This is a jammed-packed rolls report with only Truck Weekend between us and Raceday. No further intro needed!
One of several closer-than-you-want pass tests this weekend
| Org | Saturday | Sunday |
| Apex | Firefly, Helios, Molotov, Scorch | Firefly, Helios, Molotov, Scorch |
| Atlas | Monaco | |
| CIA | Roadrunner, Emperor, Kingfisher, Goldfinch, Starling | Roadrunner, Emperor, Kingfisher, Goldfinch, Starling |
| DG | Insite | — |
| Fringe | Burnout, Baltic, Blueshift, NB2025 | Burnout, Blueshift |
| PiKA | Raptor | Raptor |
| Robobuggy | Short Circuit, NAND | Short Circuit, NAND |
| SAE | Barbie | Barbie |
| SDC | Bane, Lust, Paranoia | Avarice, Bane, Lust, Paranoia |
| SigEp | Hydra, Barracuda, Kraken | Hydra, Barracuda, Kraken |
| SigNu | Bungarus Krait | Jager |
| Spirit | Inviscid, Mapambazuko, Seraph, Kingpin | Inviscid, Mapambazuko, Seraph, Kingpin |
Bold = New Buggy 2025
Green = Qualified for RD2025 w/ at least 1 driver
Photos: Saturday Gallery (upload) Sunday Gallery (upload)
General Observations:
- With so few days of rolls this spring, the teams brought their A game this weekend to get as many rolls in as possible. Several teams banded together to share their roll slots to make the most efficient use of time. This also led to a couple confusing rolls or close calls. We had many pass tests this weekend, with a few leading to various issues:
- Emperor passed Kingfisher on one roll, then they tried the opposite, and Kingfisher took a little longer to catch up, and passed Emperor in the chute turn! The next roll they tried again, with her passing just before the chute flag.
- Molotov or Solaris during a pass test slowed down to the point of a stop, and caused some confusion and a pause on rolls.
- Blueshift, participating in another orgs rolls, was not given a chute flag, and kept going straight before braking lightly before the chute barricades.
- Not a planned pass test, but Raptor almost caught Avarice in the chute; both made it through cleanly.
- A bagged Hydra was passed by Kraken and came to a full stop mid-chute, with a pusher sprinting back to grab it.
- A Spirit pass happened late near the monument, leading to a tight formation entering the chute.
The rolls board shows how teams were banding together
- The weather cooperated this weekend. A rainy forecast on Saturday held off just enough, with the drops starting to fall at 9:20. Sunday started very cold, in the upper 20s, but the teams came out to roll, and it ended up being a sunny and productive day.
Apex pass test in progress, right where you want it to happen!
- Many teams were working on building speed and fine-tuning lines for Raceday. Hill 1s were happening most rolls. Apex, CIA, and SigNu are all fully qualified. I’ve done my best to highlight the status of all the other orgs as well below. Corrections are welcome.
With all the Hill 1s, Sweeps created Lane “0” for buggies to go back down the hill safely
Team Observations:
- Apex. Apex has qualified all 4 buggies for Raceday. Notably, Helios was driving fairly erratically on Saturday, with some sharp turns and wobbles, but made it through the chute OK each time. Sunday she was looking better.
Helios, now with primer!
- Atlas. They rolled early with the robots. We didn’t hear much of note, so we file this in the “no news is good news” category.
Monaco Sneaking into the frame
- CIA. CIA rolled with SigNu both days leading to fully qualifying all 5 buggies for Raceday. Otherwise it was a quiet week, good driving and good pushers certainly makes it look like they will contend again this year. The only incident to report (aside from the pass test shenanigans) is one of their buggies lost a sensor or camera in the chute, but the wire was still attached, leading to it bouncing along for most of Hill 3 before being scooped up.
Emperor waits to help on a pass test
- DG. DG was only out on Saturday this weekend, which is a little surprising given they need a significant number of rolls if they want to qualify their two drivers. Their veteran driver seems safe, needing only two more rolls. Their new driver still needs 7 more rolls and a pass test, which may be a tall order. Still, when they are out, Insite rolls quite quickly given the age of that buggy.
