a few 4 wheeler cars, and many cars were "Model J's" (John Jeffery design). I would love to see some of the interviews to find out how many of those teams actually knew why they had taken a three wheeler with steering and indeed that design. This sort of homogenisation of car design worries me slightly. My team and I have all finished school, so we're all finished competitively, but I would like to see into the future more original and varied car designs, especially from down south and to the west. I have some plans that could potentially help, so watch this space.

That's all for now, I'll update results as soon as I can remember them properly. Also a big shout out to Miseli for having the dubious and unfortunate job of helping clean up the track after it got rained on, and for having a very fast and cleanly built test car running after the show was over.

Firstly, I would like to congratulate Moorebank high on achieving first place. Their car, although a standard 2 trolley wheel rear drive design , won the nationals because it was meticulously set up was geared perfectly for the light conditions. Well done Moorebank, you certainly new what your doing, and those years of experience paid off.

PWK, congratulations on achieving second place, and even more so for the 15.17second lap . Your car looked flimsy, but ran perfectly . Great job with the quick repair, i think had it been any other team, they wouldn't of got the job done.

Competition was heaps tough this year. Weather was fluctuating from 10% to 125%, lots of fast cars, and a few good crashes . All the ingredients for a great solar car event.

Luckily we had consistent sunlight for the finals and got to see a few fast laps. It would of been great seeing your car up against moorebank during a 120% burst. Its a shame this is your last year.

Yes, Marc's car was very cleanly built. Probably the best attention to detail ive ever seen in a solar car.

Big thankyou to all those that helped making the event successful.

Does anyone know which teams won what awards? i missed out on the presentation.

PWK wrote:From personal observation, there were only a few 4 wheeler cars, and many cars were "Model J's" (John Jeffery design).

I think there was probably at least 10 four wheelers. I noticed a lot of cars running the 4-wheels with no steering and 12W panel set-up.

PWK wrote:We really need to bring back crash barriers instead of letting teams use their own methods of stopping the cars

I don't think crash barriers are necessary. I have been stopping the Aquinas cars for 4 years now without incident by simply using a pillow. Never has the car been damaged and never has another car been impeded. Using this method I have never let a car go by. Stopped first time every time!

PWK wrote:broke it's egg. In my memory there has only been one other time when this has happened

It happened in Adelaide, I have a picture of the egg spilt all over the ground after the crash. It also happened at the WA competition this year. In fact it used to be an even bigger problem in WA because the Western Power track was a metre off the ground, resulting in a big drop for any stray cars!

PWK wrote:but I would like to see into the future more original and varied car designs, especially from down south and to the west

I think WA diversity is fine. Winthrop had the 3-wheeler and the 5-wheeler (very radical design), Girrawheen had a 4-wheeler and a 3-wheeler whilst Aquinas ran two different 4-wheelers. All the WA cars were quite different I thought.

TonyB wrote:PWK, congratulations on achieving second place, and even more so for the 15.17second lap . Your car looked flimsy, but ran perfectly . Great job with the quick repair, i think had it been any other team, they wouldn't of got the job done.

Yes congratulations PWK, it was certainly a high quality field this year. Shame Nigresta knocked us out in the first round

Redlands wrote:Yes congratulations PWK, it was certainly a high quality field this year. Shame Nigresta knocked us out in the first round

Sorry about that, but we did kind of want to win ourselves
But we got knocked out in the quarter finals by Killswitch, so it seems that things evened out.

The plate event reentry rules got a good workout in their first year. A car went from getting knocked out first round to coming third. Personally, I'm not in favour of this rule, as I can imagine how irritated I would be if I were the car that got knocked out by the winner of the plate event (It came close, I was just lucky enough not to pick my own car out of the hat), but Hot Chilli provides a strong case for why the rule should be kept.

Overall a very interesting weekend, I loved the varying light levels. And, of course, a big congratulations to all those cars that got prizes, or even made it to the nationals in the first place.

unussapiens wrote:Sorry about that, but we did kind of want to win ourselves
But we got knocked out in the quarter finals by Killswitch, so it seems that things evened out.

Yeah it didn't work out too badly for us because we reached the semi-finals of the plate... we almost beat Hot Chili. It was very close!

Hi All,

Firstly congrats to Morebank, Box Hill and Queechy for there performances in the competition, it was certainly a very fun day from being able to observe the great times that some of these cars displayed.

However there are three specific things that pretty much put a damper on the event.

