Formula South Invitational: Winning on the Road
As many of you may have heard, we recently took a road trip to Marietta, Georgia to attend the Fourth Annual Formula South Invitation, hosted by the amazing people at KSU Motorsports. Not only was this our first invite-only event hosted by another team, but we took the competition by storm. Taking first overall, we showed to everyone watching that we mean business. But there was more to the event than what we posted on twitter and Facebook throughout that day.
Before I go into the competition itself, allow me to describe the shop 2 weeks before the event: chaos. We had a running car on the 17th of February, which was the earliest in Owls Racing history. The celebration didn’t last long, however, as the event was a terrifyingly close one and a half weeks away. That meant the core group of people, including those that went, were up around the clock working on the car. As soon as that car was running, someone was in it every night except Saturdays. By the time it was all said and done, we had about 20 hours of actual drive time on the car. For two weeks, that’s a ton of hours. Once you add on the setup time, stops to tune the car, stops to fix the car (run on all four cylinders, gosh darn it), and driver changes, you can safely double or even triple the amount of man hours that went into that car in the weeks leading up to the event.
Luckily, about a week before our scheduled departure time, Electrical Team Leader Stephen Lyons, with the help of Engine Team Leader Steven Gaillot and Engine Team Member Mat Burgos, she was consistently running on all four cylinders! Three cylinders may be great for fuel efficiency, but that’s not why we’re here… for the most part… We drove until about Tuesday of the week of competition. We had time trials for everyone who had put in their time (and knew how to drive a stick). These time trials decided who drove what at the event. I was guaranteed an acceleration spot because of my weight and previous experience in the event. Suspension Team Lead and Lead Engineer Steven Stanfield took skid pad since he did that in Michigan. Team President Trent Ksionek took one endurance and one autocross spot because he’s unnaturally fast and drove both of those at Michigan.
The remaining spots that were up for grabs were: 1 accel, 1 skid pad, 1 autocross, and 1 endurance. We picked a night to go out, I set up AIM and excel, and we all took turns. 3 runs each, autocross setup, lot 5 by the airport, middle of the night. Everyone took a job (fireman, beacon mover, car setup, coffee runner, etc.) and we started the competition. The results were as follows.
Cones and skipped gates were treated as they would be in Michigan.
So we had our drivers: Mr. Lyons, Marco Cheraso, and Mat Burgos (Chris gave up his seat to let Mat run accel).
From there, the remaining effort was put into prepping the car for transport and packing the trailer. At 0630, Friday, the 26th of February, the cars and truck were loaded up and pointed north on the Florida Turnpike.
For those who are familiar with where we’re located, here’s a map. Essentially, we’re Miami. Located between West Palm to the north and Ft. Lauderdale to the south, we’re pretty far into Florida. Going straight up I-95, it’s about 5 hours to the Georgia line. We had to get over to I-75, though, so we were driving for about six hours before we crossed state lines. Then we had another four hours on the GPS to get to Marietta… But GPS’s don’t know about Atlanta traffic. Luckily, my car wasn’t stuck in it too long, but still… Traffic… Eww…
Following skid pad, acceleration was next. Mat Burgos and I were driving for this event. Due to space limitations, the normal 246-foot run was shortened to around 170 feet. Since we had no launch control or secondary rev limiter, we put Mat in the car first to see where the car wanted to launch at. He did very well for his first competition in the driver seat. His times still beat the next closest school. After two runs, we decided 7000 RPM was a decent number to launch at. I got in the car once he got back.
I have about 50 pounds on Mat, so I need I don’t need to launch at quite as high of an RPM as he does. I pulled up to the line, tried to get the revs as close as possible, and let her go. Hoooolllly moly. The end of that track came up extremely fast. You can kind of see it in the highlight video, but the parking lot we were on falls away onto the road below. I came off the throttle before the finish in the interest of preserving the color of my pants, but even then we still smoked the other teams. For reference, I was doing about 50-60 mph once I hit the brakes. That’s a 0-60 time of around 3.5 seconds. Vroom vroom, baby!
Once in the staging area and a course walk was completed, KSU went over the running procedure with us. We were to take whatever route we wanted to the start line, wait until the flag dropped, and then haul mail around the track back to the start/finish. Autocross would be a standing start at the line, endurance would start from the staging area with timing starting at the finish line. Autocross was myself and Trent Ksionek, team president and resident Stig. I went first to report on track conditions before Trent took his two runs. That was a slick course. Because the track was on a worn parking lot that was used frequently, the track was dirty. This meant the car wanted to slide out if you stepped on the gas too early. I will say that it was an experience like no other. In Georgia they have these things called hills, so that made driving in three dimensions… interesting… It was super fun, though. Going down the back straight through the trees made it seem like you were going extremely fast.
The final event for the day was endurance. Again, due to the time crunch and facilities, the normal eleven laps per driver was cut to six and only two cars were allowed on track at a time. We went with Georgia Tech. boy, were they mad. Their shop is not even an hour away from KSU, so essentially this was home turf for them. They had also attended the previous Formula South events whereas this was our first. Their anger showed on the track, with sloppy lines and aggressive corrections. They did perform better than us in endurance, however we wanted to keep our car in one piece since it still has to compete in May. Nonetheless, it was a good race. Everyone had a great time.
Once all of the awards were handed out (we took first and SAE team from far, far away), KSU invited us to a pizza place nearby similar to Cici’s. After eating greasy cheap pizza to our heart’s intent, some of us went to party the rest of the evening with KSU while the rest went to go sleep.
The following morning came early, but this time we didn’t have to be anywhere by a certain time. All of the cars took their own routes home, most of us taking I-75 south to the Florida Turnpike. The trailer arrived at FAU around 10 that night. The car was unloaded, the tools were put back, and the Monster back in the fridge. Doors were locked, personal vehicles were started, and we all went home to get some well-deserved sleep.
This was Owls Racing’s second non-affiliated invitational event. Last year, in 2015, OR went to Barnesville, GA for a similar style event, taking second overall.