Insite
- Fringe. Fringe has Burnout qualified for Raceday, with their other 4 buggies needing 4 or less rolls each, and Blueshift still needing a pass test. They were out in force on Saturday, but maybe the cold kept them limited Sunday, with a much lighter turnout. To illustrate how busy the roads were, at one point Sunday, Helios was pushed by Fringe on Hill 3, the pure white primer of Helios being confused for Blueshift or NB2025. Do we need to change its name to Belios now?
NB2025
- PiKA. Pike shared the course with SDC on both days of rolls. Raptor was still sporting bags for much of the weekend, but picked up speed by the end of Sunday. Their driver needs 3 more rolls and a pass test to qualify.
Raptor
- Robobuggy. Out both days in the early light. We heard they may have had a small loss of mass on the freeroll. NAND didn’t travel all the way around, but Short Circuit went around the course twice without issues.
Preparing for a good push
- SAE. Barbie accrued 10 rolls this weekend by sharing time with SigEp and maybe some other orgs too- we were losing track in the chute. They are now just 2 rolls shy of qualifying.
Is that a Sweeps chair pushing Barbie?
- SDC. SDC, by sharing time with Pike, qualified 3 of their 4 buggies. Only Avarice still needs qualified, and she is just missing a pass test. They were clearly the fastest heading into the chute out of all the orgs this weekend. They also had a gnarly incident where a fairing came off of Paranoia at the end of the chute, and was shredded under the wheel. An SDC pusher came to grab it from the alumni in the chute, quipping “I promise I’m an SDC pusher and not a Pike mechanic!”
Paranoia, with some orange wheels
- SigEp. Sig Ep shared time with SAE getting Baracuda qualified with a veteran driver, despite not rolling in the fall at all. They still need rolls for Hydra (2) and Kraken (8?). They had one of the more concerning incidents, as they helped SAE with a pass test, no bags were placed on Hydra (or they flew off), leading to a very late pass in the vicinity of the chute turn. They made it through fine, as you can see in the photo here.
Barbie passed Hydra just before this picture
- SigNu. SigNu is fully qualified for Raceday with a weekend to spare. Both Krait and Jaeger rolled mostly cleanly and with some solid speed. Jaeger took a few wide lines and approached the outer bales, but got through each time.
Jaeger Hill 2
- Spirit. Spirit qualified Zuke, Kingpin and Seraph this weekend, with Inviscid needing only a pass test and a second Zuke driver needing 3 more rolls. They had the most noticeable incident of the weekend, with Inviscid spinning a full 180 in the chute and tapping the inner haybales. EMS quickly cleared the driver who was extracted, and they rolled later in the day without issues.
The Spirit fleet on Hill 2
Truck weekend is next week! Sign up to help us time rolls and/or take photos here! That sheet also has links to upload photos (updated every week). Let us know if you do so we can give you credit (DM Barsham or data at cmubuggy dot org).
Thanks to Guillermo, Rob, and Elena for contributions to the report this week. Send any notes or corrections to me at danbecerra at cmubuggy dot org.
Thomas Felmley says:
Wow. I am not sure the conributers above and I were at the same event. This weekend was truly a precedent-stretching cluster___.
Fortunately, during the Monday Chairs’ meeting, Sweepstakes has now limited roll sharing for the rest of the season to drivers who need 4 or more rolls to qualify.
Seeing teams roll their WHOLE FLEET – four buggies – with another team in the roll order was just an astounding abuse of past practice.
And it was no “victimless crime” – Rolls started both days a little after 7. So there was less than two hours of time. When other teams have one time around per roll order, lets give an ENTIRE TEAM, including QUALIFIED drivers, TWO rolls. By the end, every team had to buddy up to get their fair share.
Oh, and let’s also have a 3-way share. let’s put TWO other teams in a team’s roll. This way we can be sure the flaggers are all confused and chaos reigns. BTW, Fringe’s “gentle stop” was way too close to the bridge barricades.
Let’s hope the next review of the rules addresses this more clearly.
McCue says:
What rule changes would you suggest?