Firstly, I have no idea what was going on with the commentator. I realise that it is a stressful event to organise, and that people run astray a little, and I mean no disrespect to the actual commentator, however what on earth was he doing there? This is an event designed to open peoples eyes to the prospect of solar power and engineering in the future, through a fun medium, and here is this guy complaining over the pa, practically yelling at kids to get there cars on the track. I personally know that family members I had in the audience were somewhat shocked with the way he was treating us competitors. Really, is it that hard to get someone external - therefore not as stressed - to commentate, prehaps a radio crew down there to drum up some publicity, create an atmosphere.

This also leads on to my second point. The organisation of the event was all over the place. At one stage we were roughly 2.5hrs behind time on both days and this lead to the event having to be restructured, leading to a decrease in competetion. They are meant to be best of 3 races people... The weather definatly would have had some effect on this, but being realistic even with an extra 40s per race this does not push the overall schedual back that much, the rain being the main factor in the extra time that was unnavoidable. Being in a city like Melbourne should immediatly flag calls of bad weather, and there should be contingency plans in place instead of organisers running around with no idea. Although the weather is unavoidable, there was so much dead tome also in effect when we were made to wait behind the announcer before a race. If this is to happen PUT IT IN THE RULES SO PEOPLE KNOW, and can be prepared instead of making rules up on the go...

Thirdly what on earth was going on with the race between a tasmanian competitior and the St Pauls car. Honest to god there were so many people around the track that were like "seriously WTF?". The car came off... therefore it was unstable and did not deserve to win the race. The fact that someone was allowed to tanper with the car, and that it was awarded the race is ridiculous. The rules state that if neither car completes a lap the one that gets furthurest is to be awarded the race, ergo St Pauls. If I were them I would definatly be contesting that one

For the event to truly be a success there are some vital elements that need to be addressed:

1. If you are going to make us do things at least put them in the rulebook so that we know.
2. Manage the event better.
3. Go easy on the kids that are competing, they are under enough stress already.
4. Get some more public interest.

On a positive note the actual running of the cars racing was great to see, with the quick times etc etc, also presentations and scruitineering were well run.

Well thats the end of my rant, time for sleep, its been a big weekend for us from WA

Cheers
C.C

It certainly was a big hectic weekend.

I wanted to test the effects of cooling a car panel before the race but didnt get the chance to.
We had consistent sunlight Sunday arvo, it would of been an ideal time to conduct the test.

Conitsiotis, I agree with you that the event was poorly managed in several respects, especially time wise. There were several major causes of delays, especially scrutineering (which took much longer than it should have) and the rain (as you said, unavoidable. The track was also flawed in that it held the water too well).

Steve Perry, the announcer, was getting irritated as he was one of the people who was involved in trying not to fall any further behind schedule. A lot of his irritation was due to people insisting on setting maximisers just before every race, and taking longer than the allowed 2 minutes to do it.

I believe the issue of time management is going to be raised by some members of the committee and hopefully there will be more concrete guidelines set down for next year.

Conitsiotis wrote:The rules state that if neither car completes a lap the one that gets furthurest is to be awarded the race, ergo St Pauls. If I were them I would definatly be contesting that one

My understanding is that if a car stops on the track, for whatever reason, you may attend to your car, and even lift it of the track, to see whats wrong, as long as it is not placed back onto the track ahead of were it stopped.

Unussapiens, how did you get that tube shape for Nigresta?

Also does anyone know when the results will be coming out?

Hello all,

Well, here is my take on the event from both an ex-competitor and committee point of view. Where do I start?

First of all, I'd just like to congratulate Moorebank on their win. Well done guys, particularly after what happened at last year's event in Hobart.
Your car performed not only particularly well in good sunlight, but also extremely well in lower sunlight as well. In the low sunlights the car was really a stand out and no other car came close.

Next, I'd like to congratulate PWK and the rest of the Killswitch team for placing a close second. The top 2 cars were really a step up from the rest this year and I'd been waiting for them to meet up in the final all day on Sunday. Well done also goes to the fantastic car repairs made by the Killswitch team after that first round crash.
The new track record that was set completely obliterated the old record set last year. As was mentioned in a previous post, it now stands at 15.17 seconds and is a whole 1.01 seconds faster than the time set last year by Velox. Sure, the change in car aerodynamics played a major role here, but even then it was certainly a great time.
The time was set in about 120% sunlight and puts it at about 15.7 or 15.8 seconds at 100% going off the seeding formula.
Although the Moorebank car and my test car didn't get to run in such good sunlight, their predicted times at 100% were also around this area and it would have been a real spectacle to have had 2 cars side by side and both close to cracking 15 seconds.

