Buggy loses a pillar: PiKA kicked off campus

Aw crap.  It was announced this afternoon that PiKA’s charter has been revoked by the school CMU chapter will not be recognized for at least four years. Losing PiKA from campus is obviously a huge loss to the greek community and to the broader social community at CMU in which they played a consistently central role.

Losing PiKA from buggy is devastating.  As they proudly and frequently pointed out, PiKA is (by far) the winningest organization in the history of buggy.  Their 27 men’s and 11 women’s championships tower over the historical competition.  Their presence at the top of the leader board has been a constant throughout the history of the sport and their consistency has played a large role in the stability of our race across its 91 year history.   Continue reading

2012 Sweepstakes Committee

Letting Sam take a well-deserved break from running the site, I thought I’d update everyone with the results from last night’s Sweepstakes Committee election. Winners in bold along with their org and their class as of next year.

Chairman

  • Anthony Pacella (SigEp, Senior)
  • Jeff Bouton (PiKA, Junior)

Ass Chair

  • Kevin Jang (KapSig, Senior)
  • Jeff Bouton (PiKA, Junior)

Safety Chair

  • Mike Mackin (Fringe/KDR, Senior)
  • Jeff Bouton (PiKA, Junior)
  • David Fortner (SDC, Senior)

Invoking my creepy alumni rights, here’s a picture of the 2012 committee:

Sweepstakes 2012
Left to right: Anthony Pacella making out with a buggy, a bird’s-eye view of Kevin Jang, and the only acceptable Facebook picture of Mike Mackin.

 

Congratulations to the whole committee and good luck with the coming year. Let us know if you need anything at all (except for fixing the potholes — you’re on your own with those monsters).

Finals Cancelled (rain)

Sweepstakes has decided to spare everyone a few soggy hours in the rain and cancel Saturday’s races now.   With 100% chance of rain for every relevant hour and a huge mass of green on the radar, it was definitely the sane call to make.
That means that today’s prelim results are final, and Fringe and SDC are the 2011 champions!
The awards ceremony will still be at 6pm as scheduled, but that’s the only thing on the schedule so enjoy some sleep during carnival!  What a novelty!

Prelim results and Finals schedule

I hope you either made it out this morning or followed along online, because prelims 2011 were a fine day of  racing.  Luckily, some fine folks in the forums summarized the day’s events, so I’ll skip that and get to the details.

The full official results are here on our leaderboard:
http://cmubuggy.org/raceday/leaderboard

The schedule for finals is:

Women's finals

8:00 am:   PiKA A      SDC C
8:15 am:   Fringe A    SigEp A
8:30 am:   SDC A       SDC B

Men's Finals
8:45 am:   SPIRIT A    CIA A
9:00 am:   SDC C       PiKA C
9:15 am:   SDC B       SigEp B
9:30 am:   SDC A       Fringe B
9:45 am:   Fringe A    SPIRIT B

 

Obviously the biggest factor in all of the above is whether the large amount of rain that is forecast will materialize.  Exhibitions have been semi-cancelled to allow finals to happen if the rain comes late.  If the weather holds up, we will run robobuggy and exhibitions at 10 minute intervals.

2010 videos now on cmubuggy!

If you’ve been on cmubuggy in the last 5 days since our new site debuted (and over 2,000 of you have), you’ve undoubtedly checked out its biggest new feature: the video library.  For the launch we had 264 videos capturing buggy from the 1950’s through raceday 2009.  Thanks to our partners in this project over at cmuTV, we have been able to share all of their terrific (and constantly improving) coverage from 2003 onward.

Part of that deal is that we keep each year’s races “in the vault” for a year while they sell DVDs which help to pay for the production.  Well guess what folks, it’s been a year since raceday 2010.  With no further ado, we give you …

cmubuggy.org/video#2010

This year’s installment comes with 40 videos including a great set of cmuTV-produced buggy promos  composed of footage from rolls and set to kickin’ beats.  Put a link to your favorite video on facebook and spread the word to folks that don’t yet know that all of this is online!

