[EricH]

Originally Posted by Kevin Leonard

But every year it's a race, it's a skills challenge. Which machine is fastest. There's no way to play defense, there's no way to outplay a better opponent.
I have no doubt that Formula SAE is a difficult and dynamic challenge, and I have the utmost respect for the competition.

But I like to participate in games. [...] FSAE is an engineering challenge, not a game.

All right. Fair enough.

I hate to break it to you, but it's ALL a game. I'll have to see if my dad will post here, but he's stated in the past that his senior design team (Baja SAE) didn't realize there was a game until later.

And here's why. You are trying to win, no? You are taking a set of rules, and following them, and trying to do better than your opponents. Sometimes, that involves head-to-head competition. But the vast majority of the time, the head-to-head competition is conducted in one-at-a-time or one-man-in-the-arena formats, even in the real world. (I can imagine the competition for a fighter-aircraft contract now if it was full head-to-head... Yeah, not gonna happen.)

So here's the trick: You have to look at the rules, and engineer up your best way of winning the game. If you've seen Spare Parts, or won an RCA/EI/RAS, you might notice that you don't necessarily have to win the engineering challenge to win the game.