Thank you Andres!
Things have been hectic the past 3 weeks. More than I experienced when I was a rally engineer in the WRC, which says a lot! I did the Eco Shell Marathon in 2012 but as a student, not as a proper engineer.
Our team (HE-ARC Team, the only Swiss team in this competition) managed to finish our Prototype vehicle by pulling 15hrs/day shifts for more than 2 weeks prior to the competition, and with limited people working on it, it meant things had to be done one way or another, which is good experience as you end up doing so many different things. I was able to use my car mechanic skills to their maximum which is always nice. In an engineer environment, you don’t always find people with practical skills, and you need them in these situations.
Arriving in Rotterdam, the cars were not yet ready for technical inspection. As it is the case for few years now, we enter one car in the Prototype category (on the left above) and one in the Urban Concept category (on the right above), so it was a bit of a rush to have the 2 cars ready in time for the checks. It went well, and we even managed to have few laps done with both cars in the practice session! However, the Urban Concept vehicle failed to complete the 10 laps run (200m from the finish!), and it took us many hours to sort out the issue it had. The Motec ECU could not cope with our trigger wheel due to the too small gap between the teeth. An issue that was new to us.
In the meantime we managed to score 3 race runs with the Prototype, all trouble-free, which is a good testimony to its building quality. Once we fixed the issue with the Urban Concept car, we did 2 runs with it, with good performance, thanks to a switch this year to Ethanol. It was then time to do the 4th (and final allowed) run with the Prototype, where we scored our best result, at 1273[km/l], giving us 8th place overall, a satisfying result considering that the car was still in the mould 3 weeks before the competition.
The consistency of the Consomini EvoIII (our Prototype’s name) showed that we were able to extract its potential from the word “go”, a good sign of the team’s seriousness. For sure with some testing and analysis we will be able to extract more from it, and things are already planned in that sense. I will tell more in the upcoming weeks about that.
Finally, with time running out in the competition, we were just able to squeeze the last 2 runs with the Urban Concept minutes before the checkered flag fold on Sunday afternoon, upping our best mark to 295[km/l] giving us 2nd place in the category, a great achievement!
All in all, it was a great experience of course, but not having been able to design the car body, I felt a bit empty handed because I feel like with moving front wheels, there are better things to do than this, so fingers crossed we can participate to next year’s competition in London and that I will be a part of it from the first design steps!
Pictures on my blog (link in my signature)