Other notes while I’ve got your attention:

  • The Lead Truck Auction will end at 9pm tonight.  Get in on the bidding.  Riding in the lead truck is a great way to experience raceday, and a great way to support the BAA’s financial contribution to the dual jumbotrons we can no longer do without.
  • Our Members-Only Raceday Preview has been getting rave reviews from our members.  And I quote:  “wow, loving it, awesome”   and “its awesome … you should make sure more people read it bc i didnt even realize what i was missing.”  Join or renew your membership here and forward us your confirmation email to join@cmubuggy.org.
  • If you sent us an e-mail yesterday and didn’t get a response, try again today, we fixed a problem with the join@ address and weren’t sure how many people were affected.
  • If you have emailed about other problems with the website and haven’t gotten a response, I’m really sorry.  We’re a little behind here in headquarters.  I’ll try to get everything fixed up before raceday.  Oh shit, that’s the day after tomorrow.

Lead Truck Auction 2011 kicks off

At 9AM this morning, bidding will commence in the 3rd annual Lead Truck Auction. Don’t show up fashionably late to the bidding this year as we’ve got only 36 hours (bidding closes at 9pm wednesday) to divvy up the rides because the heat selection was held later than it has been in recent years. For the uninitiated, bidders bid on the chance to ride in the lead truck for a specific heat. Winners get to ride with the head judge and other race officials with a view of at least the lead buggy around the entire course.

Last year’s auction was a huge success and it allowed us to help sweepstakes rent not one, but two jumbotrons so that spectators can really watch the entire race from the most popular spots on the course. We saw this coming, but once you have two jumbotrons, it doesn’t sound like any fun to go back to one (or god forbid, zero).  We alumni reap the majority of the benefits of these jumobtrons so if we want them to stick around we’ve got to pitch in.  Bid on a lead truck ride and you get to do your part for the big screens and take a fun ride to boot.

Rides are transferable, so you can give them as gifts if you won’t be in town.  Refunds are available in the event of races being rained out.  Plenty of other details at:

http://cmubuggy.org/auction

(discussion thread in the forum)

Here comes raceday + mini truck weekend report

I hope the rolls report faithful weren’t too distraught today given the lack of rolls report following an exciting truck weekend.  As you may remember, after truck weekend the large and well compensated BAA staffers spend the night producing an in depth and comprehensive report for our generous supporters: the Members-Only Raceday Preview.  Lucky for you, there’s still time to become a member or renew your membership via our new and improved membership page.  Starting this year, there is no set or minimum contribution to become an official member.  If you’re willing to throw something in the pot, you’re on the team.

The preview has just gone out to members, and it’s about 100x better than what compubookie slapped together, so don’t miss out.  If you didn’t get a copy of the Raceday Preview and you think you are a member, check our new roster of members to confirm and then let us know.  Remember if you become a member now, forward your gift confirmation email to join@cmubuggy.org so that we can get that Preview right out to you.

In other week-of-raceday news, the heat selection meeting was held Monday night.  We’ll get the heats incorporated into our system soon. 49 teams is 6 fewer than last year but just one less than in 2009. There accordingly 2 fewer heats overall.

With all of that business taken care of … it was an interesting truck weekend, so I won’t ignore it entirely.

In attendance
Everyone was in attendance, it was truck weekend!

Observations (Saturday Gallery, Sunday Gallery)

  • I didn’t do much observing on Saturday as we were doing a dress rehersal of the timing system.  I will be head timing again this year, operating the same system we rented last year.  It took a while to remember how everything plugged together, but once we got it figured out, it worked like a charm.  Hill 5s, practice your best frozen profile poses, they’ll be part of the official record.
  • SAE had a gnarly wheel failure while entering the chute on Saturday.  It looked familiar in many ways to the failures Spirit and CIA had and it ups the expectation that the road quality will inflict some casualties this raceday.  SAE has their act together though, and they whipped up a spare in time for rolls on Sunday.
  • Fringe and CIA both lost rear hatches in the chute.  Figure out those tape strategies before next week everyone!  On a general note, chairmen, take a moment and remind everyone in your org how they can avoid DQing the team.  Sounds simple right, but every year there are tons of DQs for stupid stuff.  Don’t be in the stupid club next week.
  • SigEp had some cool looking transponders on their buggies.  I’m guessing they were GPS or accelerometers of some sort.  Barracuda was flying all weekend so I’m guessing the data looks good no matter which variables they were measuring.
  • Both SigEp and Pioneers both had trouble at the finish line when they stopped the buggy by the pushbar and heard that terrible sound: carbon crinkling, breaking, crunching.  Pioneers’ problem looked to be in the top of Chaos’ shell while Mamba’s failure was a crack right across the composite pushbar.  Word from SigEp is that it’s already mended and stronger than ever.  I hope Pioneers is doing the same since they have no backup.
  • Fans in the chute were fairly well entertained this weekend.  Not to be lowbrow about it though, there was lots of speed on display and some thrilling driving. Both SDC and PiKA’s RD2011 are routinely drifting through the turn at full speed. PiKA was losing big chunks of rubber in the process but rolling out well. AEPi hit the inside curb after the hay bales in what looked like a visibility issue. SN’s Skua ended the semester of rolls with a distinctly squirrely entrance line and then a pretty quick spin that sent her into the bales tail first. SDC took the cake for most exciting incident without even stopping when Avarice swung out all the way outside and tapped the bales with her outside rear wheel with enough force to throw some hay in the air. The recovery was truly impressive though as she got back on track and managed to roll out a number of windows. Youtube of those three below.

