Your Favorite Organization Sucks

[RedTachyon]

McCue - She and her sister might refute the fact that I am "normal people."

[Mackin]

Fact: Our drivers are awesome.
Fact: We will no longer be rolling Bonsai because it went so fast it traveled back in time and we don't know where it went. Freshman forgot to write down the spacetime coordinates before we rolled...... noob

Without a complete set of freeroll and push practice times from both SDC and Fringe, I don't think any kind of reasonably accurate prediction is possible. Both teams have had pusher turnover and one has a brand new buggy the potential of which has yet to be fully realized or understood. RD11 is up for grabs.

Also we plan on employing the old KDR transition technique. See below.

[trophymursky]

Freshman forgot to write down the spacetime coordinates before we rolled...... noob.

my bad on that one...

[lemuroid]

and one has a brand new buggy the potential of which has yet to be fully realized or understood.

sdc, fringe, and pka have new buggies, each built with the intent of being faster, results on all not understood

back to my point, it is silly to call this a 2 horse race at this point.

[the cook]

not to mention that only Pika's buggy is any type of departure from the previous designs - at least on the outside.

In fact one could argue that the combination of smaller donuts and potentially superior aero could give Pika a significant bump in acceleration and speed - whether the small wheels can carry that speed through the chute is another matter. Their smaller wheels from 86-2000 or so generally could not, and often came up square after the chute. They would have to greatly improve the hills to even sniff it though, 2 and 5 last year were horrible.

I guess I'm no fan of the "dick-with-ears" fully faired reverse trike. SDC generally outrolls these trikes even though their wheels are the same as Fringe's, and worse than Pika's.

[abordick]

Their smaller wheels from 86-2000 or so generally could not, and often came up square after the chute.

I vehemently disagree. They were far more trapezoidal than square!

[Barnaby]

At the same time you could argue that the smaller donuts and potentially worse aero could give pika a significant bump in acceleration and loss of speed. If I had to guess the standard trikes are more sensitive to weight distribution and reverse trikes to steering geometry when it comes to speed through the chute, both of which are easy to get very wrong. And I can't say anything about this year, but the last couple years it looked like sdc used a different line than either pika or fringe, whos to say thats not the real reason they rolled out better?

I guess my real point is that its not straight cut whether its the type of buggy or what wheels they have or some small detail that determines how well that buggy will roll.

[DangerMike]

Tommy's point, and I think it s a fair one, is that while SDC had an excellent freeroll, they didn't go from being a 2:12+ (2:14ish average 2001-2006) to a sub 2:05 team (2008-2009) on the downhill. SDC absolutely improved going down, but the real difference was going up the hills. Nothing I've seen shows that they were far ahead of the other top-tier teams when gravity was in charge. We can all agree that the buggy that wins, holds the record, etc. must be fast, but not necessarily the fastest ever or even fastest of that year.

To put it another way: from all indications, Bonsai's free roll put within striking distance of any credible times I've seen, both in practice and on race day. Both the big trophy and the "horse race for second" depends on pairing such a performance with a well trained (!) and talented push team. That and a bit of luck.

[nbonaddio]

This was an incredibly boring thread in relation to the potential of the subject line.

Every single organization sucks except KDR and considering how much we suck at not getting thrown off campus, I must conclude that we're all quite terrible. SigEp obviously sucks the most and hardest, for reasons that frankly are obvious.

[abordick]

Where's the "like" button on this thing?