Why this site exists

I'm LJ, I'm 13, and I live near Charlotte, North Carolina. I want to be an engineer on a Formula 1 team.

Lots of people say that. The difference I'm trying to build is evidence. Every project on this site has a problem, a prediction I wrote down before I had data, what actually happened, what broke, and what I changed. Where I got something wrong, it's still here — those are usually the interesting ones.

How it works

The program runs in seasons of thirteen weeks. Three sessions a week: design on Tuesday, build and test on Thursday, and a short review on Saturday. Every session has to end with at least one number I calculated myself. A session that produces no number didn't really happen.

The rules I test by

• Write the prediction down first, with units.
• Change one thing at a time.
• Three trials minimum, five is better.
• Record what I didn't change, not just what I did.
• If the error bars overlap, I haven't proved anything. Saying so is a result, not a failure.
• Re-run the baseline at the end. If it moved, the session is suspect.

Where this goes

Charlotte is an unusually good place to be doing this — the motorsports industry is concentrated here, UNC Charlotte runs a Formula SAE team about half an hour away, and GM's motorsports engineering presence is tied to Cadillac's F1 programme.

Season 1 is design and build. Season 2 is data and telemetry. Season 3 is vehicle development on an RC test bed. Season 4 is competition and a public body of work.

Colophon

This site is generated from plain text files in a public git repository. Nothing is stored in a database and nothing can silently disappear — the commit history is part of the record.