Posted on | by Sam Swift

Saturday was rained out and mercifully cancelled before 8pm Friday night, leaving time for other plans.

Sunday was just one of those days.  Some hold-up with the police and the outer barricades meant things didn’t get started until 7:40 or so.  From then on, the same teams and buggies that rolled super efficiently last week dragged through the roll order.  JB owes me “big money” on a bet that they would make it through the roll order a second time.  They were 6 orgs short.

In Attendance … Orgs (11) :  DTD, Pioneers, Spirit, SigNu, PhiKap, SDC, PiKA, Fringe, CIA, AEPi, SigEp
and the usual assortment of buggies

Observations (full gallery here)
  • PhiKap got the racing season started with an attempted pass between the stop sign and the monument.  Shaddy and Svengali left hill 2 closely spaced, and by the time they passed the stop sign the gap was gone.  Rather than tap the breaks and let her teammate win the heat, the trailing driver went for the pass like a champ.  Only problem was she cut it too close and instead of a pass they got a spin and a two stopped buggies.  Now that’s racing.
  • SigNu ended up stuck along the same curb that PiKA did last week on hill 3.
  • AEPi’s driver’s goggles fogged up and left her blinded as she entered the chute.  Apparently the brakes weren’t working well enough to stop her, so she started hollering “Help!” from inside the moving buggy.  Somehow that turned out to be the right thing to do.  Someone jumped over the bales and grabbed the pushbar and brought her to a safe stop.  Maybe that should be an acceptable form of braking during capes and drops as well.
  • PiKA didn’t bring Cyclone back out, but they did role both Nemesis and Chimera together which may not have happened so far this year. Cyclone only rolled once last week, so I would hope we’d see it again. Cleaning up and caping a buggy that old is a lot of work for 1 roll, although this is the team that has retired buggies after a couple of days of rolls.
  • SDC had the Flip video camera back out on Envy. Perhaps they’d like to share a video again with us this fall? Not to be picky, but a forward facing view would be great.

22 thoughts on “Rolls Report 10/11”

  • Alex says:

    Not that PhiKap shouldn’t know their own buggies, but I’ve been hearing that sweepstakes has really been pushing roll efficiency past the point of safety. Quick rolls are all fine and good, until someone is told to send buggies faster and you end up with a crash. Hopefully everyone calms down on efficiency because I doubt someone’s trying to get a pass test in this early (since they don’t even count in the fall).

  • swiftsam says:

    Good point, and I hope I haven’t encouraged any recklessness by calculating and posting rolls efficiency stats.

    I think you can differentiate though between the time between buggies and the time between orgs. Sweepstakes has a role in making sure each org is ready to go when the chute is clear of the org before them. I would think that it’s the orgs that are responsible for spacing their buggies within their turn. From what I’ve seen the emphasis has been appropriately on the former. I think there’s traditionally more time lost in those between-org gaps so it’s the one to try and be efficient about.

  • Alex says:

    I completely agree Sam, but at the same time, even when I was at CMU, sweepstakes would often push orgs to keep their buggies close together. Granted, SDC was sometimes slow between buggies, but we usually have a reason (the slow new girl goes first, so we don’t send the fast A teamer right after her). What I’ve heard about this year is that orgs have been pushed not just to be ready at the line, but to send their buggies quick.

    Not to knock Phikap but they are not the most dedicated team (one entry last year?) and so I think it would behoove sweepstakes to take safety into concern over pushing some guys who probably don’t know much better to roll their second buggy quickly.

  • Sam Swift says:

    “the slow new girl goes first, so we don’t send the fast A teamer right after her”

    that’s why I always sent my buggies down in descending order of speed

  • Shafeeq says:

    The rules say you can have at most 30 seconds between each of your team’s buggies. Seems pretty reasonable to me – if you have enough people to run 2 teams, how hard can it be for the 2nd hill 2 to remember to count to 30? I suppose it is one of those things PhiKap might not have thought of if they’ve only had a single buggy in recent years.

    I have to agree with Sam here – in addition to keeping the spacing, if a new driver crashes, well, that happens occasionally and there’s only so much you can do to prevent it, but why place the following driver at risk too?

  • jess thurston says:

    Just to clarify, we have been ensuring that there is a smaller gap of time between orgs, but have been leaving it up to teams to control the timing between each of their buggies (other than asking one organization, which was not PhiKap, to not leave particularly long gaps of time between their buggies).

    With that clarification in mind, we’re happy to hear any suggestions or ideas to keep things even safer and more efficient.

  • Carleton says:

    I don’t know if they changed things the year Keene was here after I graduated, but when I was followcar, I remember that we almost always sent the new girls last (at least in the fall).

  • mccue says:

    I think we are all losing sight of the important issue here, which is that an anonymous person on the internet said I was taking retard pills :(

  • Alex says:

    Re: descending order. It does make sense sometimes (and SDC did that sometimes, Drew’s right), but also sometimes you want to send the slow girl first and the fast girl last because then in the event of a crash your experienced girl is the one that might have to do the braking, not the slow/inexperienced girl.

  • vincent says:

    I’ve never considered sending the new driver first because the old driver has a better chance at stopping the buggy safely; I considered making sure all of my drivers know how to stop their buggies safely before I send them down the hill. I usually sent the least experienced driver last so the followcar could keep an eye on her line, and if the newer driver messes up and crashes or has to stop, at least it doesn’t waste the roll for the other drivers.

    It honestly doesn’t make sense why you’d send a faster buggy after a slower one unless you know their speeds really well and can space them appropriately. In this case, it seems like Phikap didn’t realize what would happen if you sent two buggies down on each others’ heels; I think that’s the sort of situation where sweepstakes should step in and make the second buggy wait a few more seconds.

  • abordick says:

    Yeah, I agree with Carl. I would sometimes send the slow girls down first, wait a good long time, then send our fastest girl last to watch the line at high speed. I don’t really care about my women’s B team driver, I mean, it’s WOMEN’S! :)

  • Carl says:

    Plus sometimes you’ve half-unloaded your fastest driver so she can have a cigarette while hanging out of the buggy.

  • vincent says:

    I also show my drivers what a stop flag looks like. If someone can’t recognize a yellow square with a black X on it, they are probably not fit to survive in society.

  • Carleton says:

    Not something I can necessarily disagree with, yet empirically, we know that more than few drivers have not stopped, or done something equally foolish upon encountering a stop flag.

  • Penguin says:

    In the fall with new drivers i had a situation where i had two of them. I made sure the 1st would clear the chute before i sent the 2nd one. The extra 30 seconds is not nearly as important as safety is.

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