Boosted Falcon

Hi All,

One of our rival teams has had their car stolen, just posting on their behalf in case someone see's or hears anything.

The 2009 VU-SAE car was stolen in its trailer some time between last Friday evening and early afternoon on Sunday. The registration number of the trailer is, R54 202 (VIN 6T9 T20 V97 601 ED 087). It is a white four-wheeler with VU-SAE signs on it. Attached is a picture of the car with the trailer in the background, and half the VU team about two weeks ago.

Please contact either the police or the project supervisors (Ozden.Turan@vu.edu.au or Eren.Semercigil@vu.edu.au) with any information.

Thank you.

As I said this isn't my team, so I don't have any other details.
Cheers,
Rusty.

bummer! my mate did the FSAE, looked like great fun, I went to a few track days and stuff. hope they get their car back.

What a bunch of scumbags

What area was it stolen from?

Guessing Footscray in Vic, where VU is.

Not sure what campus it was stolen from, I think the team is based at the Footscray campus but not sure, I will try and find out.

I honestly think whoever took it probably wanted the trailer and got the car as a bonus, since every SAE car in unique with custom parts made by the students, the car would be easily recognizable to someone who knew what to look for, although some of the parts like the shocks and motec equipment (we use motec, I'm not sure about vu) is worth a fortune!

Its a real shame, we work our asses off day and night on these things, our 09 car started track testing a few weeks ago, so is getting close to being complete and set-up properly, it would be gutting to loose it like that.

These things are great. My uncle teaches the class at RMIT that builds theirs. Went to the states to race against other countries.

Hope its found!!

I remember going to watch these when they did a thing a skid pan. Its unbelievable how much custom stuff is made for these things.
All the best in finding them.
Its a bit of a dog act to take this

Fucking hell Rusty, I thought the worst when I saw that thread title, considering the (literally) thousands of hours just you yourself have put into the Swinny car. Still a shit act even though it's VU.

oneredED wrote:Fucking hell Rusty, I thought the worst when I saw that thread title, considering the (literally) thousands of hours just you yourself have put into the Swinny car. Still a shit act even though it's VU.

lol nah mate our car is safe in our workshop at the moment, its been out testing for quite a few test sessions now so its starting to handle/drive pretty nicely!
Making some decent power now too, just need some more time (or fewer distractions like having a job and assignments) to get the new exhaust designed & welded up so we can get it on the engine dyno. I reckon we'll have to settle with the one we have for this year's comp, but at least the 2010 will have our results to see which way it needs to go, although they will need to factor in the change to E85.

BROCKYB8 wrote:Its unbelievable how much custom stuff is made for these things.

Pretty much everything on our car is custom (and I'd assume Vic Uni is the same). Obviously the chassis/suspension is custom because its all designed/manufactured by us, but we also run custom adjustable diff, we've bumped up the engine compression and use custom cam profiles, our own inlet/exhaust manifolds, custom shifter barrel, the list is pretty much endless. Even our steering wheel is a 1-off unit.

Thats why I reckon whoever pinched the vic uni car was probably after the trailer and didn't know the car was inside (although I don't know much about the details from when it was pinched).
I also reckon the car would probably get stripped for the useful parts, like shock absorbers and motec etc rather than being driven, because having only around 25mm suspension travel in each direction they are not designed for use anywhere other than a track, and with so many unique parts it would not be hard to identify the car if it surfed at a go-cart track or autocross event somewhere. Our cars often have a team logo machined or laser cut into some of the parts just for the bling factor, which would make them even easier to identify.
Not to mention that they are student built cars that were only designed to last through testing and our event, so they will always have reliability problems when driven for longer than that duration, they all break eventually!