SZ wrote:On the contrary - I've seen championship winning FSAE teams. Good attempts at this problem and those poorer. Some students do do fantastic work, though less stress the important bit: FSAE teams do not race, and as such the life cycle is not comparable. A long way off.
(I'll leave out the other truths that might sound like criticisms, however) FSAE teams might have access to forged wheels but (correct me if I'm wrong) I'm yet to see a team turn out with a custom forged design in an alloy of choice pending their specific needs, which is par for the course in F1.
Consider the fact that most use 4 wheels a year(and wheels are often reused, in our case), to tool up for a custom forging is not necessarily the "smart" decision.....other than that, there are plenty of teams out there that makes custom machined wheel of their own design...and because of stuff being reused, designing them to fail sometimes is also not economical....
As to "racing", how are you defining this? They don't exactly drive leisurely at competition.....We have had parts fatigue enough to fail in competition because we've been testing the car for 1.5 month(subsequently needing to start the practice of replacing suspect parts before comp). There are plenty of parts on the car that will probably be worse for wear after a season(not chassis or actual "hardware", but stuff can be replaced or remade are usually designed to be replaced or remade), which to us is about the useful life of a car(in the case of my cars, ~300 miles a season), so I don't think we are exactly overdesigning a lot of the car....
FSAE teams also don't tend to have a rich brat with racing ambition and daddy with deep pocket to pay for broken, one-off parts, so they don't exactly enjoy the economic leeway of "real" racing neither....