The design competition chair, Melissa Lee sent an e-mail to the chairman’s list today listing the buggies that had been entered into design comp. The extremely short list is:
As a fan of the idea of design comp, this bothers me. Continue reading
First, sorry for the delay in getting these posted. Going out at night and getting up for rolls both days in a weekend is tough to maintain when I can’t just sleep all day in between like I did back in the day.
New Buggies Galore
With five more buggies coming out for the first time this weekend, we’ve reached a total of 7 in the buggy class of 2009, the most since 2004, when there were 8. Continue reading
Aside from the Rolls Report, here at Buggy Alumni HQ we’re coming up with ways to feed your inner gambler. One way we’re doing this is by taking times at various spots on the course to give a cross section of team performance. Today we give you times from down in the chute: transistion to chute flag, chute flag to window 0, and a ratio of the first time over the second time. We recorded as many times as our crude stopwatches would let us. Here’s today’s sampling. It was a pretty slow day overall, with SDC and PiKA well off the pace.
The ratio is a number we’re throwing out there to give some idea of how well the buggy maintains its speed in the turn. For example, Mirage came into the chute flag nearly 0.8 s faster than Psychosis, yet Mirage had only a 0.3 s advantage after the chute. Where’d the half second go?
Tomorrow we’ll be looking at a different part of the course.
We resume our coverage of the last 5 record breaking years with 1986. The CD of all the buggy book scans is coming along nicely, and will be available on raceday.
1986 was a record setting year, but history was made on a number of fronts. On day 1, ATO had a fire in their truck that came frighteningly close to a serious catastrophe that could have threatened the future of buggy. The incident prompted school administration including Anne Witchner to convene a committee of alumni to create a new body of rules to protect the participants. This work most likely saved buggy and provides the base of rules that still govern the sport.
After a dropping pushbar failure on hill 1 of their finals heat in 1985 took them out of contention, PiKA came back strong in ’86 to set the record at 2:08.67.
The PiKA win was historic and their 4th of the decade, but a newcomer would factor heavily into it also being their last until the 90’s. Spirit entered the race for the first time and finished 4th in men’s and winning women’s- immediately catching the attention of those in the know and foreshadowing the beginning of a new power structure in buggy.
The buggy alumni association’s coverage of the last 5 men’s course-record-breaking years continues this week with 1983. Remember, these buggy books are just a sample of the exhaustive collection we are compiling for distribution on a CD available on raceday.
The year was 1983, and CIA’s 1981 course record of 2:10.50 was still the time to beat. PiKA rose to that challenge and set the bar at 2:09 flat on a re-roll after an earlier collision with Beta. Legend has it that PiKA’s hill 3 pusher was in the bathroom in Porter hall until the last minute when he ran out and helped brake the record by 1.5 seconds. The new record marked the arrival at what would become a 25 year plateau in the 2:09 neighborhood. In fact, the average winning time from 1983-2007 was 2:09.1.
Hopefully you got an e-mail last night announcing the Buggy Alumni Association’s plans for our first raceday. If you’d like to be sure to receive future announcements like this, make sure you register on this site.
Lead Truck Auction
Bid on your chance to ride in the lead truck to view the action from a perspective never available before. We’re currently planning on running a silent auction to auction off one space in the lead car for each heat. The auction will take place starting April 14th – the day after heat selections. Check out http://cmubuggy.org/Auction for details.
Partnering with cmuTV
cmuTV is eager to provide the best coverage they can on raceday, and they realized the best way to do that is to have buggy experts on the air with them. Andy Bordick (PiKA ’94) and Mark Estes (SN ’87) will be on the air during the races broadcasting from the top of hill 2 and live from the chute. We’re also helping to collect historical footage cmuTV can use in the time between heats. In addition, we’re working with cmuTV and WRCT to make sure the cmuTV audio is being played in the chute for everyone to hear. Continue reading
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