New website arrives in time for raceday

While six of the buggy orgs were in their garage all winter building new buggies, we did some building of our own and attempted the first complete overhaul of our website since it was launched in 2008.

In addition to a visual re-design and upgraded forum, gallery, and news software, some of the exciting new features include:

Videos!

This project has been at the top of our wish list since the beginning and it’s finally here.  We’re launching our video library with 263 videos that span all of cmuTV’s coverage from 2003-2009 as well as some older historic gems and some compilations and clips from this semester at rolls.  Our agreement with cmuTV is to give the DVDs one year of exclusivity before we put the content online.  DVD sales help fund the production itself, and we don’t want to undercut that.  In what we hope will become a new tradition, the 2010 videos will be unveiled online this week before the races.

Content Feed

Didn’t you hate when you came up with a clever comment on a picture in the gallery, but nobody ever saw it?  Now everything that happens on the site is sorted out and displayed chronologically so you won’t miss a thing.  Ok, so we ripped off the facebook concept a bit, but I think that site is really going to take off, so I figured we’d ride on the coat tails.

Reference Wiki

This one is going to take a while to reach its full potential, but I think it’s going to be cool.  Buggy is so full of quirky and specific terminology and ideas that it takes new teams, new fans, and anyone else that crosses our path a long time to figure out what’s so cool about it.  We have tried to offer a “What is Buggy” section on the site, but it’s too large a job for us to tackle well.  Luckily, the wiki format lets everyone add and refine the knowledge base as they’re able.  If you’ve never edited a wiki before, don’t be shy.  Just click edit anywhere you see it and start typing.

History

Wondering how your favorite team has been progressing over the last 1o years?  Don’t wonder any longer, just take a look at the “trends” tab on any organization page and check our our new graphs.  We hope these graphs are just the beginning, let us know what buggy data you think could benefit from some visualization.

Take a look around, check out the new digs, and let us know what you think in this thread in the forum.  All accounts from the old site should still work, but you’ll need to re-confirm your e-mail address.  Send an e-mail to admin@cmubuggy.org if that process gives you any trouble.   Thanks to shafeeq and colugodriver for uploading pictures from rolls this morning.   The new gallery should be a lot easier to use, so hopefully we’ll have everyone contributing pictures this raceday!

Rolls Report: April 3


The last regular weekend of rolls of the year was starting to feel a little bit like truck weekend already as teams set up by the start line and put down their fastest times.  Saturday was rained out by about 90 minutes of rain that just happened to come down between 5 and 7am.  Sunday’s weather was decent though, with temperatures in the mid 30’s but calm winds and clear sun that made it seem warmer.

In Attendance (buggies newest to oldest, [rolls needed to qualify], my guess for A team)

Org Sunday not out
AEPi Kamikaze, Zephyrus
CIA Ascension, Freyja, Renaissance, Firebird
Fringe Bonsai, Borealis, Blizzard, Brazen [8] Bedlam
KapSig Apache
PiKA RD2011, Chimera, Knightfall [1+PT], Zeus Nemesis
Pioneers Chaos
SAE Rubicon [PT]
SDC Bane, Avarice, Malice, Psychosis, Rage
SigEp Peregrine, Pandora Mamba [5], Barracuda
SigNu Krait [7+PT]
Spirit Mapambazuko, Seraph, Fuko, Haraka

Observations (Sunday gallery) Continue reading