2015 Races

[Elmo Zoneball]

A place for gossip, rumors, scoops, news, and other tidbits about this year's races.

[Zatchmo]

Anyone know the ruling on the SDC/Spirit collision? Was it Spirit in the clear, SDC DQ as the announcers were discussing?

[Elmo Zoneball]

Also when do we get to see the Heats/Lane Assignments for the Finals?

[hvincent]

9:20 AM Women's Heat 1 Fringe A SAE A
9:30 AM Women's Heat 2 SDC A CIA B
9:40 AM Women's Heat 3 PiKA A Fringe B
9:50 AM Women's Heat 4 CIA A Spirit B

10:20 AM Men's Heat 1 SigEp B SDC C
10:30 AM Men's Heat 2 Fringe A SAE A
10:40 AM Men's Heat 3 SDC A Apex A
10:50 AM Men's Heat 4 SigEp A CIA B
11:00 AM Men's Heat 5 CIA A Spirit A

Sorry if the formatting blows; I am thumbtyping.

[hvincent]

Correction: Apex women's B to replace Fringe women's B in finals (just heard this from Apex).

[Elmo Zoneball]

Vincent; thank you for posting that info.

[Elmo Zoneball]

I'm interested in hearing experienced buggy folk opine on why everybody was so SLOW this year. Even the FR were slow by historical standards, as well as push teams.

Why?

[hvincent]

Compared to just last year, most of the final times were faster? It looks like just SDC took a big drop this year, but a lot of teams scrubbed seconds from last year's performans. The top 4 men's times were ridiculously tight this year and all better than last year's second place time. The women's teams also look a lot tighter, and a general improvement in competitiveness.

[Elmo Zoneball]

Compared to just last year, most of the final times were faster? It looks like just SDC took a big drop this year, but a lot of teams scrubbed seconds from last year's performans. The top 4 men's times were ridiculously tight this year and all better than last year's second place time. The women's teams also look a lot tighter, and a general improvement in competitiveness.

That's still 8-9 seconds slower than last year's winning time. Yes, some teams were faster than last year, but all teams were slower than last year's (and historically) fastest time. The FRs I timed were slower, as well.

[hvincent]

What do you mean by "historically fastest"? Do you really expect a course record set every year? Just because no one beat last year's first place time doesn't mean everyone went slower; if you're just looking at the fastest run as an indicator of speed, I think you're missing part of the picture.

2014 Women's top 4 average: 2:44.04
2015 Women's top 4 average: 2.42.49 (-1.55)

2014 Men's top 4 average: 2:13.35
2015 Men's top 4 average: 2:13.04 (-0.31)

I think what you're actually observing is that a previously dominating team has lost some ground this year, and the rest of the pack is closing the gap. The top times are objectively faster overall than last year (regardless if this is happening in freeroll or pushing), and the difference in those times is smaller.

Sam Swift did a excellent data analysis of historical data (I don't have a link handy for the slides at the moment), and I am pretty interested to see how this year affects the dataset. One of the thoughts I had was to try and break it down further between freeroll and pushing, but I'm not quite bored enough yet to sign up for watching a ton of race footage to get those numbers.