• Apex — Apex had a fairly smooth weekend, running a 3-deep roster alongside their new buggy debut. The only hiccup came from a pesky pedestrian — with the transition flagger throwing a stop flag before the situation could escalate. Impressive how buggies are easier to control than pedestrians. Other than that, Apex had a clean couple of rolls.

• CIA — Usually when doing a pass test, you only keep one buggy bagged. During an unintentional pass, we got to see a double-bagged pass in the chute that was very reminiscent of the CIA/Fringe pass in the chute from 2025. Aside from this, CIA had a relatively uneventful weekend, rolling well both days.

• DG — Plenty of excitement abound, with DG bringing out their new buggy, Banta. They very confidently shoved off from Hill 2 for its first roll around the course, and I’m happy to report we saw no trouble on its first weekend out! They also got to make the jump from being a single buggy team, to running 2 buggies with Insite out on Sunday. Insite needed a bit of a Hill 2.5 bump after getting slowed by its first bagged roll, but recovered throughout the morning as it shed bags.

• Fringe — We only got to see Fringe’s new buggy out on Saturday this week, so we aren’t able to make super confident statements about how fast it’ll look without bags. They brought out Blackbird and Bermuda on both Saturday and Sunday, and got in a pass test.

• PiKA — PiKA’s pushers on the backhills seemed a bit disorganized. I hear they were missing their Hill 3 pickup on the first roll of the weekend. Neither of their Hill 4 to 5 transitions I watched were really transitions, with their Hill 4 either shoving off way after or way before the transition zone. However, Raptor showed good speed coming through the chute and rolling up Hill 3. Hopefully with push practice starting this week, their pushers will figure out how to properly hand off before Raceday.

• Robobuggy — We saw Robobuggy bring out both NAND and Short Circuit to the course this week. This week, they had NAND fully dressed up with its top shell and LEDs. While it took them a while to fully get up to speed, by the end of Sunday they were coming through the chute at a respectable pace.

• SDC — This weekend was certainly a mixed bag for SDC. On one hand, you had Paranoia looking quick across the course, with their pushers clearly running hard. On the other, they struggled getting Avarice and Vice around the course. Both came to controlled stops for fogging/vision related issues. And in the one roll where things were looking promising for their new drivers, Lust’s hatch came unsecured at the end of the chute, forcing them to stop Vice midway through the freeroll.

• SigEp — We saw SigEp out only on Saturday this weekend, rolling Barracuda. Cuda had a smooth day, and their pushers were looking fairly quick as well. They should need just one more day on the course in order to get their driver qualified.

• SigNu — It was our first time seeing SigNu back this year, bringing out Jaeger. Here we see the return from a “Technically New” driver, with them having raced back in 2023. Either way, they looked fairly comfortable getting back up to speed over this weekend.

• Spirit — Sunday, we saw our first proper accident of the year with Zuke taking a spin in the chute and bumping the inner haybales. Their driver is ok, and we’ll see next week whether they try to change their line to avoid getting into spin territory again. Aside from that, we also saw clean rolls from both Inviscid and Seraph this weekend.

Kerosene

Apex has now debuted their 10th buggy — sporting some very fashionable wild west capybara wrapping paper. While I heard some murmurings that it was not wrapped well and falling off at the butt, I am much more confident that their carbon wraps went much better.

Banta

We’re told that the name for Banta comes from George Banta, an influential figure in the founding of DG (also conveniently could be a portmanteau of Katy Zapanta and Sophia Battaglia’s last names, prominent pioneers of DG’s buggy program)

We at the BAA are very excited to see Banta out on the course, as it would be the first sorority-built buggy to complete the course on Raceday!

“Borse”*

Borse is not the official name of Fringe’s new buggy. Please do not use this name during the broadcast on Raceday. The philosophical question posed to the buggy community writ large is, who would win a triathlon — you or a horse? I think my answer is contingent on finding a horse-sized bike. Feel free to debate in the comments, or over on Discord.