Felmley says:
Well, a quick scan of the rules (26 MAR 24 seems to be most recent published edition) shows NO mention of sharing a freeroll. That is why I said precedent and past practice.
I am all for a team helping out another team, but this was really extreme. And it was not something from the end of Section 9.2.5: “Changes to this rolling order procedure may be made for individual freeroll practices at the discretion of the Sweepstakes Chairman with the approval of the Sweepstakes Committee.”
It ended up a Tragedy of the Commons, where a common courtesy was taken to the nth degree and the whole freeroll system, with a listed and approved Roll Order, collapsed. You could write a paper on this.
Changes: either the practice of roll sharing needs to be disallowed, a pity, or regulated. “One team may roll one other buggy in one other team’s roll, during one(?) freeroll per season, solely to help qualify that buggy/driver combo. The Sweepstakes Chair is to be notified prior to the start of that day’s freeroll in person by the chairs of both the teams. Team chairs to clarify to Sweepstakes how their respective teams have been notified of this situation and how they will manage over the course of the day. All other teams to be notified of this arrangement. Only X teams may do this per freeroll day.” Or some such. OR does this go in the “Big Book of No-Nos,” I assume (hope) each Sweeps Chair hands the next?
Many concessions had already been made because of the short spring season. Yet this was both desperation and manipulation. And it came to an end, but the rule passed (decreed, not sure) was only worded for this season. Doing nothing, unfortunately, allows raging roll sharing to become the new precedent and allows the unprepared to squeak in (unsafe) or the shameless to take advantage of the time (unfair).
Shafeeq S says:
Combining 3-4 single-buggy teams into one “roll” or tacking them on to the end of another team seems sensible because it saves time not waiting for each single buggy and follow car to clear the course completely vs sending buggy, buggy, buggy, follow car, wait. However it’s confusing for the flaggers who don’t know which team’s buggy is coming in what order within that roll. And if there’s an incident, 3 teams have to deal with their buggies scattered around the course, which takes 3 times longer to clean up.
“Everybody goes twice” just makes the order take twice as long, and everyone ends up in the same place.
Once relaxing the roll count requirement was on the table, why cause chaos while trying to hit an arbitarary target? Just run the normal order everyone understands and lower the requirements if it turns out to be impossible for most of the field to meet them.
Barsham says:
But why? What’s the problem you’re trying to solve for? Admittedly, I wasn’t there, but from the first photo in this report, it seems like it was well scheduled as to which orgs were rolling together. To me, having two teams pair up in both of their slots seems like a great way to get more rolls in, because it means the roll order is essentially only 5 teams long, rather than 10 – so each team is rolling every 20 minutes instead of every 40 minutes.
Also, while I appreciate the scare tactics that come from writing “WHOLE FLEET” in all caps, in reality the pairings seem to be an org with 1 buggy rolling with an org with multiple buggies. So it’s really just tacking one extra buggy on to the larger org’s fleet. Also, based on the photos, it doesn’t look like there was ever more than 5 buggies rolling in a single slot – even that Apex/Fringe/Spirit one. So it’s not even like a situation of “this slot had too many buggies and slowed things down!” issue… CIA and Fringe have each rolled 5 buggies by themselves on single days this year
The “flagger confusion” also seems a bit disingenuous. For years now, teams have been sharing flaggers at Rolls. It’s pretty easy to just tell your flaggers “FYI, you flag from when the first buggy approaches until you see the follow car”.
The change Sweeps made for truck weekend, to limit it just to buggies needing to qualify, makes sense because that should be given a priority. But the weekend before truck, EVERYONE still needed to qualify, and changing mid-day to go from “these 2 teams are rolling together – see the whiteboard” to suddenly and arbitrarily “these teams aren’t rolling together” seems like it would create MORE chaos, not less.
But also, who cares? If students want to pair up, let them pair up. If they don’t, they don’t have to. It’s been a long time practice – just think of the years a SigNu or an SAE basically did roll-arounds, pairing with whichever team was up at that moment to roll so they could come out on Truck Weekend, get 15 rolls in, and qualify.