This past weekend marked the end of rolls for the fall semester. Frosty nights and finals mean that buggies settle in for their winter naps and the elves come out to finish builds in time for the spring semester. Although the previous weekend saw every team out, far fewer were came out this weekend. On Sunday, only 4 teams committed to rolling and Sweepstakes canceled rolls.

In Attendance 

Observations (Saturday Gallery)

SDC and PiKA continue to be the fastest teams on the freeroll. PiKA’s chute turn involved some skidding which took away the advantage they had in the previous weeks. Consequently, SDC was the fastest overall team rolling this weekend. Spirit has been making steady progress all semester and is clearly on the rise. They outperformed their efforts on Mini Raceday despite the colder temperatures. It should be fun to see what they can do in the spring. CIA maintained their consistent status of being one of the fastest teams out, but definitely performed 4th best this weekend.

Although we have fewer details per team, a few alumni were out with timers and cameras again to get a more empirical measure of buggy performance. This weekend they tried one location between Hill 2 and the Westinghouse Pond (A), which wasn’t ideal. They tried a nearby location as well (B), but that wasn’t much better. In the table below the first two columns represent the raw time in 40ths of a second for each location. In the third column is the raw time between the haybale pile and Scaife. This seemed to work well for getting the data. Unfortunately, the alums couldn’t get good measurements for the distance between the trees used as markers, so we are unable to convert to absolute speeds. For comparisons’ sake, the last two columns are “percentage slower than the fastest. As an example, PiKA’s pushoff is 4% behind SDC A’s.

Relative Speeds 

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Timing/Analysis brought to you by:
Shafeeq
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You might have noticed that the density of the information in the rolls reports varies  from week to week. This is because this semester we tried to do the rolls reporting a little differently. Instead of one overly-involved alum trekking out to every weekend of rolls to take notes for the rolls report, we solicited our Pittsburgh alumni to attend rolls and send in their notes and observations. I then compile the notes and turn them into the report. The system needs some tweaking, but it’s made for more diverse input on how the teams are doing and prevents the rolls report from becoming a burden.With that in mind, if you are an alumni or a student and go to rolls and want to contribute to the rolls report, we would love to hear from you. Send the BAA an email if you want to get reminders about rolls or be occasionally pestered to send in notes.

Have a great holiday season from the BAA!