I hope the rolls report faithful weren’t too distraught today given the lack of rolls report following an exciting truck weekend. As you may remember, after truck weekend the large and well compensated BAA staffers spend the night producing an in depth and comprehensive report for our generous supporters: the Members-Only Raceday Preview. Lucky for you, there’s still time to become a member or renew your membership via our new and improved membership page. Starting this year, there is no set or minimum contribution to become an official member. If you’re willing to throw something in the pot, you’re on the team.
The preview has just gone out to members, and it’s about 100x better than what compubookie slapped together, so don’t miss out. If you didn’t get a copy of the Raceday Preview and you think you are a member, check our new roster of members to confirm and then let us know. Remember if you become a member now, forward your gift confirmation email to join@cmubuggy.org so that we can get that Preview right out to you.
In other week-of-raceday news, the heat selection meeting was held Monday night. We’ll get the heats incorporated into our system soon. 49 teams is 6 fewer than last year but just one less than in 2009. There accordingly 2 fewer heats overall.
With all of that business taken care of … it was an interesting truck weekend, so I won’t ignore it entirely.
In attendance
Everyone was in attendance, it was truck weekend!
Observations (Saturday Gallery, Sunday Gallery)
- I didn’t do much observing on Saturday as we were doing a dress rehersal of the timing system. I will be head timing again this year, operating the same system we rented last year. It took a while to remember how everything plugged together, but once we got it figured out, it worked like a charm. Hill 5s, practice your best frozen profile poses, they’ll be part of the official record.
SAE had a gnarly wheel failure while entering the chute on Saturday. It looked familiar in many ways to the failures Spirit and CIA had and it ups the expectation that the road quality will inflict some casualties this raceday. SAE has their act together though, and they whipped up a spare in time for rolls on Sunday.
Fringe and CIA both lost rear hatches in the chute. Figure out those tape strategies before next week everyone! On a general note, chairmen, take a moment and remind everyone in your org how they can avoid DQing the team. Sounds simple right, but every year there are tons of DQs for stupid stuff. Don’t be in the stupid club next week.
SigEp had some cool looking transponders on their buggies. I’m guessing they were GPS or accelerometers of some sort. Barracuda was flying all weekend so I’m guessing the data looks good no matter which variables they were measuring.- Both SigEp and Pioneers both had trouble at the finish line when they stopped the buggy by the pushbar and heard that terrible sound: carbon crinkling, breaking, crunching. Pioneers’ problem looked to be in the top of Chaos’ shell while Mamba’s failure was a crack right across the composite pushbar. Word from SigEp is that it’s already mended and stronger than ever. I hope Pioneers is doing the same since they have no backup.
Fans in the chute were fairly well entertained this weekend. Not to be lowbrow about it though, there was lots of speed on display and some thrilling driving. Both SDC and PiKA’s RD2011 are routinely drifting through the turn at full speed. PiKA was losing big chunks of rubber in the process but rolling out well. AEPi hit the inside curb after the hay bales in what looked like a visibility issue. SN’s Skua ended the semester of rolls with a distinctly squirrely entrance line and then a pretty quick spin that sent her into the bales tail first. SDC took the cake for most exciting incident without even stopping when Avarice swung out all the way outside and tapped the bales with her outside rear wheel with enough force to throw some hay in the air. The recovery was truly impressive though as she got back on track and managed to roll out a number of windows. Youtube of those three below.
How do you know it’s late March in Pittsburgh? 1) It was 20 degrees or less at rolls 2) 8 of the 11 orgs put up their fastest time of the semester this weekend (and the other three were the 1 buggy orgs). The cold was killing walkie-talkie batteries, fogging windshields, and fogging my brain, but impressively the buggies were flying.
All of a sudden spring break is behind us and we’re in the 4 week sprint to raceday. We stodgy alumni thought the kids were taking a bit of a gamble not scheduling rolls for either weekend of spring break, but it seems to have worked out pretty well for them. The first weekend of the break would have been entirely rained out anyway, and the skies were clear this weekend so it’s all good. Saturday was one of those super slow days with no clear culprit, but everyone shook off the rust by Sunday and put nearly twice as many buggies down the hill in the same amount of time. We’re up to 11 rolling organizations, and 5 new buggies in the class of 2011 (plus Apache from the late fall); raceday must be near.
Melting snow and rain kept teams off the course on Saturday, but Sunday was exciting enough to make up for it. Pika joined the new buggy 2011 club (with a standard tryke no less!) and Spirit entertained the chute crowd with a hat trick of spins and a rarely seen mechanical failure. Enough intro, let’s get to the details.
The cold finally showed up for Halloween weekend with rolls temperatures around 37, and with daylight savings time still in effect we’re down to about 60 minutes on the course. Sunday was cancelled in advance to make way for parties, so we’re still batting an impressive 9 for 10 so far this semester against inclement weather. Only 6 orgs made it out, so an hour was enough to get through the roll order 3 times. If I’m not mistaken, this was the first day of the year with no incidents at all, that’t not very ghoulish.
Teams must have read the 
Orgs decided that there would be no rolls on Sunday because of mid-semester break, and even Saturday was a minimal crew of the most dedicated folks (or maybe the folks least skilled at planning something fun for mid-semester break). SDC took the weekend off, and most teams had fewer buggies than normal except CIA whose 4 rolling buggies represented 25% of those on the course. The fall weather is starting to kick in as it was about 40 degrees out there, but we’re still getting lucky on the precipitation.