A full composite vehicle...
very innovative, probably not the type they allow unless you get them past the vision of shattered CF bodies they have seen in the past.
Before you send the time and money to build a car that way, build a "test section" and bring it to the salt for the tech guys to play with. And the engineering data to back it up.
You may still need inner panels in the drivers area, this one could be interesting, but not necessarily save you cross-section. Take Kent's advice, a little aero goes a long way.
My team already understands every square inch that is not in your cross-section has a .000 CD.
BTW, I probably would not recommend the Craig Breedlove answer when we asked him why his carbon fiber cockpit area in his last car did not have any roll structure...
"you don't build a Lear Jet to crash into a mountain"
Have fun, it's why we race
Long ago I worked on solar car project in college, full composite construction. To prove we met requirements for the rollbar, we built two cockpits and drop tested the second from a crane. I think the requirement was for 5 G loading, which was about an 80 foot drop if my memory is correct. Not practical, but the school had a crane and high speed cameras just laying around.
Sevaral of the grad students had done FEA on it prior, and made minor modifications to the design after the drop test.
I wish I had the videotape of this!
Our layup was something like: inner layer of Kevlar, carbon fibre layers, high density foam core, more carbon layers, and an outer layer of S-glass. I am going off memory, so could be off on the layer setup.
The Kevlar keeps the carbon shards from entering the cockpit.
We crash tested the final car for real about three days prior to the race, and it too held up well.
John
