Getting ready for raceday 2017 ?

[bajafm]

Who looks good (besides SDC) ?

[notcompubookie]

Apparently SDC's king of the hill rushed Pike and is their hill 1 this year, so Pike might put in a strong showing this year.

Spirit appears to have made progress on their downhill speed if the data can be trusted, not sure I'd consider them a 1st place contender though.

As has been the case in many recent years (since 2012 or so) if Fringe could get faster pushers, particularly on the men's side, they could be very competitive.

Hopefully SIgEp can make a comeback from a very disappointing Raceday last year.

Also very curious to see if CIA can continue the exceptional progress they've made in the past two Racedays this year.

[Pope on a Rope]

The teething problems with my timing system did not shine any light upon the situation. Ben Brown made progress on both of his systems and thus, we have some data. The camera based systems have also captured some goodly data but I have not seen the output from Saturday from that system yet.

PKA, SDC and SPIRIT appear at the top of the lists with CIA and FRINGE not far back and Sig Epp and SN a bit back from that. Spirit appears to have the quickest trap time from truck saturday. That would be quite a step forward from just a few years ago. Seems like CIA and Fringe are not quite where we would expect them from recent performances in terms of peak speed. SN showed more speed than one would expect based on their limited roll count but I am not clear that they have the rolls needed to play. That said, the truck data has some holes in it, so there could be some faster rolls that were either not recorded or not labeled properly or both. I am hopeful that more data will surface to give a better picture. In any event, almost every org is rolling well (almost) so as was the case last year, pushers and drivers will make the difference this year.

[Pope on a Rope]

Update: Shafeeq gave me a peek at his timing data as well. From that, CIA and Fringe are closer than the other data suggested which results in each of the top 5 orgs having 2 of the fastest 10 rolls of Saturday.

Spirit is confirmed as having the fastest trap time at 37.1 mph (and 2 of the top 3 fastest).

The only new buggy with an impressive time is Fringe's NB17 with a top 20 roll. CIA's Emperor experiment appears to have not given the results they would have wanted with speeds about 10 mph slower than the top runners. No other new builds were buttoned up enough to expect a goodly roll and none delivered.

The race being up to the drivers and pushers still holds.

[notcompubookie]

Overall still feels like unless SDC makes significant mistakes (bad turn, fishtail, bad transition, super burned on hill 3, trip while pushing, etc.) this Raceday is still theirs to lose.

[shafeeq]

Sadly the rainout on Sunday means no pusher data.
It does feel like a race for 2nd, but any of Spirit, PiKA, Fringe, CIA, or SigEp (assuming they got Barracuda qualified) could be it.
I don't see anybody's A driver having difficulty unless PiKA or SigEp go for too much special sauce on raceday.