It’s spring break, and the kids are in Acapulco so there were no rolls this weekend, and there will be none next weekend. Bad timing too, because it was 55F here at 7am yesterday. Would have been a nice one.
We’ll pick up with the pictures, reports and hopefully some timing on March 21.
Today marks six weeks from Design Comp 2009, and that’s right about when the weather starts to hint at getting nicer and that buggy itch starts to really get to you. So to help everyone in the buggy world get through these long weeks, we’re going to take you on a tour of racedays past.
Each Thursday from now until Design Comp, we’ll post the buggy book from one of the last 5 men’s course-record-breaking years. On Raceday, the Buggy Alumni Association will be distributing DVDs with high quality PDFs of every buggy book ever printed for a modest fund-raising price yet to be determined.
Without further ado, we bring you
Buggy Book 1981
In 1981, Carnival weekend was completely rained out, and the races were finally held on the Sunday after Carnival. CIA’s track athletes powered the sleek, four-wheeled Black Magic to victory, smashing the record by nearly 5 seconds with a time of 2:10.50, and earning the first win by an independent. The Zoo came in second with a 2:14.2, and PiKA A spun out, leaving their B team to third with a 2:18.5.
Comments and conversation about buggy books or 1981 in general in the forum
After holding off on the semester of rolls for two weeks because of lower-than-desired temperatures, sweepstakes gave it a try on Saturday at 27 degrees and things worked out just fine. Sunday was forecast to be colder so they canceled again, although it turned out to be dry and 29 degrees at 7am.
In attendance
PiKA – Zeus, Knightfall, Chimera
Pioneers – Chaos
KDR – Powder, Perun
SigEp – Pandora
PhiKap – Svengali
SDC – Rage, Addiction, Psychosis, and Raceday09
Fringe – Brazen, Blizzard, Banyan, and NewBuggy09
CIA – Mirage, Firebird
Spirit – Haraka, Seraph Continue reading
Sweepstakes is gearing up for another try at the first weekend of rolls, last week’s being thwarted by colder than desired temperatures. So far, things aren’t looking too optimistic. Last week, the 7am temperatures were 27 and 24 F which was cold enough to cancel things. This weekend the 7am forecasts are 20 and 20 F. Don’t worry, there is still plenty of time to improve on last year’s record-settingly late first day of rolls, March 23rd.
Update : Rolls are officially canceled for Saturday Feb 20th. Too cold!
Update : Rolls are officially canceled for Sunday Feb 21st. Too cold and snowy.
On the bright side, getting started a bit later probably gives teams more uninterrupted time to finish working on the new class of 2009 buggies. So while we bide our time, lets think about what we’re likely to see on the course this year (in order of finishes in last year’s men’s races). Continue reading
The sweepstakes chair Andrew Hundt sent out an announcement about the spring’s first sweepstakes meeting being held tonight, and he included a pretty hefty collection or proposed rule changes that will be discussed.
The 6 most pertinent changes are:
It sounds in general like sweepstakes is really putting some thought into how best to prevent and respond to the accidents that are serious enough to injure the driver. Can’t argue with that in general.
Having double bales for every day of rolls sounds like a lot of extra work. How about double bales in the high risk areas and fewer bales in those places where nobody every crashes (i.e. 100 yards past the apex on the outside of the turn)?
Check out the thread I started in the forum here if you have any opinions about the proposed rules you’d like to share.
A full change-by-change document is available here.
If you haven’t already gotten it in the mail, check out Carnegie Mellon Today’s article on Tom Wood and the Buggy Alumni Association.
Tom provided the Buggy Alumni Association with about 75% of the data we’ve gathered to date in our history database, so we are very glad to have him around.
Happy New Year to everyone, and happy first day of class (aka when classes start to interfere with the build season) to all the current students.
Fall rolls 2008 came to a cold and boring end with a pair of cancellations and no mini-raceday for the men’s teams. I know I usually call the current kids wimps for canceling because of cold, but it was 16 degrees, windy, and icy this morning. Fair enough.
Some end of the semester stats :
Alex Keene was kind enough to share some of the footage SDC has been collecting from their on-board camera in the last couple of weeks. I’ve never seen video from this perspective, and I think it’s a really cool little thing to do during fall rolls.
(the action doesn’t start until 1:30 in the video)
Fall Rolls 2008 from seymour glass on Vimeo.
So once all us buggy folks appreciate the footage for it’s novelty, we’re left to ask, what is SDC collecting this footage for?
No matter what the intention, thanks for sharing SDC.
Rolls will be Sunday-only this weekend in observance of Halloween parties. Saturday is the better day to miss for the weekend because Sunday is the first day without Daylight Savings time which robs us of an hour of rolls each morning. So don’t forget to set your clock back, and then also set it to wake up earlier. Roads close at 6:20, first roll will be Spirit at 6:40.
Now that everyone has had time to travel home and get back to reality, we wanted to thank everyone who came and made the Buggy Alumni Association’s kickoff weekend a really big success. It definitely felt more like carnival than homecoming seeing so many buggy folks around campus. We’ve only officially existed for a couple of months, and I think we’ve got a lot of momentum. Some stats to make the point:
So check out the pictures from Homecoming and let us know in the forums what you’d like to see happen at Carnival. We can’t wait to see everyone back again.
