STEM Racing: Scrutineering Points
Scrutineering
Specifications
Engineering Drawings
Model-Based Definition (MBD) & PMI
This is the industry's move away from 2D drawings. All Product and Manufacturing Information (PMI)—every dimension, tolerance (GD&T), surface finish, and note—is embedded directly onto the 3D model itself. The 3D model becomes the "single source of truth" for manufacturing and inspection.
Don't submit a portfolio full of 2D drawings. Present views of your 3D model with all GD&T callouts and manufacturing notes attached to the geometry. Color-coded tolerance views show familiarity with current industry standards (ASME Y14.41 / ISO 16792).
Rendering
Quality of Finish and Assembly
- [ ] Absolute Identicality: Are your two race cars completely identical in every physical detail of finish and assembly?
Place both cars side-by-side under a bright light. Scrutinize them from all angles to spot differences or imperfections. A judge certainly will, and missing this detail drops your score to the lower tier. Reach "Exceptional" by delivering two identical, flawless cars—not just one good car.
I suggest making more than three cars, at least for the CNC'ed body and 3D printed parts. You can use extras for the pitstop anyway, so reserve the best assembled cars for scrutineering.
Decals are perhaps the trickiest to do, but do your best!
- [ ] Flawless Finish: Is the surface finish on all components, including wings and wheels, perfectly smooth and blemish-free?
Most teams focus on paint quality, which is important. However, 3D printed parts show layer lines, and wheels must have a smooth finish. Keep them clean. Some judges will penalize unpainted undersides, so account for that.
- [ ] Exceptional Assembly: Are all parts assembled with extreme precision, showing no gaps, misalignments, or glue marks?
Blend the Halo and 3D printed parts into the CNC'ed body, and fill any gaps with putty so everything appears seamless.
Fix misalignments with careful assembly. Clean glued components (3D printed structures, halo) with acetone. Cover imperfections with primer and paint, and sand down dried glue if necessary.
Not sure if the Halo is meant to be removable, but keep it as smooth as possible.
- [ ] Component Quality: Does every single component look professionally manufactured with clean edges and no imperfections?
Deburring is essential, especially for 3D printed and metal parts. Minimize tooling marks and layer lines as much as possible. Primer covers the rest.
Design & Engineering
Always open the portfolio with a beautiful render. This alone satisfies that criterion.
Design Concepts
Excellent technically inspired ideas for multiple car components with research-detailed. Relevance of the concept strongly justified
- Inspired & Researched: They come from a specific, cited source (e.g., nature, a real F1 car, an aircraft, a scientific principle). I would suggest actual scientific articles?
- Multi-Component: Your core idea or "design philosophy" should influence several parts of the car, not just the front wing.
- Justified: You must clearly explain why you chose a concept and how it's supposed to help your car go faster.
- Evolutionary: You must show how these initial concepts were tested, refined, and developed into your final design.
[ ] We have developed excellent, technically inspired ideas for multiple car components. [ ] Our concepts are detailed and strongly justified by our research. [ ] The relevance and evolution of our concepts to the final car are clearly demonstrated.
Biomimicry
- Front Wing inspired by Manta Ray or other animals.
Efficiently channel air around the front wheels.
- Shark skin surface finish on side pods and diffuser.
Aerospace Heritage
- Eurofighter Typhoon Canard system for front wing
- Y250 Vortex Generator
- Bargeboard
A bargeboard in Formula 1 is an aerodynamic component located on the sides of an F1 car, between the front wheels and the sidepods. It plays a crucial role in managing airflow around the car to enhance its overall aerodynamics. Bargeboards guide turbulent air away from critical areas, like the rear wheels, reducing drag and improving stability.
3D Modelling
Advanced Surface Modeling
- Lofting & Sweeping with Guide Curves
Creating a solid or surface by connecting multiple 2D profiles. The "advanced" part uses one or more "guide curves" or "rails" to control the shape's path between profiles. Guide curves give you explicit control over the surface's contour, preventing undesirable bulging or twisting. Essential for designing aerodynamic bodies, wings, and sidepods where the exact surface shape dictates airflow.
