For 2015, there is a proposal for a significant change to the aero regulations. The Formula SAE rules committee is committed to providing students with the best educational and competition experience for the Formula SAE International Competition Series. Before committing to this proposal, the rules committee would like to consult with all teams that compete to get their view on whether this proposed rules change is a good step forward for the competition.

Some of the reasons for this change:

It is often commented by judges, officials and others that have been involved in the various competitions for many years “wouldn’t it be great to change the rules to offer the students a new challenge”. A few of the better funded teams have done well with large wings that attempt to fully exploit the aero regulations, but it has been noted that many teams have followed down this path because other teams have been successful rather than because they understand how the benefits will be achieved. It is likely that the aero regulations will need to change in 2015 as there are concerns that the wings are too large, several wings have detached from cars causing concern about the safety of marshals and some of the cars have become unstable such that in several cases they have almost rolled over.

Addressing point 1, there are many things that you could regulate on an FSAE car, for example, you could require leaf spring suspension or you could require all cars to be front wheel drive. Generally all of the ideas that have been proposed over the years would go against one of the philosophies of the FSAE regulations which is to allow as much freedom of design as possible whilst being pragmatic about sensible restrictions on performance etc.

To regulate the aero package such that the size of aerodynamic components is constrained doesn’t stop teams from designing wings and underbody aero that are innovative. It does however change the challenge as new locations and sizes will require a different solution to be derived.

The result of this is that if a team wishes to develop an aero package, they have to go back to first principles to define a solution that works and develop it from scratch. They can’t just copy another team’s design. And of course, there is still no requirement for teams to build an aero package if budget and resources don’t permit this.

The proposal provides 3 sets aero of regulations, the set of regulations to be used will be changed every 2 years giving teams to opportunity to design a new aero package and spend a further year developing it.

The regulations attempt to change the relative level of downforce that can be achieved from wings vs the underbody such that the overall performance should be similar, but the challenge is different.

A six year cycle for the regulations means that very few students will be exposed to the same set of regulations for two cycles which should encourage fresh ideas whenever a new set of aero regulations is introduced.

The rules committee has already had some feedback from teams on the outline regulations posted in the 2014 regulations and there were two main comments: