My name is Jarrett. There are many spreadsheets, but this one is mine. It is a variation a stripped-down version of a spreadsheet that I have used to setup and track race cars. This is a minimalist example of things to track. You can easily modify to suit your team.
I grew up in Spartanburg, South Carolina. When I was a kid the region and Spartanburg in particular was the center of NASCAR. A good friend of mine’s father was a Georgia Tech engineer. He was building a race car in his garage, and knew the engineers on all the local teams. As I grew up in race garages. I went to Georgia Tech and studied mechanical engineering because I wanted to be like my friend’s father. At Tech I worked with Formula SAE, a college competition to build ¼ scale Indy race car, and got involved with the local racing scene in Atlanta. I’m not a great driver, but I am a really good engineer and have been doing race car setup for 20 years now.
In racing and in engineering, it is critical to be meticulous. There is little more annoying than finding the perfect setup and not being able to reproduce it because you don’t know what you did. Doing the same thing, the same way every time allows you to reproduce your work. It also allows you to make incremental changes and know if the change had the desired effect.
Maintaining a spreadsheet, allow you to one verify everything was done and checked every time and two see trends. I have excerpted some sample data from one of my car spreadsheets. The car is a Porcha 997 GT3 RS. The car was amazing from Porsche, and has had a lot of work done to it since. After about two months of racing my boss, the car owner would start complaining about the handling and ask what we did differently in the setup. We went back and looked at the data. Below is one of the datasets we pulled.
The X axis is the number of race periods. The orange line is where we set the toe of the car. We always set it to 1.5 degrees. Before setting the toe we always check it to see where we are starting. This is the blue line. As you can see for about 8 races, the two overlap, then the blue starts varying. The tie rods were wearing out and allowing the tow to change.
We redesigned the steering to use heim joints (rod ends) and looked at the data again. We found we were getting about 16 races out of the heim joints before they started to show wear. The problem is heim joints are 5 times as expensive as tie rods. We decide to go back to tie rods and replace them every 10 races.
The same technics work for solar cars. Alignment is critical for solar cars both from an efficiency stand point and from a tire wear stand point. Tracking the life of your tires, you might find the tend to go blow out at 400 miles. If you are starting the day with 380 miles on the tire, you might want to change them ahead of time. By recording the driver and tracking the amphours verse miles and recording you can determine who the best drivers are. There is an almost endless number of ways to use information to improve your team.