- Zebra Stripes
An analysis tool that projects stripes onto your model. The way the stripes flow (or break) between adjacent surfaces tells you the quality of the transition. This isn't a modeling tool, but a critical analysis technique. It allows you to visually verify the continuity: • G0 (Contact): Stripes don't meet. A sharp edge. • G1 (Tangent): Stripes meet at the edge but have a sharp corner. Smooth to the touch, but reflections will "break." • G2 (Curvature): Stripes are perfectly smooth and continuous. This is the goal for high-quality aerodynamic surfaces as it ensures reflections are unbroken and airflow is smooth.
Parametric & Equation-Driven
- Top-Down Assembly Design
Starting with a master "layout sketch" at the assembly level that defines the key parameters and component locations (e.g., wheelbase, track width, axle locations). Individual parts are then built referencing this master sketch.
- Global Variables & Equations
Defining key dimensions as variables in a central table (e.g., wing_angle = 3.0, nose_radius = 12.0). Other dimensions in your sketches are then defined by these variables or by mathematical equations (e.g., wing_chord = nose_radius * 1.5). Maybe even go nuts with Excel :D
Design for Manufacturing
- Design for Tooling
In your portfolio, state: "Internal fillets were designed with a minimum radius of 1.5mm to accommodate the 3mm ball-nose end mill used for finishing passes." This shows expert-level DFM (Design for Manufacturing).
- Sacrificial Supports & Breakaway Tabs
For delicate or thin 3D printed parts like wings, add your own custom, minimal support structures that are easy to break off and sand down, rather than relying solely on the slicer's auto-supports. In your wing CAD model, add thin (e.g., 0.4mm) vertical walls or "fins" connecting the underside of the wing to a base plate. These will hold it steady during printing and can be cleanly removed with a craft knife. This shows you are thinking about print orientation and quality.
- Creating Custom Jigs & Fixtures
Designing and 3D printing custom holding blocks (jigs) that will hold your car body or other components perfectly straight and secure during painting, assembly, or post-processing. Create a new part file for your jig. Use the Boolean "Subtract" feature: take a block of material and subtract the shape of your car body from it. This creates a perfect cradle. Documenting this shows a complete manufacturing process, not just a car.
ULTIMATE
- CFD-Driven Surface Morphing / Shape Optimization
This is the ultimate design loop: you use CFD pressure data to directly modify geometry. The workflow: 1. Run CFD on your baseline shape. 2. The software generates a pressure map. 3. Use a "Shape Optimization" or "Surface Morphing" tool that treats the CAD surface like a flexible membrane. It will physically nudge, pull, and deform the surface based on the CFD pressure data to achieve a goal (e.g., "reduce drag" or "equalize pressure"). After running CFD on your sidepod, you identify a high-pressure zone. Instead of manually re-modeling it, you define that zone as a "design space" and let the solver morph the surface to alleviate the high pressure. You can then show a before-and-after of the geometry, proving that your final shape is a direct result of computational analysis, not just intuition.
- Tolerance Stack-Up Analysis, especially for Wheel
On your wheel assembly, you have tolerances for the axle diameter, the bearing's inner and outer diameters, and the wheel's bore. A tolerance stack-up analysis will tell you the maximum, minimum, and statistical gap between the wheel and the car body. You can definitively state, "Our analysis shows a 99.73% probability (3-sigma) of the wheel-to-body clearance being between 0.5mm and 0.8mm, preventing any contact."
ULTIMATE
- Waste as a Resource: Design your CNC machining strategy to produce a single, large, continuous piece of "off-cut" foam rather than multiple chips/dust. In your portfolio, showcase a second product (like a branded phone stand or keychain) that you designed to be machined from this "waste" material, demonstrating a circular economy mindset.
- Machine Learning via Creation of a Proxy Model (Surrogate Model): Running 500 CFD simulations is impractical. Instead, you script the process to run 50-100. You then use this dataset to train a simple machine learning model (e.g., a Gaussian Process Regression in Python using Scikit-learn) that takes car parameters (wing angle, sidepod radius, etc.) as input and instantly predicts the resulting Drag and Downforce. This "proxy model" allows you to analyze thousands of design permutations in seconds.
- Pareto Optimization / Data-Driven Concept Selection: Your portfolio doesn't just show "Concept A" and "Concept B." It shows a scatter plot of 1,000+ simulated design variations, color-coded by performance. You can then clearly justify why your chosen design sits on the "Pareto front"—the optimal frontier where you can't improve one metric without hurting another.
