First, sorry for the delay in getting these posted. Going out at night and getting up for rolls both days in a weekend is tough to maintain when I can’t just sleep all day in between like I did back in the day.

New Buggies Galore
With five more buggies coming out for the first time this weekend, we’ve reached a total of 7 in the buggy class of 2009, the  most since 2004, when there were 8.

• KDR’s Polaris came out on Saturday, but only made it around the course once before a mechanical failure in the steering.  The shell wasn’t painted so the plastic makes it tough to judge the details, but the shape and craftsmanship look to be of pretty good quality. The windshield shape is reminiscent of PhiKap’s.
  
• SigEp’s Barracuda rolled on Sunday.  Also in bags, the but not entirely covered, it looked a bit like they had to rush to get it out the door. The windshield is such a narrow horizontal band, it looks like the helmet from a suit of midieval armor.
  
• Sigma Nu’s Bungarus Krait looks to be from the Skua mold, and was already going just as fast.  It came out in newspaper on saturday but was painted by Sunday.
  
• AEPi’s Kamikaze is a study in buggy dimension optical illusions.  It looks astonishingly short, but an AEPi pusher told me that it’s actually not that short, it’s just a bit taller than most buggies.  Either way, it looks solid and it’s rolling pretty well, so a good build for one of the newer teams on the course.
  
• Spirit’s new buggy (name anyone?) departs from the Kingpin/Seraph mold and opts for the softer throwback tear-drop form of Haraka with 3 pneumatics.  Haraka’s surprising performance last year (running men’s A team and placing 4th) despite being 13 years old may have raised demand for a newer model of that design philosophy.
  
  EDIT:We’ve gotten word that Spirit’s new buggy is actually the resurrection of the previously retired Zulu Machafuko, a.k.a. “Fuko” from 1996.  So that reduces the new buggy count to 6 but our proposed logic of following Haraka’s success appears to be on the money.

Observations
Saturday (Gallery Here)

• SDC’s going fast and pushing their highly apexed line hard already this semester.  Their new buggy came close enough to outer AND inner haybales to throw some hay in the air.
• KDR’s Polaris had a steering linkage fail in the chute on its second-ever roll.  The result was a left wheel turned perpendicular to the buggy and a right wheel at about 70 degrees.  Turns out you can stop a buggy really quickly like that.
• CIA continues to thrill with their pushbar drama.  On roll 1,  Mirage dropped pushbar at start of Hill 3.  On Roll 2, the pushbar dropped just as pusher was trying to get last shove on Hill 2. Conquest made “screechy” noises at Hill 2 and was scratched.

Sunday (Gallery Here)

• Zeus slowed to a stop after the chute flag without ever attempting to turn.  Apparently the driver had trouble with her contacts.
• SigEp’s new buggy turned right at the transition flag and stopped near the monument before being pushed around the wrong side.   The buggy sounded “like a locomotive” on its first rolls but got quieter through the day.
• Sunday unfortunately featured one of the scariest moments in recent memory when an SUV got onto the course after crossing the bridge at the chute and blowing right by the barricades and heading up towards the flags.  In the end, enough flaggers jumped bravely out in front of the car to get it to stop and pull next to the monument.  Sigma Nu was able to stop one buggy at the top of the hill and one near transition, but the first buggy had rolled past the car, luckily without incident.  Many have suggested returning to a barricade format that funnels cars into the Phipps access road so that we don’t have to rely on the folks manning the barricade (Beta this semester).  I’m sure sweepstakes is giving it their full attention.
• SigEp’s Messiah suffered major structural damage on its way to drops and had to be scratched for the day.  Rumor was that the pan cracked.
• Psychosis spun in the chute without hitting anything just after SDC’s new buggy barely made it through but ran the fastest time of the semester so far.
• Fringe had a bit of trouble getting a pass test completed for Bristol which couldn’t seem to muster the speed to get around Banyan in a timely manner.
• Spirit’s new buggy performed well, but they had trouble with the previously reliable Seraph which spun on Saturday and again on Sunday.  It’s rolling on Xootrs in the back and a pneumatic in the front, a formula that has worked fine for a while.
• Fringe did not have their new buggy out, but apparently it was just a driver availability issue.
• The many many incidents in the chute allowed for many tests of the brake flag and drivers did very well actually responding to them and then making graceful controlled stops.  That hasn’t always been the case.  Good work flaggers and drivers.
• the Zoo’s new Bungarus Krait ran into the curb on hill 3 after it had been pushed a few times.  It seems like either the steering failed or the driver slipped off of the steering handles on a big shove.  The pusher nearly stopped it, but there was a crunch.  Tough luck less than 24 hours after the paint job was done.
• After an extremely slow start to the day in terms of the number of buggies down the course, sweepstakes was cracking the whip to get through the roll order.  In all, teams got less than 3 rolls per day this weekend.
  

Updates
A couple of things I forgot the first time around.

• SDC was rolling its new buggy on white rear tires. That’s the first obvious wheel technology change of the semester, and it seemed to be effective as the buggy earned the fastest freeroll of the semester by about a second at the beginning of its 3rd day on the course.
• Rumors from multiple sources indicated that PiKA caped a new buggy on Friday, but it was not seen at rolls.

Times
One timing source was kind enough to share freeroll times with us so long as we obscured things slightly.  Good thing too, because the all-alumni timing team on Saturday showed some significant rust on the thumbs.  The top freeroll (cross-walk to window 0) time from each org from this weekend sorts out like this:

• SDC – Raceday09
• Fringe – Banyan (+1.0 sec)
• Sigma Nu – Skua (+5.5)
• PiKA – Chimera (+6)
• CIA – Conquest (+6)
• Spirit – Haraka
• Pioneers – Chaos
• AEPi – Kamakazi
• SAE – Rubicon
• PhiKap – Svengali

In Attendance (25 buggies from 12 Orgs)

• KDR – Polaris
• SigEp – Barracuda
• PhiKap – Schadenfreude, Svengali
• Sigma Nu – Skua, Bungarus Krait, King of Spades
• SDC – Envy, Rage, Psychosis, RD09
• AEPi – Kamikaze
• Fringe – Banyan, Blizzard, Bristol
• CIA – Mirage, Conquest
• Spirit – Seraph, Haraka, New Buggy
• PiKA – Knightfall, Zeus, Chimera
• Pioneers – Chaos
• SAE – Rubicon