•  AEPi – with the first roll of the year, AEPi started the year off with a bang and managed to lose a wheel on their very first roll. They lost it while entering the chute and managed to slow down enough before they hit the bales that they didn’t hit anything. Even with losing their wheel they were allowed to roll again for the rest of the morning completing the course 3 more times.
• Apex – Ember’s disappearance from last year’s raceday seems to have continued to this year as Apex only brought out phoenix. Most rolls went very smoothly aside from one where the rear hatch came loose and popped off around the stop sign. Maybe some of that extra thick paint caused more of a bump than they thought.
• CIA – After nearly a year without, Ascension was back on the course this weekend. Word is her original driver is back after a year off and ready to hit the course again. There were some complaints that the buggy has lost some of her original magic, so we’ll see if she sticks around, or gets retired in favor of the newer builds. Speaking of which, all other buggies rolled without any issues.
• Fringe – Rolled smooth, nothing really to report.
• PiKA – For the first time in a while, PiKA brought out Raptor to the course. We’re not totally sure why since we’ve heard so many times that they’re not huge fans of that buggy and it hasn’t been out on the course in a while. It’s possible they haven’t yet found a driver for Banshee, or maybe Raptor makes a good training buggy, we’ll only know as more rolls happen.
• SAE – Also bringing back buggies that haven’t rolled in a bit, SAE brought out Lucy who had an unfortunate accident with their pushbar just before Raceday. Hopefully they put some time into this fix since they had a summer to work on it.
• SDC – First rolls wouldn’t be complete without someone missing a turn and this time it goes to the driver for Rage who missed the turn by the stop sign and accidentally started to go towards the Panther hollow bridge. She managed to continue rolling but Avarice had to stop behind her to avoid any chance of an incident.
• SigEp – Rolled smooth, nothing really to report.
• Spirit – In typical fashion, we have entirely forgotten how to recognize Spirit’s buggies and can only tell them apart by color. The Red and Teal buggies were out this weekend and both rolled very well with no incidents.
• SigNu & ROTC – Neither were out this weekend though both reportedly have been going to sweepstakes meetings. Hopefully this is a good sign that they will be out at some point this year and we look forward to seeing them at Raceday.

Robobuggy

This time around we saw the return of Robobuggy to the course. Before everyone else started, they got a couple walks around the course to test their systems and attempted an autonomous run. Apparently it was clear that they needed a bit more work and called it off before shoving off. Hopefully we’ll see them come back and maybe this time they’ll get their chance to roll on raceday like they attempted to do a couple years ago.

New Obstacles

Being the first weekend of rolls, teams had their first experience removing the barriers. Unlike our first look at them, the city decided to tighten them down even more and possibly glued a few in place. It took them almost an hour and a half to get them all out and capped.

The caps are rubber plugs that fit into the hole and fill it flush with the road, so fortunately we don’t have to worry about them sticking up at all, but being rubber they might compress enough to make them useless. Maybe some current students can lend an opinion. Fitting the posts back in apparently only took ~5 minutes when they figured out a good system.