Well done to Queechy for finishing third after being knocked out in the first round and having to battle its way through the plate event and plate winner re-entry. They had been knocked out in the first round in low sunlight due to their car being geared up for good sunlight and didn't have anything else to go with. Even in the better sun later on, their slow starts were very noticeable.
By chance, the plate winner race-off put them back into the same part of the draw that they had originally been in. Queechy had been seeded 5th and Girrawheen 4th in their quarter final clash so having both there meant that that part of the draw had gone to plan in the end.

3 of the 4 quarters of the draw turned out close to what had been expected. The last quarter should have also gone somewhat to plan.
First of all, the car that was expected to make the semis from this quarter of the draw had been the Syndal South car Scorpion which had been seeded 3rd. Something had however gone wrong and a faulty connection had them eliminated. This then had a slower car (seeded 16th) from St Patrick's which had suffered from a crash in the first round through to the quarter finals.
The 2 Syndal South cars had been seeded 3rd and 6th and so they should have been up against one another in the quarter finals.
Anyway, the 6th seed was knocked out in the first round by a St Paul's car named Pulse that had underperformed on the first day and had been given a bad seeding. St Paul's then also knocked out GGS1 from Guildford.
This now had the St Paul's car up against the St Patrick's car in their quarter final clash. The St Paul's car should have won this with ease, but had for some reason removed the electronics and as a result failed to complete the race. This then put St Patrick's through to the semi finals.
If any or both of these 2 races had been re-run, we would have seen either Pulse or Scorpion though into the semi finals but I'd like to still however congratulate St Patrick's on their 4th place. After all, you still have to be in it to win it. A fantastic result for a school participating in the challenge for the first time. I’m sure they will produce some great cars in the years to come.

Lastly, I'd like to congratulate unussapiens and the Nigresta team on winning the best engineered car award. It was certainly well deserved. Have you run any tests in the Box Hill wind tunnel with all of the running gear attached to your car?

Right, now to the event itself.
Some of the comments made so far are certainly very valid and I have to agree that some of the decisions made and actions taken were probably not optimal in my opinion.

Looking back on the Saturday, I would have like to have seen official car scrutineering start much earlier then it did. This delayed the start of the round robin event and as a result we missed out on some good sun. I can't remember exactly, but I wasn't called over to help out with scrutineering until about 10:30 (maybe it was even 11:00), but once it got going, it was reasonably efficient apart from having a few teams being sent away to go and find ballast for their cars.

Once the round robins got underway things seemed to run OK. There were 2 reasons why the last round of the round robin event was cancelled. One was because we had been behind schedule due to the late scrutineering and slow race times because of the weather. The other was that the weather was gradually becoming worse (down to 3 or 4% sunlight) and all cars were going to start to really struggle getting over the hill.

Now to Sunday.
On arrival, much of the track was still wet from the rain during the night. A few sections had well and truly collected some water. Eventually things got mopped up and the track began to dry off. Later on we were back to square one again when a quick shower rolled by but after that the weather turned out half decent. Anyway, so poor weather did have some affect on the event schedule early on.

The big mistake that was made was not issuing the eggs during re-scrutineering on Sunday morning. This meant it had to be done out by the track and really slowed everything down. Then weighing both cars before every race also didn’t help. The whole thing just didn’t run very efficiently. It was finally decided that only the winning team of a race would then have to come and get their car checked out.
There were also a number of problems with some teams not being ready to race and taking a lot longer than they were supposed to when fixing and setting up their cars.
For future years, I have made some notes and will be bringing these up with the committee.
Once things got sorted, the event seemed to run alright. The whole plate event was held in just a matter of minutes.

As unussapiens mentioned a little earlier, the plate event re-entry was trialed this year. Having Queechy come back from the plate event and finishing up 3rd certainly shows that there are some benefits.
Although a car seeded 9 through to 12 was to race the plate winner to retain their position in the draw, this car was drawn out of a hat at random. This was the fairest way of doing it without significantly changing the current competition and reducing the numbers from 32 to 30 cars and introducing a bye in the plate event. This year the plate winner opponent was Skylite (seeded 10th).
None of the 4 cars seeded 9 through to 12 made it through to the semi finals and only Nigresta reached the Quarter finals, so losing out to the plate winner or to the original second round opponent (which was expected) really comes to the same thing.
In fact, if you have a good look at the draw and if Queechy had not lost their first round, Skylite would have been up against Queechy in the second round anyway.

