To provide simulation data on current and past vehicle platforms so design choices are made against accurate estimates of vehicle performance; to surface where one subsystem's properties will hurt another's; to provide the tools that predict final vehicle characteristics from a design; and to build tools that improve member quality of life and carry knowledge from year to year. Systems Engineering exists because the Engineering Manager role was historically overburdened. When that role was absent the team saw system-level design issues, weak integration during manufacturing, and no development of vehicle-level analysis. The role owns full-car modelling, integration and packaging during design, and the design and analysis workflows that let subteams work across system boundaries.
- Improve LAPSIM until it correlates to on-track vehicle performance. Current point-mass steady-state model with a quadratic tire model calculates lap times within roughly 4% of actual, tuned on 2025 Autocross competition data. - Improve isolated vehicle models of specific subsystems. Current work: the Simulink four-wheel transient quarter-car model, the mass model, and the cooling model. - Improve overall vehicle understanding, and specifically the understanding of unique subteam interactions. - Track mass, CG and moment of inertia weekly through design rather than discovering them at build. - Make the Systems Integration position sustainable long term: document the simulations, document the timelines and goal-setting, and train before summer.