At the most recent Chairmen’s meeting, next year’s Sweepstakes committee was elected. Congratulations to the new committee!

Chair: Rebecca Dettmar (Fringe)
Ass. Chair: Jasmine Zeng (Spirit)
Safety Chair: Julia “Jazz” Liu (CIA)

The chairmen also voted on a number of rules changes, pending advisor approval. Some of them are simple improvements to wording, or updates to bring the rules up-to-date with current practices. Others are bigger changes to driver qualification requirements and disqualification penalties. We will post the fully updated rules document on our website as soon as it is available. For now, here’s a changelog for your perusal.

Rule Changes

Capes and Rolls

• Capes location clarified
• Robotic buggies added to language for capes and drops
• Drops location formalized as being on the road, rather than the sidewalk, in line with current practice
• New driver follow car observation ride requirement elaborated
• Fall carryover rolls increased slightly for drivers with a large number of fall rolls
• Veteran drivers may now complete their pass test for the year in the fall, after completing 8 rolls
• Drivers must now complete their spring rolls requirements across a minimum of two days, one of which must not be during truck weekend

Sweepstakes

• Added several appointed Sweepstakes roles to spread the workload— Finance, Assistant Safety, and Mechanical Safety
• Operations Chair added as an elected role
• MarComm renamed to Events & Broadcast Chair

Raceday

• Start line is now described in reference to buildings other than the late Skibo Gym
• King/Queen/Monarch of the Hill methodology and criteria formalized
• Number of teams in women’s finals increased to 10 to match current practice
• Reroll requirements updated to reflect current practices, specifically allowing rerolls when a driver stops due to a valid safety concern

DQs

The following infractions are now enforced with 6-second time penalties, rather than DQs:

• 5-second violations, where the buggy is at the line at the count of “5,” and any offenders are gone by “Ready”
• Lane violations of one full wheel, but not the full buggy
• False starts not deemed intentional or excessive (time penalty is 6 seconds, plus the amount of time early that the buggy started). Other entries in the heat may get a reroll.
• Transition violations of one foot but not both feet
• Pacing violations

Any other violations, including interference arising from any of the above violations, are still DQs, and many have been reworded to indicate this. In addition:

• Three time penalties on an entry in a heat result in a DQ.
• Time penalties are counted in finals seeding, but not future year seeding.
• Time penalties do not carry forward. They only affect the result of the heat in which they’re incurred.

At long last, we have finished the 2025 races! While they were a week late and far from ordinary, the men’s and women’s races were a unique and special occasion. Congratulations to all the teams for simply making it this far and making it around the course, and of course, congratulations to this year’s victors, CIA and SDC.

I would like to extend my most heartfelt gratitude to all the BAA members, CMU staff, students, and other friends and alumni who came together at the last minute to make this production possible. With less than a week’s notice, at least fifty-five different volunteers signed up, showed up, stepped up to make these races happen. I get teary-eyed just thinking about it. Really and truly, thank you all.

If you’ve been following along, you saw and heard our makeshift broadcast over the weekend. What you may not know is that we had over a dozen video cameras recording around the course for the entirety of this weekend’s races. Over the coming months, we will be editing this footage into full coverage of every heat that was run. If you are interested in helping with this sizeable project, please reach out to a BAA Officer.

Early next month, look out for news about BAA elections. But for now, most of us need a post-raceday nap. Once again, thank you all for your continued support.

At long last, the BAA Executive Board has finally formalized and organized its rules, practices, and standards into a formal document, the Bylaws of the Carnegie Mellon Buggy Alumni Association. The document primarily describes how we’ve already been doing business for years, but now, future BAA Officers, Committee Chairs, and members will have something concrete to reference. They are, by design, easy for the Executive Board to change and update, as they are a living document meant to reflect the actual practices of the BAA at a given time. They serve to fill in the spaces around the framework provided by our Constitution. Thank you to the Executive Board for your contributions, and for the hearty and respectful debates and discussions that led us to a unanimous approval of the final draft.

If you’ve made it this far, and you don’t have one yet, please remember to buy a Raceday shirt while you still can! We also need more Raceday volunteers, both in general and for the broadcast. Thank you for your help and support.

UPDATE: The BAA Officers have nominated Cynthia Xu as Comms Chair. If there are no additional nominations by November 5, she will be automatically elected as per our Vacancy rules.

We currently have a vacancy at the position of Communications Chair. Would you or any of your friends like to run the BAA’s social media pages, coordinate posts for the website, and handle communications and newsletters for the BAA membership? If so, please nominate yourself or someone else here. This position is a two-year term through Spring 2026.

If you might be interested but have questions about the role, feel free to reach out to me or our previous Comms Chair, Dave Singh.