FEV Announces Winners of First FEV Powertrain Development Award

Advanced powertrain engineering company FEV announced the recipients of the first FEV Powertrain Development Award, awarded to three collegiate teams that participated in the 2007 Formula SAE competition held May 16 – 20. The Award was presented on Sunday, May 20 at the conclusion of the competition.

The winning teams were:
1st place: The University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
2nd place: The University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia
3rd place: Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

“These three winning teams exemplify the spirit of the FEV Powertrain Development Award,” said Robert J. Last, vice president of operations and communications for FEV. “The teams that tend to rise to the top in this competition will not only have a robust and well-tested design — but they will also have mastered the critical elements of strategy planning, project management, contingency planning, and logistics management. Through this achievement, the winning teams have demonstrated that they understand and can successfully apply these concepts.”

The Award is intended to reward the top three Formula SAE teams for overall excellence in powertrain development. It considers aspects such as performance, fuel economy, endurance and cost in determining a winner and uses a quantitative scoring system that is already well known and tested. The FEV Powertrain Development Award emphasizes the elements that are most important in the development of a powertrain and provides the engineering student and FSAE team with an “equation” that can be optimized, much like the product attribute decisions that today’s powertrain designers and developers must make in the conduct of their day-to-day activities. This results in multiple solutions that a team can employ to win. Full details of the weight factors and scoring system are available on the SAE website (http://students.sae.org/competitions/formulaseries/fsae/).

Of an available 900 points, The University of Toronto scored 694.8 points, the University of Western Australia scored 652.7 points, and Carleton University scored 622.7 points. Of note is the fact that the students of Carleton University achieved their score based on the use of a 1-cylinder KTM engine that provided excellent fuel efficiency. Carleton won the fuel economy portion of the event outright and completed all of the other Formula SAE events, as well. This durable, high fuel efficiency approach propelled Carleton onto the podium and substantiates FEV’s intention of allowing for multiple engineering approaches to winning the award.