To make up for lost time, a couple of the rounds were reduced to best of 1 race encounters. Personally, I was not in favour of this and it was not ideal but in general the faster car still ended up winning and progressing.

Now to the team stopping procedures.
While most teams had things under control, there were yet again several incidents that came about due to dodgy stopping procedures. I had brought this up at the meeting on Friday after some problems that had occurred in Hobart in 2008 and this year appeared to be no different. Something along the lines of what I have posted in the 2010 rule changes topic on the forum is almost certain to be adopted now.
To be honest, I can’t quite see why there is an obsession with using towels and shirts to stop the cars. When I was competing I always found it far easier and less likely for something to go wrong if you just slow down and stop the cars yourself. If you do it properly it’s virtually impossible for something to go wrong.
Anyway, you may have noticed Ian Gardner and a few other committee members running his test car into a cardboard box at the end of the event.

I will be cleaning up the racing results from both Saturday and Sunday over the next day or two and will be posting them up here and on the Tas website. I will also be working with Stan Woithe in the next week or so to get together the usual car data document with car weights, panel powers, etc.

It’s a pity things got so hectic. If things would have been a bit more relaxed, I would have otherwise had a bit more time to remember to charge up the USB camera and recorded some on-board footage with the test car. I do however have video footage of most of the event including a few of the crashes and will be uploading a number of the races onto youtube in the coming weeks. I think I’ve also got the test car going around a few times.

For those of you that came back to the track after the presentations and saw it run, it was running a prototype of Tony’s new auto tracking unit.
Tony, it certainly seemed to be working just as well as the Box Hill unit. I guess once Stan and Ian have run some tests over the summer we’ll know where it stands.

I too would have liked to have run some definitive tests measuring the effects of cooling a car panel before a race but didn’t get the chance to.
Friday would have been perfect if the track would have been set up. Unfortunately by the time we’d set up and aligned everything, the meeting had started.

Apologies for the long post,

miseli

miseli wrote:They had been knocked out in the first round in low sunlight due to their car being geared up for good sunlight and didn't have anything else to go with. Even in the better sun later on, their slow starts were very noticeable.

Yes we definitely noticed this, just have a look at the photo I posted earlier. We ended up losing by under a metre.

Great Post Marc, pretty much summed everything up. No need to apologise .

St Pauls were running with a direct drive design, using the maxon 118740 motor, which requires the maximizer to work extremely hard. At the end of a typical 1 lap race, ive calculated the motor voltage, with their setup, to be 5.5 volts.

Anyways, Geoff was having problems with his switch, and after been called to race, seemed to have pulled out the maximizer, which for some reason is directly connected to the switch, just to get the motor to spin. As we saw, the car failed to make it up the hill, without the electronics unit, even under full sunlight.

Does anyone know who ended up winning the overall points award? Was it Moorebank? I was running around the test car after the event and missed out on the presentations.
Were there any other awards given out? I'm sure there would have been one for the best poster.

Yes, Stealth from Moorebank won the overall points.

I'm not sure who won the best poster.

Best Looking Car: Bullet, Moorebank High School
Best Interview: Nigresta, Box Hill High School
Best Team Uniform: Tasmania
Best Engineered: Nigresta, Box Hill High School
Best Recovery (unofficial): Killswitch, Box Hill School

Not sure about any other awards, these are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head.

Pretty good day for Box Hill and Moorebank.

Redlands wrote:Pretty good day for Box Hill and Moorebank.

Well they certainly stood out, and deserve their wins.
Moorebank put consistent effort into their cars all year, and it certainly paid off.

TonyB wrote:Well they certainly stood out, and deserve their wins.

The grand-final was definitely high quality. How did Moorebank go in the NSW competition? because I had never heard of them prior to this weekend

Moorebank came 2nd in the NSW comp. All Saints Grammar came first. Dont ask me what happened to all saints in the Nationals.

Anyways, Moorebank is a very strong team, they came 3rd in last years national event.

TonyB wrote:Anyways, Moorebank is a very strong team, they came 3rd in last years national event.

I thought Belridge SHS from WA came 3rd??

I was very impressed by the Moorebank team as-well, especially the engineering of their cars. Bullet was very well done.