What this is
An independent platform for Formula Student teams, built by two people who used to be on one.
The problem we kept running into
Every Formula Student team solves the same problems from scratch. The same accumulator container question, the same tyre data fitting, the same argument about whether a monocoque is worth it. Somewhere a team has already solved yours and written it up, and you will never find it, because it is in a Google Drive folder belonging to a team that graduated three years ago.
The same goes for parts. A team retires a car and the wings, the uprights, the loom go into a storeroom until somebody throws them out. Two hundred kilometres away another team is buying the same things new, with money it does not have.
Neither of those is a hard problem. They are both the same easy problem: there is nowhere shared to put things.
What we built
- A knowledge library where design reports, cost reports, test data and tutorials are tagged by subsystem, class, event and year, so they can be found again in two years.
- A marketplace for parts between teams. Adverts only: you arrange the handover and the money yourselves, and we never touch either.
- A forum where answers to rules questions become a searchable archive instead of scrolling away.
- Company profiles and a job board, because building a car from a blank sheet is the best thing on a graduate CV and almost nobody knows to look for it.
How it stays free
Teams and students never pay anything. Not to register, not to publish, not to sell, not to read. That is not an introductory offer. It is the reason the thing exists, and if we ever charged teams we would have built the wrong product.
The costs are a server, a domain and email. Right now nothing covers them but donations. There are no sponsors and no advertising. If you want to help keep it running, the support page says how.
How we keep it usable
Every team is verified by hand before it can publish. Every resource, every listing and every job is read by a person before it goes live. Nobody is anonymous: real names are required, and what you write is signed by the team you belong to.
That is slower than the alternative and it is the whole point. A library anyone can dump anything into is not a library, and a marketplace where you cannot tell who you are dealing with is not worth using. How we moderate, and how you argue with a decision, is on the moderation page.
Who we are
FSPitside is run by two people who came through Formula Student themselves, both alumni of UniNa Corse, the Formula SAE team of the University of Naples Federico II, and both senior technical inspectors: the officials who scrutineer the cars before they are allowed on track.
That second part matters for what this is. Inspecting means seeing, every season, dozens of teams arrive with the same problems solved badly in the same way, and knowing that somewhere a team two paddocks over got it right and wrote it down.
Write to us at [email protected]. We read it.
We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or run by SAE International or any Formula Student competition organiser. Nothing here is an official rules interpretation. Answers in the rules archive are what other teams have experienced, which is useful and is not the same thing.
What we will not do
- Charge teams. For anything, ever.
- Take a cut of a sale. We are a noticeboard, not a middleman. No payments pass through the platform.
- Sell your data. Your CV is private until you decide otherwise, and it stays that way by default. See the privacy notice.
- Allow anonymous posting. You can display a pseudonym, but we know who you are and so does your team.