FUCKYOU
- NoHuman-Machine Interface for Launcher: The car is only half of the system. The other half is the human launcher. Your team's unique focus is on engineering the perfect interface between the human and the machine to gain crucial milliseconds during the launch sequence. We do this by removing the human from the equation.
Stuff I need to look at
- Ruled geometry
- Area Ruled Sidepods
Sidepods that are "pinched" inline with the wheels to smooth the car's total cross-sectional area (the Area Rule). They will seamlessly blend into an underfloor with Venturi tunnels to generate ground effect.
Application of CAA
F1 Model Block Technical Datasheet
Use of CAM/CNC
3D Printing Adjusting 3D printing slicer options is a solid approach. Nozzle Diameter Testing - Vary from 0.4mm to 0.2mm, maybe even lower?
Minimum Radius Analysis Accessibility analysis
- Minimum Wall Thickness Testing
Zac designed a simple model which consists of walls increasing in thickness by 0.25mm increments. We machined 5 of them to see which is the thinnest wall which could consistently maintain geometric accuracy & reasonable strength, We found 2.25mm was the perfect combination, so we it for the parameter ‘CNC_Min’ in the CAD ï¬le.
- Post-machining accuracy testing
As we were concerned with the alignment between each toolpath as the block is rotated, we used 2 methods to ensure that the ï¬nal model was within +/-0.2mm Tolerances.
- FFF Printed Gauges for complex shapes
We designed a set of 4 3d printed parts which slot onto the car, and are pushed as far towards the centre as they will go. If the car is accurate to the CAD ï¬le, each gauge will be 15mm apart, and flush with the surfaces around the car.
- Use Of Calipers for easy to measure
We used vernier calipers to check critical regulations such as the 3mm CO2 canister chamber clearance, or the canister depth. This provided accurate results for non-curved geometries where the gauges couldn’t be applied
CNC is maybe a bit harder to really be advanced with Especially since Yas just does a quick raster finish to do all the cars
Mass reduction cutouts with Horizontal drilled holes, with a jig in the halo socket This approach actually reduces weight effectively.
Other Manufacturing & Assembly
Gluing Safety
To make sure the glue was used safely and to avoid health risks there was thoughtful consideration to the glue type, to keep any health risk away the following are the precautions taken.
- Masks Are To Be Work Around Gluing Always
- Gluing Is to Be Done With A Supervisor
- Glue Is To Be Closed Immediately After Use, Caps Have To Be Kept Near The Glue At All Time
- If Skin Comes Into Contact With Glue Then It Must Be Washed Immediately.
- Adhesive Test
We tested 2 methods of glueing the parts together: CA Glue, and Dichloromethane. The Dichloromethane test was unsuccessful, and the parts did not properly adhere as the model block foam absorbed a signiï¬cant volume of the adhesive, taking it away from the mating surface. The CA glue worked perfectly however, holding the parts together perfectly. The only area of concern is that once dried, if excessive quantities were used, there is a white outer surface. To mitigate this, on the ï¬nal car we chose to use a small needle to apply the adhesive, making sure that it does not appear on the outer surface.
- PolyFiller
When adhered together, most parts had a small gap along the outer edge. We used Red Devil Lightweight PolyFilla to ï¬ll the gap. Frogtape was applied to either side of the seam, and the paste was thoroughly applied, left to dry, and then sanded back until there was no noticeable gaps.
- Airbrush Setup
To reduce the environmental impact of the ï¬nishing process, we used an airbrush instead of aerosols to paint the car. This allowed not only for a reduction in waste materials, but also a greater selection of paint colours, and a reduced drying time between each coat, maximising the work efï¬ciency.
Scrutineering with acrylic stuff provided by F1
Research & Development
MUST do research into miniature and small sized ball bearings https://www.minebeamitsumi.com/english/product/bearing/1181967_6218.html https://ris.utwente.nl/ws/files/6075232/t000000d.pdf https://www.bocabearings.com/blogs/2018/f1-in-schools-bearing-and-wheel-design
Testing
Wear in bearings before testing. You'll notice the same car performing better over time.
Design Process Evaluation
Document Presentation
Project Management
Project Management & Engineering Innovation:
Professional Methodologies: You formally adopt and implement a professional project management framework like PRINCE2 or PMBOK. Your portfolio will feature Gantt charts, critical path analysis, risk registers, stakeholder maps, and detailed work breakdown structures (WBS).
