East Tennessee Region SCCA

Hello,

I am from the Pellissippi State Community College Formula SAE Team. We are interested in running our Formula SAE car and our shifter kart at several of the Solo events this summer. We have a few questions about how this would work as we've never done it before.

-Can we have more than just two drivers per vehicle?
-Which class would we be in?
-How do we register multiple drivers? (We have at least 4 drivers)

If there are any other things we need to know that I didn't think of please feel free to share those as well.

Thanks!

Need to verify the number of drivers per car and let the registration folks know the events you will run. The standard classing for kart is KM, if you have lady drivers easy to have them run KML or bump the second 2 drivers to BM or AM. Prettymuch the same for the FSAE, FSAEL then bump to AM, AML. Have a way to quickly change the class and numbers. Numbers are usually a 2 digit for first driver then add 1 in front of that for the second driver. So first driver is 25, second is 125. Probably best to only have 2 drivers per run group. Registration and timing folks should be posting here shortly with more info

Yep, what Ted said.

Four drivers will be okay, but we can really only handle two per heat logisitically. So 2 drivers will run while the other two will be working their assignment. So if you have 4 per vehicle, what Ted said should work just fine.

Yup, everything as stated above. You will need to let timing know if the car is running in multiple classes, this way we can make sure that the different classes the car is in are not running at the same time. It is your responsibility to make sure you change the numbers for each run. While it probably doesn't matter if you take all your runs in a row, then switch drivers, or if you alternate every run (all other competitors will be alternating every run) the imperative thing is that each driver makes sure they have the appropriate numbers on both sides of the car (kart) for their runs.

Does our Formula SAE car and Shifter Kart need to comply with the SCCA SOLO sound requirement? Our car complies with the FSAE rules max sound level of 103 dBC at idle and 110 dBC at all other speeds; however, this is higher than the SCCA max sound level of 100 dBC. I am not sure what the sound level of our shifter kart's exhaust system is.

They will need to be below 102 to run......

SpeedRacer5 wrote: ↑Mon Jul 11, 2022 12:05 pm Does our Formula SAE car and Shifter Kart need to comply with the SCCA SOLO sound requirement? Our car complies with the FSAE rules max sound level of 103 dBC at idle and 110 dBC at all other speeds; however, this is higher than the SCCA max sound level of 100 dBC. I am not sure what the sound level of our shifter kart's exhaust system is.

Not sure how FSAE measures but we measure at 50' from the course, in a place where you are likely to be on throttle. I can't imagine the FSAE cars are permitted to be that much louder than what we run.

MARKP wrote: ↑Mon Jul 11, 2022 1:09 pm

SpeedRacer5 wrote: ↑Mon Jul 11, 2022 12:05 pm Does our Formula SAE car and Shifter Kart need to comply with the SCCA SOLO sound requirement? Our car complies with the FSAE rules max sound level of 103 dBC at idle and 110 dBC at all other speeds; however, this is higher than the SCCA max sound level of 100 dBC. I am not sure what the sound level of our shifter kart's exhaust system is.

Not sure how FSAE measures but we measure at 50' from the course, in a place where you are likely to be on throttle. I can't imagine the FSAE cars are permitted to be that much louder than what we run.

Note the C (lack of) weighting in the FSAE rules. SCCA uses A weighting and the slow meter response function, i.e. average sound pressure rather than peak. C weighting is what you use to balance speakers in a multi-speaker and isn't actually weighted towards any part of the sound spectrum and is often used for peak sound pressure from an impulse. The A weighting filters the low frequencies. Come to think of it, that probably wouldn't help the small displacement engines in a Formula SAE or Shifter Kart. So SCCA is 100dBA, not dBC.

FSAE measures sound half a meter away from the exhaust tip. SCCA measures it 50' away when you should be under hard acceleration with the meter set to A and slow. Most likely you will be ok. As long as the DD2 kart has all the sound absorbing glass mat in the silencer and has the intake airbox it should be well under sound. If you have a test day at the school parking lot, you can measure 50' away from a section you are under hard acceleration, set up the meter and see what it reads. set meter to A and slow.

I'm no sound meter, but I've been throwing discs at Pelli during test sessions in the spring and nothing stood out as loud.

Are we really going to preach about sound for the FSAE car when half the time we don't run the meter or enforce the rules anyways?

Short answer, you have to be STUPID loud to get anyone to give a hoot, especially when we run at bristol.

benk wrote: ↑Tue Jul 12, 2022 11:31 am Are we really going to preach about sound for the FSAE car when half the time we don't run the meter or enforce the rules anyways?

Short answer, you have to be STUPID loud to get anyone to give a hoot, especially when we run at bristol.

Seeing that we have had an influx of excessively loud cars lately, yes, we need to be enforcing sound. It's not about FSAE. It's about everyone.

sound has been ran at BMS on the last 2 events as I was the one doing it for one heat at each of the last 2 events.

I've done sound at BMS in the past. If the drag strip is open, the sound from the dragsters frequently reads higher than the cars on the autocross course. And those aren't Top Fuel or Nitro Funny Cars. 10,000 plus horsepower makes a lot of noise. I suspect that when the Cup cars are running on the oval, it's pretty loud too.

That being said, we should still run sound for information at BMS and for real at Smokies. People need to know how loud their cars are because they might go somewhere that will DQ you if you're too loud.