November 2, 2015 in Thinking Analytically
Racecar design
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https://doi.org/10.1287/LYTX.2015.06.15
As the lead design engineer on a car racing team, you’ve been hired to build a car that can complete a racecourse in the fastest time. To get a feel for how each component performs, you’ve built several sample car configurations with varying engines, tires, transmissions, and brakes and then tested them on the racetrack. Each combination of parts has yielded different speed results, as shown in Table 1.
There are three types of each component that you can choose from. You must pick exactly one component from each category: engine, tires, transmission and brakes.
Question: What combination of engine, tires, transmission and brakes will give you the fastest car?
Send your answer to [email protected] by Jan. 15, 2016. The winner, chosen randomly from correct answers, will receive a $25 Amazon Gift Card. Past questions and answers can be found at puzzlor.com.
John Toczek is the AVP Predictive Modeling at Chubb in the Decision Analytics and Predictive Modeling department. He earned his BSc. in Chemical Engineering at Drexel University (1996) and his MSc. in Operations Research from Virginia Commonwealth University (2005).