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM): You treat the car not as a single object, but as a product moving through a formal lifecycle: 01_Conceptual Design, 02_Detailed Design, 03_Virtual Prototyping (Simulation), 04_Physical Prototyping, 05_Testing & Validation, 06_Race Deployment, 07_End-of-Life Analysis. Each stage has formal "gate reviews" and sign-offs.
Integrated Systems Thinking: Your portfolio explicitly shows how the car is just one sub-system within a larger system that includes the launcher, the human operator, the regulatory constraints, and the track environment. You use systems modeling diagrams to show the interfaces and energy/information flows between these components. Enterprise & Branding:
Your team is branded as a professional engineering consultancy. Your portfolio looks like a corporate bid for a major government contract.
You seek mentorship and sponsorship from major engineering, construction, and project management firms like Jacobs, Atkins, or Emaar.
Unique Selling Point: You demonstrate a level of professional maturity and process discipline that is unheard of. You are proving you are ready to manage real-world, complex engineering projects right now.
Unique Idea 4: The "Global Virtual Team" Thesis
Philosophy: In a hyper-connected world and from a global crossroads like Dubai, a team should not be limited by geography. Your project becomes an experiment in radical, international, remote collaboration, mirroring the structure of modern global tech companies.
Project Management & Collaboration Innovation:
Decentralized Expertise: Your core team in Dubai manages the project and physical manufacturing. However, you recruit student "consultants" from around the world via F1 in Schools forums or social media. A student in Brazil becomes your Head of Branding. A student in Japan with access to a university wind tunnel provides independent testing data. A student in Germany becomes your CFD consultant.
Mastery of Collaboration Tools: Your entire project lives on cloud-based platforms. Onshape or Fusion 360 for real-time, multi-user CAD. Miro for virtual whiteboarding and brainstorming sessions across time zones. Slack/Discord for daily communication.
Cross-Cultural Management: Your project management plan explicitly details how you manage different time zones, cultural communication styles, and language barriers. You are demonstrating global competency.
Enterprise & Branding:
Your team is branded as a "born-global" entity. Your team photo is a mosaic of faces from different continents.
You seek sponsorship from multinational corporations, logistics companies (like Emirates or DP World), and collaboration software companies (like Slack, Miro, Atlassian).
Unique Selling Point: You demonstrate that your skills are not just in engineering, but in managing the complexity of modern, distributed, international work. You are proving you are ready to lead in a globalized world.
Initiating
Initiation Process
Project Schedule
Planning
Budget and Resource Management
Roles and Responsibilities
Executing
Team & Stakeholder Comm.
Risk Management
Monitoring & Controlling
Enterprise
Enterprise
Marketing Strategy & Materials
Sponsorship & return in Investment
Digital Media Proficiency
Sustainability
Strong understanding and effective implementation of sustainable practices. High awareness of environmental impact and active involvement in sustainability initiatives considering economic, environmental, and social factors
Unique Idea 1: The "Open-Source Champion" Thesis
Philosophy: You reject the secretive nature of competition. Your entire project is developed as a public, open-source resource for the global STEM community. Your goal is not just to win a trophy, but to create the ultimate educational platform for all future F1 in Schools teams, fundamentally changing the landscape of the competition.
Engineering & Project Management Innovation:
Public Repository: Your team's entire CAD history is managed publicly on GitHub. You will learn to manage binary CAD files with Git LFS (Large File Storage), demonstrating an incredibly advanced workflow. Every design change, every decision is logged and commented on for the world to see and learn from.
Public Wiki & Documentation: You build a comprehensive public wiki (using platforms like Notion or GitHub Pages) that details every aspect of your research—from aerodynamic principles to material science tests. It becomes the "Wikipedia" for F1 in Schools.
Live Development: You periodically live-stream design sessions or CFD post-processing on Twitch or YouTube, answering questions from other students in real-time. You are not just a team; you are live educators.
Enterprise & Branding:
Your sponsorship pitch is revolutionary: "Don't just sponsor a team; sponsor a movement. Your investment will fund the creation of a permanent, free resource that will benefit tens of thousands of STEM students for years to come."
You target companies that champion open-source software (like Red Hat, GitHub, Google), educational foundations, and government STEM initiatives.
Unique Selling Point: You redefine winning. Your legacy is measured by how many teams use your resources in the following season. You are competing on generosity and impact, a truly audacious and noble goal.