The sweepstakes committee cited below-freezing temperatures as the reason for canceling both days’ rolls. Regardless, only a handful of orgs were caped and ready, and backup for chores looked thin. Stay tuned for next week.
First chairman’s meeting and rule changes
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:
- Required mouthguards for drivers.
- Required double bales at all times.
- Language regarding treatment of the buggy during an accident.
- ‘Spin Test’ to evaluate brakes and wheels without moving a buggy.
- Follow Car Certification Program, needed for at least one person in any active follow car. (Similar to the required driver meetings)
- Edited some rules to be more concise, clearer, accurate, and shorter.
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.
Carnegie Mellon Today features the Buggy Alumni Association
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 end with anticlimax
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 :
- There were 355 total rolls over 6 days (4 days canceled)
- Sweepstakes averaged 30.6 buggies around the course per scheduled hour of rolls
- 12 orgs rolled a total of 32 different buggies
- Fringe (74) and SDC (63) send the most buggies down the hill, while KDR (10) and SAE (8) took the fall a bit easier.
- The most active buggy-driver combo was Fringe’s Jess in Blizzard with 18 rolls
- According to one timing source (additional sources of data welcome), orgs stacked up like this according to their fastest freeroll of the semester
Continue reading
Freeroll Practice 11/15-16/2008
Nov 15: Rolls cancelled due to rain.
Nov 16: It was cold, but not enough to keep everyone inside. Seven orgs rolled, Spirit had a crash, and Fringe won Women’s Mini-Raceday.
Rolling Orgs (buggies): SDC (4: Psychosis, Addiction, Envy, Rage), Pioneers (1: Chaos), Fringe (4: Bristol, Banyan, Blizzard, Brazen), PhiKap (2: Svengali and Shadenfraude?), CIA (2: Mirage and Firebird), Spirit (2: Haraka and Kingpin?), PiKA (2: Knightfall and ?)
Not Rolling: SAE tried to come out, but were missing their driver.
Continue reading
Freeroll Practice 11/8-9/08
Nov 8: Rolls canceled due to rain overnight.
Nov 9: AEPi spun and PiKA hit the inner haybales
Rolling Orgs: Spirit (1), AEPi (2: Zephyrus and Camo), SigNu (3), PiKA (3), SDC (4: Rage, Addiction, Psychosis, Envy), Pioneers (1: Chaos?), Fringe (4), SigEp (2), CIA (1: Conquest)
Former Safety Chair John Novak was visiting.
Continue reading
Great Video from SDC
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?
- pusher technique training?
- psych video material?
- pushbar rigidity measurements?
- pittsburgh filmmakers class project?
- flip video marketing?
No matter what the intention, thanks for sharing SDC.
Freeroll Practice, 11/02/08
Nov 2: The organizations got through the roll order exactly 4 times with no major issues on the longest day of freerolls in the Fall.
Rolling Orgs: Spirit (1 buggy), KDR (1 buggy), SAE (1 buggy), AEPi (2 buggies), Sig Nu (2 buggies), PiKA (3 buggies), SDC (4 buggies), Pioneers (1 buggy), Fringe (4 buggies), PhiKap (2 buggies), SigEp (2 buggies: Pandora and the new buggy built this past Spring), and CIA (2 buggies: Firebird and Conquest)
Not rolling: Beta
SDC had the Flip video splint on their buggies again. This time it went around the course twice on Addiction‘s inner side facing forward. (Now there’s a video I’d like to see on youtube.) For the second two rolls, the camera was mounted on Psychosis and faced back and upward at the pushers.
Pioneers is finally out at rolls and rolling Chaos.
Note: Addendum added 11/03/08, 09:15 EST Continue reading
Nov 2nd roll schedule
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.
Thanks for a successful kickoff
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:
- We’ve now got over 100 buggy alumni registered here on the website.
- 7 people have registered as dues-paying-members through the website, and many more did so this weekend in person. Those numbers are still being tallied
- Our history database already has information on 1,592 people and 196 buggies plus many data contributions that we haven’t had time to add to the database yet.
- The website has had over 1,600 visits from more than 800 people in just 2 weeks
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.