Pittsburgh finally let buggy have a nice dry course for the weekend, so CMU stepped up and provided the torrents of water on Sunday. Thanks CMU! Saturday was sunny, 40-45 degrees, and over 2 hours long thanks to the end of day light savings. Sweepstakes got through the roll order 3 full times despite a fair number of stoppages. The first 40 minutes of Sunday went smoothly, but then Porter Hall decided to burst and spew disturbingly brown water out onto hill 3. In just minutes the sidewalk, hill 3, and the outside of the chute were thoroughly flooded.
Mini-raceday is next weekend!
In Attendance
- CIA – Conquest, Firebird, Renaissance
- AEPi – Kamikaze, Zephyrus
- DTD (Sat only) – Bethany
- SAE (Sun only)– Rubicon
- SigEp – Barracuda, Pandora
- Spirit – Seraph, Fuko
- SigNu (Sat only) – Skua
- PhiKap – Schadenfreude, Svengali, Celerity
- SDC – Malice, Psychosis, Envy, Rage
- PiKA – Zeus, Wyvern, Nemesis
- Fringe -Banyan, Bedlam, Blizzard, Bantam
Observations (full Saturday gallery here)
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Zeus went wide and hit the outer bales pretty hard, but the doubled up bales did their job. The driver had a bit of cut lip, but was quick to say she was fine. Zeus was rolling with the Zero Error wheels seen on Knightfall last week at the time. Perhaps new wheels/compound created an understeer problem? 
DTD had a rough day, going 1 for 3 on rolls. On their first roll they were going a bit quicker than usual and the driver cut it in too quickly and pulled a clean 180 in the middle of the chute without hitting anything. On their 3rd roll, she had helmet related visibility problems shortly after the transition flag. She tried to hit the breaks but in that effort she jerked the steering left and the curb ended up doing the stopping for her.
SDC had an April fools caliber “spin” in the chute. Someone said over their org radio channel “Psychosis spun in the chute” which caused their follow car, their flagger, and the sweepstakes car all to jump into action racing to the aid of the buggy. Only thing was, Psychosis actually made it through the chute fine and was on its way up the back hills. The result was a lot of frantic searching for a buggy that seemingly crashed so badly that it vanished.- Spirit’s Fuko blew a tire on the mild asphalt patch just past the apex of the chute. Seraph stopped like a champ right at the chute flag even though the hill 3 pusher had already moved Fuko to the side of the road.
- Despite very professional and much improved flagging, a car managed to sneak on to the course between orgs. Apparently it had been parked in the driveway behind the Schenley park visitor’s center. The safety chair (who hangs out in the chute during rolls for faster response) quickly jumped in his own car and confronted the intruder as they approached the chute.
- SDC, Fringe, and SigEp look like the only teams on the course that are getting ready for a race. Perhaps the rainy weather has slowed down driver training, but with mini-raceday just a week away, most orgs are going to have to switch modes quickly to put together a semi-realistic lap. CIA was actually rolling faster than SigEp, but SigEp was putting together some solid looking push teams. SDC and Fringe were clearly the fastest rolling teams on the course this weekend. PiKA is obviously the salient omission from that list. They did have some decent rolls a couple of weeks ago, but they seem to be wrapped up in some elaborate testing / experimentation routine that involves pulling cards from a deck to determine which buggies from the garage to roll each weekend.
PhiKap brought out Celerity for the first time in quite a while. According to PKTracing.com, it last raced in 2004. Anyone know if that was when it last rolled? Interesting that PhiKap is dedicating the resources to bringing out a third buggy, but they do have 4 drivers caped, so maybe they’re just trying to find a ride for all of their ladies.
Fringe’s Bantam was rolling on a white tire compound, possibly for the first time. Bantam’s front and rear fairings make it tough to glean too much more about the tire during rolls, but that white is high-contrast and hard to miss. Perhaps the same white compound that SDC has been rolling on since last March?
hendrix says:
Thanks for the post Sam.
Carleton says:
Since I actually visited this weekend, I’ll make a couple of comments.
On Saturday, SDC was already undermanned, and because they were forced to take on an additional course flagging responsibility down at the Scaife driveway, the chute flagger was relatively inexperienced. She misinterpreted a comment made by another chute flagger, taking it to mean that something had happened to Psychosis in the chute. A regretable mixup, but it caused no real damage.
On more of a critical note, given the numerous cancellations of rolls during the last few weeks, I was pretty disappointed with how little effort was put into salvaging rolls on Sunday. In fact nobody displayed any interest whatsoever in finding a way to continue rolls. With 1.5 hours of warm sunday remaining, I deem this total lack of try a failure.
carsenkline says:
The outer bale area was flooded by 7:30. Given the number of bad chute turns that have happened this semester, I would thank Sweepstakes for keeping Rage’s and Zeus’ wheels (among many others) clean and dry.
Carleton says:
You’re missing the point: it’s a failure that Sweepstakes cancelled rolls with no attempt to fix the problem.
With very little effort, a few pieces of wood from unused barricades, and one misshapen unused haybale I found, I was able to divert at least 80% of the water over the curb and into the ravine next to Scaife. That alone reduced the flow in the chute to significantly less than is shown in the picture above. I think a few more bales would have cut that flow down to a small enough trickle that rolls could have continued.
Maybe it wouldn’t have worked, but clearly a little bit of effort yielded some success. I’m pretty sure that if sweepstakes had organized a serious attempt, they could have continued rolling. Everyone’s awake and ready to roll, don’t just pack up, use a little creativity and at least try. Sweepstakes owns the road for another one and half hours, why throw in the towel minutes after the problem arises?
jess thurston says:
If you’d like the full story on why we cancelled, feel free to e-mail me rather than speculate.
Carl says:
Were there a lot of orgs hankering to float a taco through the poop chute?
Did any of the chairs object to the cancelation of rolls due to sewage?
Could have been pretty epic though. ‘Alright, be sure to close your mouth as you make the chute turn.’ ‘I’m joining an org that only rolls reversed trikes.’
vincent says:
my driver certainly wasn’t willing to roll near the goop, and even if she was, i wouldn’t have put her through. while i was there, i heard a lot of other drivers and chairmen making similar noises. there are certainly things about how this event got handled that i disagree with as well, but regardless of what could have possibly been done to mitigate the shitriver, that doesn’t change the fact that the outer half of the chute was soggy and nothing could be done to make that part of the course usable soon enough for rolls to meaningfully continue.
Carleton says:
Because of an email from Jess, I now know that Sweepstakes’ cancellation of rolls was based on considerations that superceded whether or not the chute could have been made rollable. I rescind my judgement of failure from Sweepstakes.
wook says:
Alleged picture of Celerity above is in fact Schadenfreude (mistaken, as usual.. Schad has a pointed nose, Cel has a rounded nose). Man is this an ugly pic, but here’s Cel:
http://cmubuggy.org/Forum/gallery2.php?g2_itemId=4904
To answer your question, while I’m not 100% sure, I don’t believe Celerity was out on the course for practice after 2004.