After practically 2 weeks off, buggy returned to two very cold days of rolls, and thanks to daylight savings, they were each a full 2 hrs long. Some teams are getting up to full speed already and clearly can’t wait for the spring. With only one weekend left, there is not much time left for the teams to claim all the rolls that they can carry over if they haven’t already gotten them.
The tree next to the chute has fallen down and opened up the viewing possibilities from the chute. This also means that come raceday, we might have a new option for Jumbotron placement. After Next weekend, we here at the BAA will be going into our own style of hibernation until the spring where February 1st is the first possibly day of rolls of 2014.
In Attendance
| Org | Saturday | Sunday |
|---|---|---|
| AEPi | Kamikaze | |
| Apex | Phoenix | Phoenix |
| CIA | Ascension, Impulse, Freyja | Ascension, Impulse, Orca, Freyja |
| Fringe | Beacon, Bissa, Banyan | Beacon, Bissa, Banyan |
| PiKA | Banshee, Chimera | Banshee, Chimera |
| SAE | ||
| SDC | Vice, Malice, Avarice, Psychosis, Rage | Vice, Malice, Avarice, Psychosis, Rage |
| SigEp | Barracuda, Pandora | Barracuda, Pandora |
| SigNu | ||
| Spirit | Kingpin II, Zuke, Seraph, Haraka, Fuko | Kingpin II, Zuke, Seraph, Haraka, Fuko |
Observations (Saturday Gallery | Sunday Gallery)
AEPi has been rolling rolling fine through the freeroll aside from coming up short of hill 3 much of the time. On Sunday, Kamikaze hit a pothole at the finish line and escaped the pushers hands, the one catcher was surprised and jumped out of the way leaving the buggy to roll right under PiKA’s follow car if it weren’t caught by Apex’s past chair at the last second.
Apex will have all 5 drivers qualified for fall next weekend and word is they’ve begun work on their second buggy ever, so they might have a chance of rolling all of them come raceday. Their newest driver came out for the first time on Saturday where she rolled with bags all day. Come Sunday she was picking up speed and already starting to get pushes off hill 2.
CIA, who was the most rollingest org last year, went down to one buggy per roll at the end of the day Sunday and has slipped far away from that title. Additionally, they haven’t been getting the same rollouts that we saw from them a year ago. We know that the cold doesn’t treat everyone equally, but right now they hardly look like the 4th place team that they were last year.
Fringe has consistently had the best rollouts so far this year. On Saturday, Banyan lost a lot of speed through the chute and came up short on hill 3. Beacon was right behind her and just barely avoided a crash by slipping by on the inside of the turn and passing into hill 3. Banyan is the only buggy of theirs which doesn’t always get a few windows on each roll.
Pika had a fairly successful weekend with only a couple issues. Banshee has been showing great speed every other roll, and is getting about half the rollout of Fringe or SDC. Their times though have been pretty comparable despite this lesser rollout. Banshee had a stop just after the chute flag on Saturday when her windshield fogged up to the point that she couldn’t see. On Sunday their hill 3 pusher forgot to show up on one of their rolls to pickup Banshee. Luckily I was there to catch her before she started rolling back. After a later roll, the Chair stopped the show to cruise around the course again because Chimera lost a fairing. It turns out that somebody had already picked it up and brought it back to the tent while he was looking.
SDC had the only “crash” type incident on Sunday where Rage clipped the bales and stopped in the chute. The driver was fine and rolls were quickly underway again. Malice, and to a slightly lesser extent Vice, are right up there with Fringe’s awesome rollouts, but they’ve been having trouble keeping the consistency.
SigEp has started showing their consistency, but like most years, their speed just isn’t up to where it needs to be yet. Typically we’ve only seen that speed come out a week (possibly two) before Raceday itself. If they are able to get up to full speed, they might actually give their drivers and pushers a chance to properly practice which could be the edge they need to finally finish at the top of the heap.
Spirit has looked to be noticeably faster on a set of purple wheels now, but they have yet to get better than a couple windows on their rollout. They might be able to obtain better carry through if they tighten up on their line and stop swerving before turning into the chute. On Saturday, Haraka decided that the course wasn’t interesting enough and decided to follow the road around the monument until the last moment when she managed to turn back to the correct side and still hit the chute flag. After she was out of sight behind the monument, EMS started to run up the hill until the buggy showed its face again still with speed heading down the hill.- SAE and SigNu were nowhere to be seen this weekend leaving them far behind of everyone else. They have one more weekend to try and get as many rolls as they can. At this point, any rolls they can get now will only help them qualify next semester.
Livestreaming
We haven’t livestreamed in a while, and boy did it show this weekend. That combined with the cold left for some very quiet and unmanned streams. Sunday in particular was so lame that the phone battery died about 20 minutes into the stream and didn’t get noticed until the end of rolls. Sorry to those of you who may have tried to watch it, but it was clearly just not meant to be.
Freeroll Times
This was the first weekend we had to test out our new GoPro toys. That’s right, the BAA is now the owner of two new GoPros which will hopefully allow us to easily capture the events of rolls or anything else that we might do. Of course, since this was the first weekend, we’re still working out some kinks and tricks to finding the best resolution and frame rate to use. The good news is that they are already easier to set up and start recording and they last clear through the whole morning. I’ll be going through the video this week and hopefully have some times to share in a few days.