Now that teams have some extra daylight savings time, they got a chance to square off against each other and compete in a slightly early Mini-Raceday. Sweepstakes managed to get timers out for all splits around the course and teams got to get a rough time for front hills, Freeroll, backhills, and overall (if they did all 3). Some teams seemed burned out by Mini-Raceday and Sunday quickly turned into a free-for-all of roll-arounds for the teams willing to put in the effort. Teams that rolled both days were rewarded with a relatively warm morning after a quite frigid Mini-Raceday.
I’m trying out a slightly different format for this week, comment below if you’d prefer to stick with the old one.
In Attendance
| Org | Saturday | Sunday |
|---|---|---|
| AEPi | Kamikaze | Kamikaze |
| Apex | Phoenix | Phoenix |
| CIA | Icarus, Impulse, Orca, Ascension, Freyja | Icarus, Impulse, Ascension |
| Fringe | Bolt, Beacon, Bissa | Bolt, Beacon, Bissa |
| PiKA | Banshee | Banshee |
| SDC | Vice, Rage | Vice, Rage |
| SigEp | Kraken, Barracuda, Pandora | |
| Spirit | Haraka, Seraph | Seraph |
| Roboclub | Robobuggy |
Observations (Saturday Gallery | Sunday Gallery)
General:
Though Mini-Raceday went a bit slow, it was still very smooth. Timing didn’t seem to have much trouble aside from some slight impreciseness attributed to the stop watches. All recorded times were marked to the second leaving many teams with ties for some segments and others within a second or two giving sweepstakes a hard time calling a winner.
While most teams competed with men’s teams, CIA and Fringe were the only ones to compete in women’s. Freeroll times were surprisingly close between CIA, Fringe, and Spirit with a strange lack of top buggies from SDC and PiKA on the list. What clinched it was the Backhill times that CIA managed to put up for both their men’s and women’s teams leaving them with a victory in both categories for combined Freeroll and Backhill. CIA did not do any Hill 1’s leaving Fringe and Spirit to tie for the Overall men’s time and Fringe with the only entrant for Women’s Overall. One particular time of note is SigEp who managed to tie Spirit for the fastest Front Hills.
Official times from Mini-Raceday can be found here: Official Sweepstakes Mini-Raceday Times
Saturday may have run slowly, but Sunday was the complete opposite. Many teams seemed to be lacking a good portion of their crew and several opted to roll just a single buggy at a time, some later not by choice. Surprisingly, even though things felt much quicker, sweepstakes managed to roll exactly the same number of buggies around the course on both days. This is probably from the extra time teams took between rolls given the quick team-to-team change over.
About halfway through the morning, Sweepstakes declared it a free-for-all and any team willing to roll just needed to get to top of the hill and they would be cleared to roll. This allowed some teams to have their first true roll-arounds of the season. At the end of the morning, sweepstakes took over the backhills for some tired pushers and got a chance to push. Many remarks of “I am so out of shape” or “I forgot how heavy buggies are sometimes” were heard from some quickly exhausted committee persons.
Incidents:
Rage – Continuing SDC’s unfortunate trend of crashes, Rage managed to nosedive into the inside bales in the same place on both Saturday and Sunday. The first time she managed a much lighter hit where she barely disturbed the bales at all. Her second crash found her hitting with much more force and she got burried deep in the bales making it all the way to the second line. Each time SDC has crashed it has looked about the same. The buggy comes in a little wide and begins to skid, the driver attempts to correct, but by the time the rear wheels regain traction, the buggy is already facing the inside bales and carries the leftover momentum almost directly into them.
Banshee – After a few issues with vision earlier weekends, Banshee found herself in the bales early Sunday morning. We didn’t have any eyes in the chute at the time so we are unsure how it went down, but based on where she hit, we suspect that she had a similar issue that Rage had. What we can tell from the pictures that we did get, it looks as though she may have spun further around landing in the bales tail first rather than head first like SDC.
Seraph – Seraph didn’t hit the bales this weekend, but did manage to stop about halfway up hill 3. In the past this has been because of the horrible sun angle at that spot, but with heavy cloud cover this was clearly something else. Reports from pushers around the incident claim to have heard some kind of snap and the steering looked to be suffering as she skidded to a stop.
Teams:
AEPi – In an unexpected move, AEPi was out both days this weekend to compete in Mini-Raceday and also join in the roll-around fun. Watching Kamikaze be pushed and cut around the tight corners is somewhat comical as the body rocks back and forth around the single point connection to the front axle. We can only imagine what that feels like as the driver. Also, if the roll counts are correct, Kamikaze can attribute a full 3rd of her rolls of the season to this one morning.
Apex – After her time off a couple weekends ago, Phoenix seems to be rolling alright again, but she was noticeably slower on Sunday. This is probably because of the two newer drivers who took the helm that day and quickly racked up some much needed rolls for the season. By the end of the morning, she seemed to be rolling closer to her old standards again. With so many rolls and not nearly enough pushers to keep it going, Apex managed to convince Sweepstakes to take on their last roll.
CIA – As the big show offs of the weekend, CIA seemed to roll as many buggies as there were teams out on the course. With 5 buggies out on Saturday, they still managed to compete as a top tier team despite the extra effort needed to handle the number. CIA was also one of only a few teams to actually roll all of Sunday, and towards the end of the morning started going one buggy at a time to give their pushers and drivers a break between roll-arounds.
Fringe – Simplifying their weekend, Fringe took things easy on Sunday with a single buggy per roll, which is not unusual for the past champions. Saturday we got to see them flip it around by rolling all 3 buggies as often as possible. Beacon was wrapped all weekend for what we can only expect to be protecting her new paintjob.
