Posted on | by Sam Swift

Now that I’ve built some serious suspense by coming out with this report 4 days late, I hope it lives up to the hype.  Sorry for the delay, don’t get out of the habit of checking on monday mornings.  We’ll get back on schedule.

It’s an established fact now, electing the sweepstakes committee in the spring is the way to go.  In the past, a new committee would scramble to figure out what was going on through September and rolls would usually start sometime in the second half of October.  Last year worked well, but it could have been a fluke.  But for the second year in a row now, rolls have gone off without a hitch on the 3rd weekend of September.  It’s also worth noting that things weren’t just running, they were running smoothly.  Barricades were out; people were doing their chores or covering for others as needed; only the weather held things up.  The course was blanketed in some serious fog on Saturday that kindly dissipated so that CIA could take the first rolls of the year with some visibility.

In Attendance (buggies listed newest to oldest)

Org Saturday Sunday
AEPi Kamikaze, Zephyrus
CIA Freyja, Renaissance, Firebird Freyja, Renaissance
Fringe Borealis, Banyan, Blizzard Borealis, Banyan, Blizzard
PiKA Nemesis, Chimera, Knightfall, Zeus Nemesis, Chimera, Zeus
SAE Rubicon
SDC Malice, Rage Avarice, Addiction, Rage
SigEp Peregrine, Barracuda, Pandora Peregrine
Spirit Fuko, Haraka Seraph, Fuko

Observations (Saturday gallery)

  • Things were generally surprisingly smooth, but there were plenty of signs that a new crop of pushers, drivers, and mechanics were on the scene.  I saw a number of buggies shoved enthusiastically across the finish line and some that finished about 50 yards ahead of their hill 5.  One new driver gently braked near the stop sign when she was unsure which way to go, but then finished her roll after a reassuring nudge from one of the follow car passengers.  One of my favorites was the haphazard collection of newspapers taped to the bottom of PiKA’s tent to cover the gap left by a frame that got larger or a tent that shrunk in the wash.
  • Fringe found time to finish painting Borealis over the summer and went with some of that trippy color-changing green –> purple stuff.  It’s not as visually shocking as you might have thought (at least in the current implementation), but it did make me do a double take when I saw it.
  • CIA was rolling on both red and blue rubber that I don’t recall seeing last year, but I could be wrong.  Rolls ended on Saturday with Firebird in the inside bales just past the apex.  A new driver was at the helm and things may have gotten too quick too fast, but CIA is generally a paragon of safety-first training.  It seemed to me that she hit one of the growing collection of ruts right at the point where CIA buggies are almost always doing their bad-ass oversteer maneuver.  It only takes a bit of a bump to upset the balance at that moment.  The driver was fine and sounded undeterred by her first day experience.
  • Fringe had a pair of chute incidents on Sunday to start off their year on a sobering note.  First, one of their new drivers ended up in the outer bales in Blizzard with enough force to knock the hatch off.  She was OK, but did end up with some scratches to welcome her to the sport.  On the next roll, Borealis had a mechanical failure of some sort that brought it to a halt in the chute.  They couldn’t push it on, so they had to unload the driver there.
  • SAE scratched midway through Saturday and didn’t come back on Sunday, but I didn’t hear any explanatory narrative.  Hope Rubicon is holding together.
  • What about the orgs that haven’t been mentioned?  That’s a good thing this time of year!  They got out to rolls, got down the hill without crashing, and had enough pushers out to get back up.  We’ll delve deeper into the finer points as the semester progresses.
  • The average buggy in this year’s starting lineup is in its 6th year which seems a bit on the old side, but I’m too lazy to compare it to last year.  With PhiKap and SN out of the running, Spirit has an easy claim on the most “experienced” fleet this year with Haraka and Fuko both hailing from the mid 90’s.   Rage, Rubicon and Zeus also deserve mention for making it back out in the 10+ category and looking pretty good while they’re at it.

Thanks to Katherine Crawford for notes on Sunday’s events that I didn’t make it out to see.

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