PiKA – For a team that we normally look at as one that can dominate the course, we were very surprised to see PiKA not roll like it for Mini-Raceday. Their times were somewhat competitive for both the front hills and freeroll, but what made the difference was their 10 second slower back hills. Raptor was missing all weekend for unknown reasons, likely just due to the driver not being able to make it, but hopefully they take the chance to fix the issues with her hatch popping off every other roll. Banshee’s contact with the inside bales on Sunday ended their morning early, losing out on the chance to get several more rolls.
SDC – As a surprise to everyone, Malice was very noticeably absent from rolls this weekend. Without what is likely their top buggy right now, SDC seemed to ignore most of Mini-raceday focusing instead on trying to fix their string of season-long issues in the chute. With the Malice driver reportedly being a proper senior this weekend, and Rage’s crash on sunday, Vice was left as the only buggy racking up more than double the number of rolls.
SigEp – With a very sparse showing all season, SigEp seemed to put all their effort into mini-raceday. Like AEPi did with Kamikaze, SigEp managed to end the weekend with a 3rd of their rolls happening just this weekend on Mini-Raceday. What was a little more exciting for those of us around the course was the chance to see Kraken out for the first time this season.
Spirit – Showing that they’re not someone to forget about, Spirit managed to put up impressive times tieing SigEp for the top Front hills times, and also tieing Fringe for the top Freeroll and overall times. Unfortunately, they haven’t been able to make as big a showing buggywise recently and with their incident on Sunday, left early to hopefully make some repairs.- Robobuggy – Coming out on Saturday only this weekend, Robobuggy managed to avoid the nice weather choosing to instead maybe compete on Mini-Raceday. Unfortunately no times were recorded for the pre-sunrise team, which at this point would be really interesting to see some comparisons. We know they might not be competitive, but for the experiment that it is and the effort we have seen, we would love to see how they’ve been progressing.
Course Sightings:
Aside from the Cement trucks running through the course on Saturday, There was a strange stand-in bale sighted at the end of the inside line. We weren’t totally sure what it could be just by looking at it. It looked to be a large stack of leaves in bags taped together and strapped to a wheeled platform. The purpose of this contraption is much more questionable. Some people speculate that it’s some kind of mold experiment with each bag being a different test. Others speculate (probably much more accurately), that it’s part of a prop used for someone’s Halloween set up from the previous weekend.
Zatch says:
Nice to see such a strong showing by CIA.
McCue says:
Interesting to hear about how mini raceday is being run (and has for the past few years) — apparently it’s pretty different than the mini-raceday method I remember from years back.
AFAIK, currently synced stopwatches are used to record front hills, the h2-h3 time, and the backhills all separately. Beer is given for the fastest freeroll, full course time, and backhills (I think).
Back ~10 years ago, a single stopwatch was used to record the fastest buggy in a given team’s roll from Hill 2 through the finish line, and the time was posted on a board at the top of hill 2. This has a couple advantages in that it feels like raceday. People get more into it, times don’t have to be computed after the fact and with a delay, and they can walk away with their beer.
Mini raceday used to be a pretty big deal and I think part of that was the immediate feedback. I’m not one to argue with however anyone wants to do it and it’s clearly being executed well regardless, but personally I like the historic method a little better.
Aubrey says:
I’m totally in agreement. Even in my years at CMU I’ve noticed mini raceday become less and less of a big deal and I think thats a shame. This year was definitely an improvement over recent years (correct me if I’m wrong, I don’t think mini raceday day even happened last year?) but I agree that we’ve definitely moved away from what it has been in the past.
I would love if we moved back to a mini raceday similar to that of what McCue is talking about. It would encourage participation, eliminate the number juggling and error we’re introducing with four separate stopwatches (and there being a confusing/excessive amount of metrics/winners/beer), and also make it a ton easier on sweepstakes. There’s a lot to be said for everyone engaging in the event the day of, and that would absolutely be helped by having immediate feedback and a sense of everyone’s relative performance. I know that a ton of our conversations that day were newer pushers excitedly asking how the day was going for us and other teams. Its a bummer to just not have any idea.
Related: I doubt it was a coincidence that Malice didn’t make it out on Saturday. I’m betting the surprising (lack of?) times of some top teams aren’t indicative of performance, but rather not wanting to show their cards for/participate in mini raceday, which is also a bummer.
None of this is to say the day wasn’t really great. Sweepstakes did an amazing job of organizing the whole thing and it ran super smoothly!
He doesn't even go here says:
Malice wasn’t out because her driver wasn’t able to roll this weekend, per SDC pushers on the back hills.
Aubrey says:
Haha alright the tin foil hat may have been premature. Forgetting Malice, a lot of those times are still quite out of character for a couple teams
chayes says:
SDC and Pike Training New Drivers, Sig Ep waiting till closer to raceday to go fast could maybe explain?
Rachael says:
It would be awesome to get a reminder of which team the buggy belongs to in the “incidents” section, for people who don’t have the roster memorized.
anon says:
You can see which team the buggies belong to if you just looked at the “in attendance” section.
DAConley says:
For us older folk…can somone please advise with this ‘mini-raceday’ thing began? This wasn’t around when I was in school but the winning of beer could be very motivating, provided what it takes to coordinate the event doesn’t detract from execution of rolls themselves. Seems there is too much time (spacing) between orgs both ‘over the hill’ and ‘between buggies’ these days.
the Pope says:
mini race day did not happen in my era either (1981- 1992). However, it was already a ‘thing’ when cmu buggy.org began reporting on such things.
mldarm says:
I believe mini-raceday started while I was on the committee, in 2000, but maybe it was 2001. It started pretty low-key and fun, not super competitive like it probably got for a few years in there.